The application is active again
FACT: Trinity Terrace filed a new application to rezone the 27.73-acre Kite Farm property on or about October 1, 2026. The City Administrator confirmed it in writing on October 2: “They applied yesterday.” A zoning change notice sign went up on the property during the week of September 28.
FACT: The hearings are set. Planning & Zoning: Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 6:00 PM. City Council: Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 7:00 PM. Both confirmed in writing by the City Administrator on October 6. If you own land within 200 feet of the tract, Texas law gives you real leverage over this decision, and the window to use it is open now: how to protest the rezoning.
FACT: This is the second attempt. In March 2023 the Planning & Zoning Commission voted down Trinity Terrace’s prior request to rezone the same property, and that application was withdrawn. The commission that will hear this one was rebuilt by the council in June and July, six of seven seats in a month, and its first recommendation sailed through in August.
FACT: The applicant describes the project on its own website, archived here on October 11: 236 independent living residences, 40 independent living villas, and additional memory support and assisted living residences, with an indoor pool, fitness center, dining venue, a proposed restaurant open to the public, under-building parking, two green spaces of more than an acre each, privately owned campus roads, and a gated community. The applicant states the only planned street connection is to White Settlement Road, and proposes connecting the site’s storm drainage to Pecan Street and Sky Acres.
FACT: The applicant is holding a community-wide promotional meeting about the project on Sunday, October 12 at 6:30 PM, per the mailer sent to residents, at a city facility. The City Administrator confirmed on October 2 that the city opened its facility for the applicant’s use and that invitations were being mailed to every address in town. Worth stating plainly: the city opened a city facility to the applicant for a promotional meeting about an application the city will rule on. Note this is the applicant’s own event, not a city public hearing; nothing said there is part of the zoning record.
Incomplete under the city’s own code
FACT: Before the merits ever come up, there is a threshold problem: the application is missing documents the city’s own Zoning Ordinance requires. A written comment delivered to the City Secretary on November 1, with a request that it go to every P&Z commissioner before the hearing, lays out five defects, each cited to the code and to the page of the city’s own hearing packet:
FACT: One: no deviations list. Section 14.3.52(B) requires every application to list all requested deviations from the zoning chapter’s standards, and says applications without the list “will be considered incomplete.” The application answers “Any Ordinance Waivers/Variance Requests?” with NO, while the plans show buildings up to 72 feet where the limit is 35, and roughly 60 percent impervious cover where the limit is 55. Two: no owner signature. The owner signature line and the owner’s notary block are blank; Sections 14.2.28(B) and 14.2.41(A)(1) require a notarized ownership statement. Three: no survey, which Sections 14.2.28(A) and 14.2.41(A)(6) require. Four: the draft ordinance (No. 534) contains none of what a PD ordinance must contain: no base zoning district, no development standards, and no attached concept plan, contrary to Sections 14.3.52 and 14.3.54. Five: no city engineering review of this submittal; the only review in the packet is dated March 10, 2023, addresses the prior application, and was prepared by the same firm that engineered the project.
FACT: The code says what happens to incomplete applications: under Section 14.2.28(C)(2), they “shall not be scheduled on a Planning and Zoning Commission agenda until the proper information is provided.” The written comment proposes a concrete path: open the hearing as noticed, take every speaker, then defer the recommendation to December 1 under Section 14.2.30(B) until the applicant completes the file. A fuller analysis, cataloging roughly 25 departures from the ordinance in tiers, is here: Trinity Terrace Submission vs. Westworth Ordinances.
OPINION: The city would require every one of these items from a homeowner adding a garage. An application missing the owner’s signature, the survey, the deviations list, and the engineering review should not be put to a vote at all until it is complete. If the commission recommends it anyway on November 3, that tells you something about whether the rules still run this process.
FACT: One more thing worth watching, from the draft ordinance itself: its findings are worded to invoke the state-law provision that would raise the neighbor-protest threshold from 20 percent of nearby owners to 60 percent. Asked which threshold applies, the City Administrator wrote on October 20 that the city attorney “is working on her opinion” and that the city “will consult with our insurance provider just to make sure we are in good standing before the council takes any action.” As of this writing the city has not announced an answer. The protest page explains both thresholds; file either way.
