Seventy-year-old Hap Goodman Jr. remembers swimming at the White Rock Lake Bath House as a child.
Now, he returns in his retirement to look for egrets, woodpeckers, cormorants and American wood ducks in a low area between the dam and the historic Pump Station near the Spillway. Goodman likes to put a canoe in the water near Mockingbird Road and make his way north through often swampy White Rock Creek.
He has heard plans over the years to fence in the lake and keep the roughnecks out, or to build restaurants whose ownership would most likely change with the seasons.
The lake needs help, Goodman says, but it is better to do nothing than develop White Rock.
“Leave it alone,” says Goodman, who represented the Audobon Society on the White Rock Reforestation Committee. “One of the most beautiful spots in the city of Dallas is Winfrey Point.
“I’ve stood there I don’t know how many times, looking out on the stunning skyline of Dallas and said: I wish I owned this piece of property. It’s absolutely magnificent.
“But then, when I think a little further, I say: “No, Happy, you don’t need to own this property. It ought to be just where it is, in the hands of the City of Dallas, open to the citizens, now and forever.”
White Rock Lake has grown old with Hap Goodman, but perhaps not as graciously. The 80-year-old reservoir is choking on silt washed down the creek from over-developed northern suburbs. Many of its trees are dying, and its facilities are tired. On weekends, the cracking asphalt of the 9.3 mile trail around the lake is a bicyclists’ superhighway that demands traffic enforcement.
These problems can be corrected. In fact, engineers have completed a master plan and reforestation plan that could restore the lake to pristine beauty.
But what White Rock Lake needs now is what the City doesn’t have: money.
A February 1990 master plan urged $12.8 million in lake improvements, including $4.5 million to dredge the lake, which now averages just three feet in depth. The last dredging, which was not completed, occurred in 1974 at a cost of less than $1.2 million.
Now the dredging bill has risen to $7 or $8 million, says District 9 Councilman Glenn Box, who supports a bond election to raise funds for many City projects, including White Rock Lake.
“There are already parts of the lake where it looks like a miracle’s taking place because you can literally walk on water,” Box says.
That bond election probably won’t occur until 1994, Box says. Voters last approved a $428 million bond election in 1985. Some of that money paid for the White Rock master plan and improvements such as the pedestrian bridge on Garland Road, near the spillway. Another $400,000 will fund renovations to the Bath House Cultural Center (at the site where Hap Goodman and others swam in their youth).
But even successful bond elections don’t mean instant money, says Tom Anderson, superintendent of planning and research for the park department. Of $22.5 million in bonds allocated to parks in the 1985 election, the City has sold only $5.2 million.
“We’re projected to be selling 1985 bonds through 1993,” Anderson says. “The determination is dependent upon the tax operating dollars of the City. When you sell bonds, you have to pay back those bonds, plus interest. That comes out of the operating budget annually.”
To sell more bonds than it can pay off would threaten the City’s AAA bond rating.
Even so, Anderson continues to explore lake improvements. He’s considering spending 1985 bond money for a consultant, as outlined in the master plan, to establish a park design theme. And he hopes to submit a grant application by July to the Texas Park and Wildlife Department for $230,000 in matching funds to purchase playground equipment and fishing piers.
More such initiatives make sens to Lois Finkelman, who became park board president on Jan. 1.
“I would hope that as a result of the master plan and the reforestation task force that we have an opportunity for the interests at White Rock Lake to come together. We might initiate some private sector fundraising that could stimulate the City to match some of those dollars,” Finkelman says.
“We really have an obligation to keep White Rock as beautiful and effective as it has been in the past. It’s a big challenge and a big task. The way to go about it is to identify small things and try to look for some funding on a step-by-step basis.”
Joan Layden, who represented the Sierra Club on the Reforestation Committee, sees further opportunities in volunteerism.
“The committee said: ‘Here are appropriate trees and appropriate areas. We’ve done the mapping, now it’s up to the City and citizens to decide if they want that to happen.’”
And yet, Layden says: “I have not heard of any volunteer efforts.”
