Reported / Citable
Background
Hicks Airfield is a privately owned, public-use general aviation airport in Tarrant County, Texas, governed by Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CCRs) and managed by Hicks Airfield Pilots Association (HAPA), a nonprofit entity overseen by a board of directors. In 1995, Rio Concho Aviation, Inc.—owned by Barbara Ann and Kevin Brunson—purchased Area H, the largest lot on the Airfield, which had operated continuously as a restaurant site (the Beacon) for nearly twenty-five years without any HAPA notice of violation. In late 2019, Barbie Land Development, Inc. (whose president is Ms. Brunson) began operating a nearby overnight lodging and event center called the Lodge. In August 2022, Southlake Hospitality, Inc. opened a new restaurant, Wing It Café!, in the former Beacon space pursuant to a lease with Rio Concho.
The dispute arose when HAPA began restricting access through the Airfield’s South Gate around May 2020, claiming that the Café and Lodge created safety hazards because their customers must drive on the Airfield’s taxiways, and that the businesses did not qualify as “airport related commercial businesses” within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment to the CCRs—the restriction governing permitted uses of the relevant lots. Rio Concho sued HAPA in May 2020; the Brunsons and Barbie Land later joined as plaintiffs. HAPA filed counterclaims seeking a declaration that the restaurant violated the CCRs and injunctive relief to close it. After an eight-day bench trial, the trial court ruled broadly for the Appellees: it declared the Café and Lodge to be permissible airport-related businesses, found HAPA had applied the CCRs arbitrarily, issued permanent injunctions limiting HAPA’s authority over South Gate access and fines, awarded tort damages for tortious interference and breach of fiduciary duty, and granted attorney’s fees of approximately $416,000.
HAPA appealed on five grounds, challenging the declaratory judgment, the permanent injunction, the tort liability findings, specific findings of fact and conclusions of law, and the attorney’s fees award.
The Court’s Holding
The Second Court of Appeals affirmed in part, reversed and rendered in part, and reversed and remanded in part. Applying de novo review to the trial court’s conclusions of law and legal-sufficiency review to its factual findings, the court sustained HAPA’s challenges to the tortious-interference and breach-of-fiduciary-duty claims in their entirety, reversing and rendering judgment for HAPA on those counts. This eliminated the damages awarded to Rio Concho ($60,276) and Barbie Land ($16,500) on those theories. The court likewise sustained HAPA’s challenge to the attorney’s fees award and reversed that portion of the judgment. On the permanent injunction, the court sustained at least some of HAPA’s complaints and reversed in part.
On the declaratory-judgment rulings, the court took a mixed approach: it sustained some of HAPA’s challenges to specific declarations while overruling others, reflecting that certain declarations rested on proper CCR interpretation or sufficient evidentiary support while others did not. The court also sustained HAPA’s challenge to Finding of Fact No. 25, but overruled the remaining challenges to the trial court’s factual findings and conclusions of law. Portions of the declaratory judgment that were not subject to outright reversal were either affirmed or remanded for further proceedings consistent with the appellate court’s legal rulings.
Key Takeaways
- An airfield association may escape tort liability for actions taken to enforce its CCRs even where a trial court finds the enforcement arbitrary; the appeals court reversed both the tortious-interference and breach-of-fiduciary-duty verdicts in HAPA’s favor.
- The CCR term “airport related commercial business” is undefined in the governing documents, making its application a fact-intensive inquiry; the court’s mixed treatment of the declarations signals that neither a purely aeronautical nor a purely locational definition is controlling.
- Nearly twenty-five years of uncontested restaurant operation at the same location without a CCR-violation notice is a significant backdrop fact, though the appeals court’s partial reversal shows it did not insulate all of the trial court’s rulings from scrutiny.
- A homeowners’ or airfield association that wins reversal of all tort damages on appeal can also recapture attorney’s fees exposure, since the reversal of the tortious-interference and fiduciary-duty claims eliminated the predicate for the fee award.
Why It Matters
This decision is significant for operators of mixed-use private airfields and the associations that govern them. It demonstrates that CCR disputes over loosely defined land-use terms—such as “airport related commercial business”—can generate multifaceted litigation spanning declaratory judgments, permanent injunctions, and tort claims simultaneously, with appellate courts reviewing each layer under different standards. The reversal of the tort claims signals that courts will scrutinize whether an association’s enforcement conduct rises to the level of tortious interference or breach of fiduciary duty, even when the enforcement is found in other respects to be arbitrary.
For aviation counsel and property lawyers, the case also highlights the interpretive challenge when CCR terms go undefined: the record here included dueling expert and lay testimony about whether a restaurant serving mostly aviation-community customers qualifies as “airport related,” without any textual CCR anchor. Associations and lot owners on private airfields would benefit from clear definitional language in their governing documents—a gap this litigation exposes sharply.