Ft. Worth-Dallas feud borne on wings of Love : The cities have always been sibling rivals, but when Big D tried to net more airport traffic, Cow Town kicked.
No two ways about it. The people here in Cow Town look off to the east, toward Big D, and what they get is a case of big-time suspicion.
Ft. Worth does not trust Dallas any more than a rabbit would trust a coyote. The view from here these days is that Dallas was the slick dandy that tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the country cousin. And that does not play well in Ft. Worth. Not well at all.
The object of this latest round of bickering is the mammoth Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, which is, by design, exactly 17 1/2 miles from the center of each city.
What started it all was a proposal by the Dallas City Council to change a 1968 agreement that compelled both cities to promote the huge regional hub over all other competitors. The Dallas council was interested in exploring the possibility of more flights by more airlines out of Dallas’ Love Field, which now has Southwest Airlines as its only commercial customer. The stated reason: to promote more competition and better flight schedules for Big D.
That kind of talk may seem innocuous enough from afar, but it was downright heart-stopping in Ft. Worth, a depressed city that needs all the economic help it can get. Any suggestion of moving flights to Dallas--and in the process hurting both the big airport and Ft. Worth--only stirs up smoldering resentment that goes back a long way. The view from Ft. Worth was that Dallas was again putting its interests over those of the region.
“You don’t build a lot of warm and fuzzies doing things that way,” said Terry Ryan of the Ft. Worth Chamber of Commerce.
The roots of the friction between Dallas and Ft. Worth go back to the basic differences between the two cities.
Ft. Worth was on the Chisholm Trail, and early merchants profited from selling supplies to drovers pushing the great herds north to the railroads during the last half of the 19th Century.
Ft. Worth has always prided itself as being “out where the West begins,” and the city today retains its Western flavor, despite the fact that the cattle business was long ago eclipsed by the aerospace industry and the military as an economic base.
Dallas, on the other hand, became the banking center of the region during those early days and prided itself on having a cosmopolitan flavor from the very start. Today, it is the banking and financial center for the region and the second-largest city in the state, behind Houston.
From those beginnings emerged a rivalry, as well as an inferiority complex on the part of smaller, more countrified Ft. Worth. As one story goes, Amon Carter, the former owner of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram and once a powerbroker here, always took his own lunch when he drove to Dallas so as not to leave any of his money there.
As long ago as 1940, federal aviation officials urged the two cities to get together and have a joint airport, but negotiations broke off three years later when it became clear no agreement was going to be reached. The Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport was finally opened in 1974.
The two cities worked closely to bring major league baseball to the area, and the Texas Rangers were housed in a stadium halfway between Dallas and Ft. Worth. But critics here point to the fact that Dallas lost no time in trying to woo the Rangers about 20 miles further east when the lease on the old stadium was set to expire in 1990. The Rangers decided to stay put.
Adding fuel to the airport controversy is the fact that Dallas Mayor Steve Bartlett was elected last year on a “Dallas first” platform, in which he said the city had suffered at the hands of regional development efforts.
It was in this atmosphere that the Dallas City Council, by a vote of 9 to 6, opted last April to at least look into the possibility of changing the federal statute that restricts flights out of Love Field.
Ft. Worth’s response was swift. Mayor Kay Granger summoned council members into emergency session the next morning, and they voted unanimously to file a lawsuit against Dallas.
“There was no basis for the lawsuit,” said Mayor Bartlett, whose council later passed a resolution essentially saying it would forget about any changes for Love Field.
That wasn’t good enough for angry Ft. Worth officials, who said the language in the Dallas resolution was not strong enough to suit them and kept its lawsuit in place.
But the whole matter may finally come to an end soon, because the Dallas City Council last Wednesday went with some new wording that will be voted on this week. Ft. Worth Mayor Granger said the suit will be dropped if the latest resolution passes.
Bartlett said there is very little difference between the new resolution and the old one: As he put it, “a semicolon here, a fly speck there.” But he said the changes are necessary to appease an angry Ft. Worth.
“We will do it in a way that is suitable to Ft. Worth,” he said.
