It’s always feast or famine at Fair Park.
A week after the 2025 State Fair of Texas closed, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Fair Park was empty and quiet. A few workers zipped around in utility vehicles, but no visitors wandered the Esplanade.
Three weeks after that, some drivers were stuck in traffic for 45 minutes trying to reach parking for a large charity event and concert at the Cotton Bowl. It wasn’t nearly as big a production as the annual Texas-Oklahoma football game, but parking was still a problem.
With Fair Park’s former private management team now out of the picture, it is up to City Hall to bring this place back to life, even as it wrestles with questions about future governance. The Dallas Park and Recreation Department assumed management of the fairgrounds in September after terminating its contract with the nonprofit Fair Park First and its for-profit subcontractor, OVG, in a sour split.
Park and Recreation leaders have developed a preliminary plan for managing the unique but complicated municipal asset. They briefed a City Council committee about their “hybrid plan” on Monday. It keeps the department in charge of maintenance, overall contract management and community programming but outsources event booking and promotion, food and beverage service, parking, security and major venue management. It also suggests creating a stand-alone foundation to support the Cotton Bowl.
Opinion
Because they were not included on the agenda, officials did not discuss the role of Fair Park First and its key project, development of a long-sought community park.
The emphasis on pursuing economic development within Fair Park makes sense. The buildings and grounds require significant, expensive, ongoing maintenance. With a good management structure, we believe the park can generate dependable income, but the city still hasn’t settled on a long-term plan, and economic development efforts take time.
At any rate, City Hall must reckon with the fact that it must invest more money into Fair Park to turn it around. As we wrote in our series The Future of Fair Park, the city’s philanthropic community won’t step up unless City Hall boosts its own contributions to Dallas’ historic jewel.
There are steps the city can take right away. The park department should address simple measures that would improve Fair Park’s accessibility and attractions now. It needs better signage, both on surrounding streets and within the park itself. Poor signage has been a complaint for decades.
It needs to better manage traffic trying to enter and exit the park. The recent charity event showed that traffic flow hasn’t improved much since a 2021 Rolling Stones concert at the Cotton Bowl left some fans stuck in their cars for two hours. The city’s transportation and public works department will need to help with this task.
Dallas can’t afford to wait to fix these obvious problems while it develops its more ambitious plans for Fair Park.
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