UPDATE: Council Denies Batch Plant Zoning Request Near Youth Soccer Park

UPDATE, 5/26/2025, 6:19 p.m.: In a vote of 10-5, the Dallas City Council voted to deny the zoning request for a concrete batch plant at the corner of Spangler Road and Mañana Drive in Northwest Dallas. While a majority of council members voted in favor of the request, the City Plan Commission’s prior recommendation of denial required the case to be approved by a supermajority of the council, 12 votes, to pass.

Original story below:

On the Friday of the last day of school, MoneyGram Soccer Park is a ghost town. But come Saturday morning, the fields will be full of children in shin guards and cleats and parents lugging coolers full of orange slices and Capri-Suns.

Nearly 20% of all of the city of Dallas’ soccer fields are found at MoneyGram, which features, in addition to the 19 pitches named after various soccer-playing countries, a picnic area and a partially-shaded pavilion. The 120-acre park opened in 2014 and cost $31 million. With the fields empty on Friday morning, it is easy to see the evidence of industry surrounding the park on all sides.

The horizon is dotted with piles of rubble and long silver warehouses. Bird calls are occasionally interrupted by the metallic groaning of yellow excavators throwing dirt and rocks. A seemingly endless procession of 18-wheelers, concrete mixers, dump trucks and articulated haulers kicks up dust and coughs out black exhaust as they drive the main road that leads to MoneyGram Park. 

When the children arrive on Saturday, the trucks will be gone, and the surrounding plants will be quiet, off work for the weekend. However, a recent zoning application for the area has called this arrangement-a park surrounded by industrial polluters-into question.

“This is schizophrenic zoning, and we need to decide what [the land] needs to be when it grows up,” said council member Paula Blackmon. “We may have to undo some things that have been done in past times.”

According to the ForwardDallas land use plan, the area surrounding MoneyGram is one of three city areas recommended for industrial-use zoning. Already, several concrete batch plants, a lumber processing plant and distribution warehouses surround the public park. Some of that industry dates back to the 1980s, city staff told the Dallas City Council on May 14 during a multi-hour briefing on a zoning case that requests a new, locally owned concrete batch plant be able to open in the area.

After the area had been established as an industrial one, in the mid-2000s, city officials began planning for the MoneyGram Park. Now, 10 years after it opened, council members are questioning why it was ever approved in the first place.

“The park never should have been built there,” remarked council member Carolyn King Arnold during the briefing.

The problem is, it was.

The Problem With Particulate Matter

Concrete batch plants are uncomfortable necessities for any growing city. Industrial hubs become hubs for pollution that can cause health problems, and those clusters have traditionally been relegated to Dallas’ poorer, non-white neighborhoods. But concrete is also required for any city hoping to build, repair, or expand.

Last year, a Texas Tribune article about pollution in Dallas County pointed to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s findings that particulate matter emitted by concrete batch plants can increase the risk of asthma and heart problems in residents exposed to the pollutants long-term. While MoneyGram Park and its industrial neighbors are not near any residential areas, some individuals opposed to the latest batch plant zoning request say no amount of pollution is safe for the children, parents and coaches who regularly visit the soccer fields.

Several doctors, including Dr. Folashade Afolabi, a pediatric pulmonologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center, urged the council to vote against the batch plant rezoning request. While city staff has recommended approval of the plant, the City Plan Commission recommended denial without prejudice. 

Afolabi warned that the minute dust particles emitted from batch plants can pass into the blood and lungs when inhaled, which can be especially harmful for children whose lungs are not fully developed.

“I would appreciate everyone on the council taking a moment and thinking about what it means to draw a deep breath. … When you draw that deep breath, are you hacking and coughing? Is your nose becoming irritated?” Victoria Howard, chair of Dallas’ chapter of The Sierra Club, a national organization focusing on environmental advocacy, asked the council. “This is what will happen every second of every moment that our vulnerable, our young, and even our regular health citizens will be experiencing the more that you pack industrial polluters … into a small pocket of our beautiful city.”

And Dallas’ air quality is already objectively bad.

In February, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality named Dallas County one of four counties that should be required to improve their air quality. This multi-year-long process now seems unlikely because it relies on the involvement of EPA employees who were laid off earlier this year in an early wave of Department of Government Efficiency workforce cuts.

Addressing the council, John Jenkins, director of the Park and Recreation Department, said if it’d been up to him, an athletic park would’ve never been built next to a concrete batch plant. Also in the area are city-operated tennis courts, the Luna Vista golf course and a shooting range. Jenkins said he has observed dust collecting in the areas during his trips to the various facilities.

