Dallas’ biggest problem is City Council indecision

Here is how Dallas is handling the most consequential civic decision in a generation: In June, a faction of the City Council went to court and won a temporary restraining order to stop their own colleagues from voting on the future of City Hall. The council met and voted anyway, 9-6, to reject a decade-long repair plan, estimated between $531 million and $610 million, and to direct the city manager to explore selling the 15-acre site. Some council members then moved to hold the city manager in contempt and throw the vote out. Weeks later they dropped the case entirely, their own attorney explaining there was “nothing left to fight about.” 

In the meantime, the council handed that same city manager millions of dollars and an August 26 deadline to go study places the city might move to instead. This is not governing. It is litigating.

And that, not the Dallas Mavericks, is the real story of downtown Dallas right now. The Mavs have picked the old Valley View Mall site. The Stars are headed to Plano. AT&T is going to Plano too, and the century-old Neiman Marcus flagship goes dark on Sept. 30. Those are real losses, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But cities absorb losses all the time. What no city can absorb is a government that turns every hard call into a lawsuit and a study.

And I would not write the Mavericks off downtown yet. What the team selected at Valley View is an option to buy land, not a groundbreaking, and I would not bet that option ever gets exercised. That 104-acre site in Far North Dallas reads less like a final destination than like leverage, a credible alternative that strengthens the team’s hand in every negotiation over a downtown arena. 

But leverage only pays off against a counterparty who can actually close, and a city that needs a restraining order to hold a vote is not a credible partner at the table. Indecision does not just stall City Hall. It quietly forfeits the hand Dallas still holds.

Current conditions beg for decisive leadership. Downtown office vacancy is almost 30%, and the 10 largest towers are nearly half empty, all while the city’s general fund runs over budget and the I.M. Pei City Hall carries a repair bill north of half a billion dollars. These are exactly the circumstances that separate leaders from placeholders. 

Here is what makes the paralysis indefensible: The information needed to make an informed decision already exists. The vacancy data exists. The repair estimates exist. The relocation studies, the redevelopment models, the cost projections, nearly all of it commissioned by the city itself. The council is not waiting on facts. It is waiting for a decision that carries no political risk, and that decision does not exist. 

There is no version of the City Hall question where the building gets repaired, relocated or torn down and nobody is upset. There is no right answer. There is only a decision, and the courage to make it.

So the council does what it always does. It convenes the chorus: consultants, general contractors, economists, developers, every expert with a billable hour and a stake in the outcome. Each round of input sharpens the question and dulls the resolve. At some point you are no longer gathering information. You are outsourcing courage.

The same week the council maneuvered to avoid a vote, a gathering of 100 business leaders argued about downtown out loud, on the record. Developer Ray Washburne named the failure directly: “What we lack today is any kind of unified planning.” The Mavericks and Stars situation, he said, “should have been dealt with three or four years ago, not reactionary. That is the problem the city has right now.” He was describing a governance vacuum, not a market one.

Jack Matthews, who is leading the convention center effort, was blunter. For most people he talks to, he said, the glass is not half empty but “maybe completely empty.” His sharpest point was about reputation. The international groups that want to invest in Dallas have discovered they can watch the city council’s meetings online. “It’s funny,” he said, “but it’s not funny.” When the people trying to bring capital into your city are embarrassed by their government’s public conduct, that is not a branding problem. It is a leadership problem.

The capital is ready anyway. Developer Mike Ablon pointed to nearly $8 billion already being deployed around the convention center district and the new Dallas College campus, and predicted 14 or 15 cranes operating downtown within three years, the most since the 1980s. The private sector is not waiting. It is building, not in partnership with the city but in spite of it.

The single largest variable standing between downtown and its next chapter is not money, demand or vision. It is whether the people at the horseshoe can bring themselves to decide anything at all. And here is the part the council refuses to internalize: Not deciding is itself a decision, and it is the only one guaranteed to make everything worse. Indecision is not neutral. It compounds, and it compounds against the city.

Defenders of the delay will say a $1 billion choice deserves caution, and they are right that it deserves rigor. But rigor and avoidance are not the same thing. The members who blocked the June 10 vote did not ask for a sharper analysis. They asked for more time, which is the one resource a city cannot spare right now. Caution that never resolves is just procrastination in a better suit.

The city manager is due back on Aug. 26 with relocation options and sites. The council should pick a direction and commit capital to it, not commission the next study to second-guess the last one, and not run back to court. 

The 15 people elected to make the hardest call of their tenure are treating it like it belongs to someone else. It does not. It is theirs. They should make it.

Joe Zylka is managing partner at Original Capital Holdings in Dallas. 

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