Dallas City Council members will take a first look this month at plans for a 2024 bond program that could fund about $1 billion worth of projects.
But residents looking for specific projects on the ballot may have to be patient.
Preliminary discussions held at the committee level last month focused on how much a bond election will cost (about $1 million), when it should be held, and the process for appointing an advisory board to recommend projects.
A request form will be published for citizen input on bond projects.
A bond program is a voter-issued debt used to fund improvements to the City’s infrastructure such as alleys, streets, sidewalks, parks, drainage, and facilities. The upgrades are funded by general obligation bonds, a debt that the city must pay back over time. Debt service is funded by taxpayer dollars.
What Council Members Want
During a Jan. 17 Transportation and Infrastructure Committee meeting chaired by Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Omar Narvaez, council members talked about the timeline for calling an election and how they’d like to see the funds allocated.
A 15-member Community Bond Task Force will be appointed by the Dallas City Council to review and select projects. Subcommittees will then be tasked with developing each proposition. According to a preliminary timeline, the task force would recommend a 2024 Capital Bond Program to the Dallas City Council in January.
District 12 Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn questioned the timeline, noting that it would be less expensive to place the bond on a May 2025 ballot, when a city council election is already taking place.
Narvaez said the election should be held sooner rather than later.
“We have a lot of needs; we’ve got to get to work,” he said. “We really should have already started this process.”
Mendelsohn expressed concern about a staff proposal to reduce funds for parks, libraries, and public safety facilities. District 13 Councilwoman Gay Donnell Willis advocated for flood protection and storm drainage.
“It’s not sexy, but it’s just something that tends to get pushed down and get short shrift,” she said. “We’ve got so much erosion going on. It is affecting lives, and we’ve got to have our eyes on the horizon.”
District 7 Councilman Adam Bazaldua said it’s difficult to tackle street projects with a bond issue because there are so many costly needs throughout the city.
“It’s almost disingenuous for the average voter to think they’re voting on a bond proposition, as they did in 2017, and to say five years later, ‘Why do my streets still look like this?’ They don’t realize we’re not even scratching the surface,” Bazaldua said. “It’s a combination of our messaging of the magnitude of the hole we are in with infrastructure maintenance and the amount of funds that we have at our disposal to get it done. The reality is we could devote our entire capacity in 2024 to our infrastructure needs for our streets and still not get it done. I’d like us to not continue spinning our wheels unless we’re really going to make a huge impact unless we have a good way to educate our public on what that looks like.”
Narvaez agreed.
“If you add up streets, sidewalks, and alleys, we’re talking over $4 billion in deferred maintenance,” he said. “In the last bond, we did about $563 million for transportation and infrastructure. People thought it was all for streets. It was for streets, alleys, and sidewalks. We got to hit a lot of major streets, but that’s not going to get us into the smaller interior streets that folks are most upset about.”
While Mendelsohn and Willis said they had concerns about appointing advisory board members a couple of months before a council election, Bazaldua and Narvaez said they didn’t want an election to delay governance.
Calling a Bond Election
Director of Bond and Construction Management Adriana Castaneda said her staff has been meeting with city infrastructure departments monthly to talk about the development and planning process.
“Part of those conversations have included finalizing the technical criteria and policy that will be utilized to select and prioritize the projects recommended for the next capital bond program,” Castaneda said.
Selection and prioritization include an equity component based on the council-adopted Racial Equity Plan and input from the Office of Equity and Inclusion, she added.
Council committees such as Economic Development and Housing and Homeless Solutions will submit technical criteria for their priority projects.
The city’s “needs inventory” includes more than $13.5 billion in projects for 2024, Castaneda said.
The financial capacity for a 2024 general obligation bond program is forecast to be about $1 billion, assuming $200 million over five years of issuance, according to Castaneda’s presentation.
Staff is coordinating bond projects with other city initiatives, such as the Sidewalk Master Plan, to identify cost-sharing opportunities.
A detailed website will display projects, costs, and timelines, Castaneda said.
“This dashboard is intended to be a one-stop shop for the city infrastructure team to review project costs, scopes of work, where they align in project schedules, and to identify potential opportunities where projects overlap or intersect,” she said. “We are working with data analytics to make this a friendly, public-facing feature. We want to make sure the public has access to project information.”
The Dallas City Council is scheduled to hear a briefing on the 2024 bond program at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 15.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do in the time frame that we have,” Narvaez said. “Asking the voters to spend $1 billion is a lot to ask. We’ve got to get it right on the things that they want. This is their bond. This is their taxpayer money that’s going to pay this debt back over time.”