Some Efforts Are Underway
Are you interested in supporting police bicycle patrols at White Rock Lake? Dallas Police Deputy Chief John Chappelle says four bike officers could provide an effective crime deterrent.
The Communities Foundation of Texas is managing a fund, through the Greater East Dallas Chamber of Commerce, to raise the $1,500 to $2,000 required to outfit each bicycle officer.
Currently, up to four officers patrol Lawther Road, which circles the lake, by car. A system of road blocks and a midnight curfew assist police, and they stress the importance of that curfew. Last winter, police arrested three suspects in a string of shotgun robberies against people who had parked late at night at White Rock.
“The potential exists for serious problems to occur there. But generally, if you look at the size of the lake area, it is very safe. Our objective and mandate is quite clear: to keep the lake safe. We want people to use the lake with a complete lack of fear.”
Making The Lake A Priority
The sentiment holds true for people who would like to eat the catfish and crappie that swim in the lake, or sail the smooth, green water without striking a submerged tree trunk.
Charles Boseman carries these same hopes as park maintenance supervisor for District One, which includes White Rock Lake in its vast territory. Boseman’s office, however, is in park headquarters, right on White Rock.
He hands over a stack of framed awards from a recent newspaper poll honoring White Rock Lake as “Best Place to Walk Your Dog,” “Fly a Kite” or hold “A Spontaneous Picnic.”
“My goal is to continue to establish White Rock as one of the focal places to visit in Dallas and bring the crowds back we had in the 1950s and ’60s,” says Boseman, who moved over from the Oak Cliff area in October.
The Clock Is Ticking
If Dallas doesn’t allocate the money – and Boseman’s prediction is less ominous than most – “it’s conceivable that within 10 to 15 years, our sailing clubs will not be able to use the lake.”
Try five years, says Allen Tuell, commodore of the Corinthian Sailing Club at White Rock Lake.
“Things are going to get real bad,” he says. “It may be longer than we can wait for something to happen.”
Already, silt has overtaken the northern third of the lake, Corinthian sailors say. The sailing community would lose a lake of national prominence if the silt wins, says Brad Davis, an avid sailor and former president of the Friendship League of White Rock Lake.
“It’s one of the greatest training lakes in the world because it’s so accessible, you can spend so much time there, and you get so many variable conditions.
“We were winning regattas all around the country,” Davis says. “People would ask us, ‘Where do you race?’ We would say, ‘White Rock. It’s a little mud hole in East Dallas.’ You can go almost anywhere now and tell them ‘White Rock’, and they know what you’re talking about.
Davis, who insists he has lost hope, envisions a town lake with a community sailing center to rival Boston’s center on the Charles River. John Diggins of Corinthian says: “We only need a group to get together and buy six or eight sturdy, Fiberglas boats that can be sailed by two or three people. With that you can really run a community-based sailing program. We could probably get the boats donated.”
Here again, another call for community action.
“While a number of us would like to see a community sailing program in Dallas,” Diggins says, “nobody has had the inclination to try to stimulate it.”
Biting The Bullet
“We’re in the process now of identifying our needs and trying to build ourselves back up,” Boseman says.
His priorities include those mentioned in the master plan: Desiltation; planting trees; renovating popular park buildings such as Big Thicket Cabin, Winfrey Point and the Dreyfuss Club; new picnic benches, piers and playground equipment; and freshly paved roads and a new, concrete hike-and-bike trail.
A revitalized fish hatchery would attract sportsmen. Although Texas Park & Wildlife and Dallas Water Utilities officials (neither agency admitted responsibility for testing water at the lake) defend the water quality and the safety of White Rock fish, Boseman says dangerous chemicals wash off suburban lawns into White Rock Creek and flow into the lake. Education would alleviate that problem, he says.
Such programs, though, await desiltation and dredging.
“Once that happens, we can start marketing the lake. With today’s economic problems, the bond issue will be tough to pass,” Boseman says. “But it came up during the past council elections and the neighborhoods, environmentalists and park staff all are aware of it.
“It’s got the backing it needs. Now it’s going to take that pressure from the citizens to make the council ask: “Is this project as important as some other things?’”
