The Dallas City Council will vote next Wednesday on several matters regarding the fate of City Hall, including potentially authorizing staff to begin working “towards the relocation of city hall staff and functions” as well as “opportunities for the redevelopment of the property located at 1500 Marilla Street.”
An agenda for a special-called meeting was posted late Thursday night. According to that document, the meeting is due to begin at 10 a.m. The regular council meeting is scheduled to start at 9 a.m., but usually does not begin until nearly 9:30 a.m.
The agenda has six items, which include:
Authorizing city staff to work on relocating city hall employees and functions;
Authorizing City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert to negotiate and execute pre-development agreements and conduct due diligence for potential sites and appropriate a currently undetermined amount of money to pay for expenses incurred from doing that due diligence;
Authorizing advance work on relocating the city’s 911 and emergency operations, including negotiating pre-development agreements and paying for due diligence;
Authorizing the phased City Hall repair strategy presented at this week’s briefing;
Allowing Tolbert to “pursue opportunities” to redevelop the City Hall property.
The other two items are in closed session. They involve specific locations the city might lease or purchase to move 311, 911, and emergency operations to new quarters, as well as potential discussions about relocating city hall functions. They are in closed session because “deliberation in an open meeting would have a detrimental effect” on negotiations.
Not mentioned in the agenda? Exactly how many yes votes from around the horseshoe would it take to move some of those items through the uprights. Last month, one of three notice letters sent to the city from the attorneys for Save Dallas City Hall warned the city that a policy passed in 2021 requires a supermajority of the Council to authorize any new or replacement municipal buildings, and those votes can only happen after the city manager provides detailed financials for the project to the Council. Wednesday’s agenda doesn’t ask the Council to approve any purchasing or leasing of buildings—just the advance work for it. However, there is some discussion about whether a supermajority of the Council would consist of 10 or 12 members.
Throughout the week, many advocates for saving the not-yet-50-year-old I.M. Pei-designed building thought that news of the Mavericks’ intention to move to North Dallas and build on 104 acres at the former Valley View Mall site would mean the city could slow its deliberations on the City Hall property. However, both Tolbert and Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson continue to hold out hope that the Mavericks or the Stars, who announced their intention to move to Plano this week, would change their minds. Tolbert issued a statement stressing that the Stars’ decision was a “non-binding letter of intent related to a potential arena project in Plano,” adding that the city and the team “will continue conversations with the organization and work collaboratively to ensure the Stars remain playing in Dallas.”
On Thursday, Johnson told CBS that neither decision was final. “The Valley View site that the Mavericks are looking at, it’s in Dallas, that’s a good thing,” Johnson said. “Let’s start with that. But as far as the Stars are concerned, that negotiations from my understanding, it is a letter of intent. It is not a final deal. It’s a step, but not a final step.” He says Tolbert is still attempting to woo the Stars, in particular, to stay at the American Airlines Center beyond 2031.
But time doesn’t seem to be on their side. The Plano City Council will vote on the agreement with the Stars on Monday. A source familiar with the negotiations between the city and the Mavericks told the Dallas Morning News that the team’s decision was final, and that CEO Rick Welts had personally informed Tolbert on Monday.
The Council was briefed two days ago on the potential cost to repair City Hall. Consultants put that cost somewhere near half a billion or more over the next decade. Johnson says relocating would cost less than repairing the building. There has not been as much data made public about the cost of relocation, which would likely need to include funds for finishing out any office space the city would lease to house its operations, including meeting rooms and city council chambers.
Wednesday’s briefing was not at all sunny—consultants Gresham Smith and WM2 Company laid out phased approaches to repairing City Hall over 10 years, triaging the needs of the building. Both had estimates ranging from $500 million to $600 million, depending on whether the work was done over 5 or 10 years. Five years would be faster, but more disruptive. Ten years would be less disruptive, but could be more expensive. All the consultants said that getting the building watertight—reglazing and repairing windows, replacing the roof, and sealing the exterior concrete facade—would likely be the first priority. The building’s electrical systems are also quite old, including the Federal Pacific electrical panels.
“If you have a home today and they come in, and you need a loan or purchase, and you have a federal Pacific panel in your house, you can’t get insurance for it,” Will Mundinger of WM2 told the Council.
Since the building was constructed in the 1970s, some of its systems no longer meet code requirements. For instance, only the first floor has fire sprinklers. There is no smoke-evacuation system, and consultants said that many of the stairwells that serve as evacuation routes during a fire actually become chimneys that draw smoke upward.
The discussion turned to money and whether the city has enough to pay for all of those repairs.
“If you’re asking me today, do we have the current funds in our existing budget to pay for— whether it’s the numbers we have from Gresham or the numbers that we got from WM2—it really doesn’t matter. My answer would be, ‘No, we do not,’” Tolbert said. To pay for it, the city would potentially need to issue debt or divert funds from its budget.
That prompted Councilmember Paula Blackmon to ask whether the city had the money to move, too. “Either way, we’re going to be hitting the budget,” she said.
Barring some robust behind-the-scenes persuasion, it seems unlikely the Stars or the Mavericks will change their minds. While the agenda does include voting on a phased approach that would keep city operations at 1500 Marilla, no doubt many are wondering this morning exactly what the rush is. And perhaps it is just a matter now of getting a better lay of the land as the Council begins budget season in earnest in August, after its July break.
Time—but not a lot of it—will tell.
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Bethany Erickson
Bethany Erickson
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Bethany Erickson is the senior digital editor for D Magazine. You'll find her writing primarily about city hall, Dallas ISD, and the Texas legislature, and editing the popular DBrief newsletter.