Happy trails to you if you ask to see how much Dallas city officials actually spend on travel. It’s a journey, and City Hall might just sue to stop you from finding out. At least, that’s what they did to us.
In late March, Dallas filed a lawsuit against the Texas attorney general’s office to block the release of information about the council’s air travel. This happened after we filed an open records request asking for this information and other travel documentation.
Yes, the city is saying it shouldn’t have to disclose information about council members’ past flights or how much they spent on airfare.
Now, our curiosity about the council’s travel expenses predates the latest budget debacle. We defended the city’s decision in 2024 to send a contingent of council members and staffers to Tokyo to glean insights on high-speed rail. That seemed pertinent given the ongoing conversations about high-speed rail projects in Texas that would have terminals in Dallas.
Still, were council critics right to be concerned about travel more broadly? We asked for a year’s worth of expenses ending in November 2025. We asked for itineraries, receipts and any documentation explaining the reason for the trip. We also requested the expenses of support staff who accompanied council members.
We were surprised when Dallas punted our request to the attorney general. The request sat waiting for review until late February, when an assistant attorney general said the city should withhold credit card numbers and some financial details but release other records.
Here’s the peculiar bit: Dallas argued that a provision of the Texas Transportation Code bars it from releasing information about a person’s travel dates and flight information as well as the “amounts of any purchase made by the person.” Records show that this particular provision of the Transportation Code was added by lawmakers in 2023 to allow airport governing boards to protect the information of people parking at airports — not to shield local governments from disclosing taxpayer-subsidized council travel.
The attorney general’s office determined that the city maintains council members’ air travel information for administrative purposes and cannot withhold it. Dallas didn’t like that answer, so now it’s suing the state.
Dallas’ objections make no sense. The city released airfare information to us last summer as part of another records request that city staff only partially fulfilled. In response to this earlier request, Dallas released flight bookings for three council members as well as travel approval forms in which council members documented the purpose and cataloged different categories of expenses. Per the city’s own administrative rules, council members and staff must fill out travel approval forms for business trips.
So why the mystery now? In our last request, we received none of these forms, even though we asked for the documentation. We asked for information spanning two different councils. We wanted to see all council members’ travel records, including the mayor’s. The city gave us limited information on 11 of 15 council members. The mayor’s records were among the missing.
To boot, the records were unclear with confusing redactions. Vendor information was blacked out, and a field for “check description” cut off those descriptions. It was like a copy-and-paste from a spreadsheet with no ability to expand broken fields.
Perhaps everything is on the up and up with business travel at City Hall. But if that’s the case, why go to such great lengths to keep it secret?
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