The PILOT, in the applicant’s own words
FACT: The applicant’s page states, in the present tense, that to make sure the city receives its property tax revenue, a PILOT agreement “would be established before development begins.”
FACT: Set that next to the record. The mayor has repeatedly described a PILOT agreement as existing. The only PILOT the city has ever produced, after a complaint to the Attorney General, is an unsigned 2023 redline draft with 116 tracked changes. The applicant’s own public statement now confirms the agreement has yet to be established.
OPINION: On the one question that decides whether this project pays for the services it will use, the applicant says “would be established” and the mayor says “exists.” Both cannot be right, and the one with the signature line is still blank. Residents should ask, on the record on November 3 and November 10, for the signed PILOT to come before any vote, not after.
Who they are
FACT: Trinity Terrace is a continuing care retirement community in downtown Fort Worth: three towers, the newest 23 stories, opened in 2017. It’s operated by Cumberland Rest, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has been tax-exempt since 1943 and reported $52.45 million in revenue in fiscal 2024. That’s all public record: read the IRS filings yourself. The project is reported at a $350 million investment; the entire village’s property tax base was reported at roughly $440 million.
The mayor’s two positions on White Settlement Road
FACT: Mayor Jones supported the 2023 rezoning, per Fort Worth Report and KERA coverage. On June 12, 2023, the same mayor sent a signed letter on city letterhead to the Fort Worth Zoning Commission, formally opposing ZC-23-067, a rezoning request for 2.95 acres of multi-family housing at 4500 and 4570 White Settlement Road in Fort Worth. Read the letter. His stated reasons: “explosive apartment growth” in Fort Worth’s River District; that “grossly increased traffic and congestion is the inevitable result” on White Settlement Road; that residents “detest its effect upon our little town.”
OPINION: Opposing 2.95 acres of apartments across the city line for traffic reasons while championing a 27.73-acre campus at home on the same road is a contrast we think residents should see side by side. Both positions are documented above; the inference about what explains the difference is ours.
Why “tax-exempt” is the whole question
FACT: Being a 501(c)(3) exempts an organization from federal income tax. Texas property tax is a separate question with its own test: Tax Code § 11.18(d)(19) exempts a nonprofit retirement community only if it offers independent living, assisted living, and nursing care on a single contiguous campus and provides at least 4% of net resident revenue as charity care. Even then, only if the owner applies to the county appraisal district and is approved. It is never automatic.
FACT: Trinity Terrace’s downtown campus has that exemption. As of July 2026, Tarrant Appraisal District records list the 1600 Texas Street property, appraised at $103.9 million, as exempt under § 11.18(d)(19). When Tarrant County approved roughly $72.6 million in bonds for Trinity Terrace in 2024, one county commissioner voted no, saying the charitable designation “is really pushing the boundaries and stretching the definition.”
FACT: The Westworth land is a different story, for now. TAD records show Cumberland Rest acquired the 27.73-acre Kite Farm parcels in August 2022 (eleven accounts, roughly $4.2 million in market value), and no charitable exemption has been granted on any of them. About $2.5 million of that value is fully taxable today; the rest sits under the old farm’s agricultural appraisal, taxed on productivity values of a few hundred dollars per parcel. Texas law adds one more wrinkle: converting agricultural land to development triggers rollback taxes.
UNVERIFIED: Whether the Westworth campus would seek, or would qualify for, the § 11.18(d)(19) exemption remains an open question. We have found no public statement from the applicant committing either way. It is a question the council should ask, on the record, before any vote.
Where this connects to everything else
SPECULATION: The June 18 legal-fees vote and the P&Z shake-up both happened while this project was waiting in the wings; the new application landed ten weeks after the commission was rebuilt. Whether those actions were taken to clear a path for this rezoning is our speculation. We say so plainly, but it’s the question that ties these pages together, and the hearings in November are where residents can ask it out loud.