“I’m seeing the streets being torn up, I’m seeing the dust particles everywhere,” Jenkins said, after acknowledging that, as Park director, he is biased in favor of his facilities. “I won’t drive my personal car down those roads.”

Paul White, interim director of the Office of Environmental Quality and Sustainability, told the council he is “not aware” of any health studies that have taken place in the area. He added that a single air quality sensor is in place at MoneyGram, and the sensor has not shown any worrisome air quality impact from the neighboring industry. 

Still, White said, if city officials are visually observing dust particles in the area, consideration should be made that the sensor may not be catching everything.

A Catch 22

Some council members mused early in the conversation that maybe the solution is to eliminate the surrounding industry, despite the fact that the area is one of only three in the city planned for such uses. That would mean the council would side with the City Plan Commission in denying the rezoning application submitted by B.J. Johnson, the Dallas native who says he purchased the land at the corner of Spangler Road and Mañana Drive for his small business because of the already-existing plants in the area.

The problem: one of the existing batch plants has a permit through 2037, and the other has the right to operate indefinitely.

“I feel that this is resulting in pressure to make a decision that is punitive to a Black owned business [in a way] that is not equitable to how we are addressing the other businesses, the conglomerates, that are apparently going to be there for as long as they want to be there,” council member Adam Bazaldua said. “We’re not improving air quality by denying this.”

Bazaldua lamented that if Johnson’s application is denied, a business that would have gone to the local entrepreneur will likely be gobbled up by the larger companies.

Johnson told NBC DFW that the 10 months it has taken for his rezoning case to reach the horseshoe have been financially painful for his small company, costing him around $30,000 a month. His parcel of land is already zoned for industrial research (IR), but in 2022, the city approved a code amendment that made concrete batch plants allowable only in industrial manufacturing (IM) zones. His zoning request, which asks for the IR land to be changed to IM, would require the council to renew his permit in five years.

Even if the council denies Johnson’s request, two more industrial-use zoning applications that fall in the MoneyGram vicinity are in the pipeline for the council. Which means this problem will come to the horseshoe again and again.

“I am not a bad actor,” Johnson told the council, referring to himself as a local, small business owner and father whose company has helped repave city sidewalks and build Klyde Warren Park.

Council members then considered that maybe the solution was to move MoneyGram. After all, the industry did come first. The decision to move a $31 million park only 10 years after its opening would undoubtedly be embarrassing for the city, and according to Jenkins, it isn’t really a viable solution.

Even if MoneyGram is moved, Dallas residents would still be exposed to particulate matter at the neighboring park facilities. Finding the space for a similarly-sized park would take some strategic maneuvering, if possible at all. And then there’s the cost.

“You’re probably in the range of $50 million to build the same type of complex again,” Jenkins said. “If you’re going to put in 19, 20 fields, it depends on where you put it, how much grading, how much site work we’re going to do. But the real expense, once you get past the site work, is that athletic fields, if you want them to be durable, require a lot of soil amendments and the proper drainage to make sure they’re durable. [Also], the lighting is very expensive for athletic fields.”

To put that number into perspective, when voters approved last year’s $1.25 billion city bond, it included the largest allocation towards parks in city history. A brand new MoneyGram park would gobble up 14.5% of that allocation.

A Reckoning at the Horseshoe

After the May 14 council briefing, the Dallas City Council was admittedly unsure of what to do next.

The ForwardDallas land use plan suggests Johnson’s zoning request is appropriate, but it also promotes a deeper consideration of environmental justice and the burdens that have historically been borne by communities of color. While the area surrounding MoneyGram isn’t residential, District 6 as a whole is overwhelmingly Latino, and other conversations taking place about long-term environmental inequities across West Dallas suggest that it isn’t a coincidence that District 6 was where batch plants were planted back in the ’80s.

“Nobody on B.J.’s side is wrong, and nobody in the community is wrong,” council member Omar Narvaez, who has served four terms as the District 6 representative and was visibly emotional from frustration during the May 14 discussion, said. “Everybody’s right and that’s what makes this suck.”

The council voted to defer the issue for two weeks, hoping that each of the city departments potentially impacted by the zoning decision will have time to coalesce and come back with a plan that makes the best of the situation. That vote is slated for Wednesday.

“We know that we can’t move the whole sports complex and golf course and shooting range and soccer fields. We know we cannot move all the batch plants and that there’s more coming,” said council member Jaynie Schultz. “The beauty of it is, if [the city departments] work expeditiously, because there are two more [zoning cases for] batch plants coming down the road, it can give us a model that we can use.”