Wilonsky: A failed vote to revisit Jefferson Viaduct route delays Dallas’ new convention center

I started Monday walking around one of this city’s bigger code violations, which also happens to be one of this city’s biggest mistakes: 7800 N. Stemmons Freeway, into which the city sunk more than $29 million for the permitting building it could never get permitted. The joke that never gets old.

A source texted over the weekend that the building, which has apparently been under contract for more than a minute, was a code violation surrounded by high weeds and trash. Sure enough. There’s also a broken window. And a faded, frayed City of Dallas flag clinging for dear life to the pole out front. 

A little on the nose as metaphors go.

Hours later I was at Dallas City Hall — for now — for a meeting of the City Council’s transportation committee, where The Big Item on the agenda was the possibility of reopening an old wound: city staff’s proposal to reroute the Oak Cliff-to-downtown Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct, which now runs smack into the new convention center’s backside and threatens to roadblock the downtown development altogether.

At community meetings, including one this week, residents south of downtown have made it clear that they don’t want the city messing with Jefferson, nor do most of the council members. Because that bridge over the Trinity River is many residents’ best and only route into downtown. 

Last month, the committee voted to send the viaducts and the convention center to the full council, despite city staff’s warnings that to do so meant delaying construction. But some members of the committee wanted a do-over, which is how it wound up yet again on the committee’s agenda Monday. If, that is, enough members of the committee voted to revisit the subject.

Spoiler: They did not. Which means the $3.8-ish-billion Kay Bailey Hutchison is now delayed well past its scheduled 2029 ribbon-cutting. In a memo City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert sent to council members late Wednesday night, she confirmed: “We now anticipate that the convention center expansion will push into 2030.”

Before they reached the Jefferson Viaduct, committee members first berated Dallas Water Utilities staff over its new online payment platform, DallasGo, the cause of innumerable complaints council members say they’ve received. Everyone says it’s confusing and difficult to use and that it costs residents more money to pay their water bills than before.

A “self-inflicted wound,” council member Cara Mendelsohn called DallasGo. This city’s favorite kind! “A disaster,” council member Bill Roth called DallasGo. The real Big D!

That finally brought us to the Jefferson and Houston Street viaducts — and a convention center, approved by voters in the fall of 2022, now officially on hold. For how long is unclear, per Tolbert’s memo, which says that “there is the potential for a longer-term delay as our partners slow their work while awaiting clear policy direction from the full City Council.”

In May, a majority of the transportation committee agreed with Mendelsohn’s motion to send the discussion to the full council within two weeks for a briefing and public comment, with the recommendation the convention center be raised to accommodate Jefferson. That meeting never happened, though: Council members told me city staff spent that time lobbying them not to bring the issue back to the full council.

But that’s exactly what’s going to have to happen now, as Tolbert told council Wednesday night she will add the transportation committee’s May motion to the June 24 agenda item, and that it “recommends a full redesign of the convention center expansion.” That, Tolbert wrote, will “cost approximately $597 million and will result in further delays beyond 2030.”

I got the sense committee chairman Paul Ridley expected Monday’s vote to reconsider to succeed: He cut short the long DallasGo discussion to get to the Jefferson Viaduct item, expecting it would “not be insignificant.”

But it was chaos from the jump.

Lorie Blair, who represents Dallas’ southernmost district, made the motion to reconsider the vote that sent the issue to the full council. But Blair was absent when the vote was taken in May, and as a city attorney had to remind the committee, only council members who chimed in on the original motion could move to reconsider on Monday. So southwest Dallas’ rep, Zarin Gracey, who voted in May to send it to the council, made it instead, with Blackmon seconding.

In the end, four council members killed the motion: Mendelsohn, Roth, West Dallas’ Laura Cadena and Ridley, who had originally voted in May against sending the discussion to the council. Ridley told me Tuesday he voted against Mendelsohn’s May motion because of the enormous expense associated with raising the convention center to accommodate Jefferson. He voted against reconsideration on Monday, he said, because “time is of the essence to decide one way or the other what we’re going to do with the viaducts. It’s important we tee this up for a decision by the full council.”

Ridley said he requested that the mayor put this in front of the council on June 24, before the council’s summer recess, as now planned.

Cadena told me she voted against reconsideration because her residents “continue to have concerns about the proposal for the viaducts.”

Mendelsohn said Monday night that the council “should not be forced to choose between bad options because a problem was not brought forward soon enough. My focus now is hearing from my colleagues, gathering public input, and determining whether better solutions still exist before any final decision is made.”

This is a mess entirely of the city’s making. A self-inflicted wound, you might call it. A disaster, too, some might say.

Like developer Jack Matthews, the man the city hired to build the new convention center. Sending the convention center back to the full council, Matthews told me Monday evening, is “incredibly short-sighted and works against all the good things the city’s trying to do downtown.”

That’s a Canadian’s polite way of saying some impolite stuff.

“While I want to keep City Hall, I don’t want to stall this project,” said council member Paula Blackmon, who voted against the May motion and voted Monday, unsuccessfully, to reopen the discussion. “But now it’s all jacked. If this is how we treat the biggest construction project at the city, we are doomed if we tear down City Hall.”

The new convention center was originally supposed to be tall enough to let “traffic flow under the building,” as Rosa Fleming, executive director of the city’s Convention and Event Services, told the transportation committee in March. But $500 million in value engineering later, the building shrunk by two stories. 

So city staff devised a plan to divert Jefferson’s traffic onto the historic Houston Street Viaduct, which heads from downtown into Oak Cliff, using the old Reunion Arena parking garage connector as a cut-through. Which most of the council has hated from the moment the options were presented some three months ago.

Ray Hunt, owner of all that empty cracked concrete where Reunion Arena used to sit — including the air rights above that post-apocalyptic parking garage owned by the city — hates it, too. Hunt Realty Investments CEO Chris Kleinert sent Assistant City Manager Dev Rastogi a letter last month insisting the city can’t change Jefferson or Houston without first consulting Hunt Realty, per a decades-old agreement with the city.

Rastogi responded on May 28 that this is all just “preliminary evaluations and options under consideration as part of our broader transportation and infrastructure planning process.” Said Rastogi to Kleinert in the letter I obtained Monday, fret not: “No formal process has been advanced.”

In fact, as of this week, it’s not only not advanced, it’s stalled out.

“The city values its longstanding working relationship and partnership with Hunt Realty,” Rastogi wrote. “We look forward to continued dialogue as we evaluate transportation and infrastructure concepts that may affect the Reunion area.”

A Hunt spokesperson declined comment Monday. So, too, did the city.

After the meeting, folks from Matthews’ team and Visit Dallas said they would be issuing a media release late Monday about the financial impact caused by the convention center’s delay. But city staff quashed that release. Instead, I was told, there would eventually be a memo, which was sent to the council a little before 7 Wednesday night.

Because, these days, that’s how DallasGo! Nowhere, fast.

Editor’s note — June 16, 10:40pm: This column was updated with new information after press time for Wednesday’s print edition.