Tomorrow at 10 a.m., Dallas parks officials will pitch City Council members on installing massive digital advertising billboards on public park land across the city, the latest concept in a years-long discussion on how to turn your public assets into revenue generators.
A similar briefing was delivered to the Dallas Park & Recreation Board in May, during a meeting at which park department Director John Jenkins told the board members he reports to, “We need to wean ourselves as much as we can off this general fund, so that we don’t keep getting into these cycles and we start controlling our own destiny.”
That general fund is made up of the taxes you pay on your property and your purchases. It is supposed to be sufficient to fund basic government services, including parks. But not next year — and maybe not for a while, considering a long list of growing needs, wants, and persistent problems.
We elect our mayor and city council members in part to use the general fund to ensure we have the best police officers and firefighters, as well as good parks, libraries, arts, streets, and infrastructure.
Every few years, our city leaders also come to us for permission to increase our property tax-backed debt to fund hundreds of additional infrastructure projects that cannot reasonably be covered by the annual budget. In recent history, Dallas voters have consistently put their trust in our leaders by saying “yes” to bond programs ranging from several hundred million to more than $1 billion.
This is a civic covenant. We, the people, pay our fair share as tax-paying, law-abiding residents. You, our elected representatives, go to City Hall on our behalf to ensure our money is spent responsibly on our priorities. When City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert signs her memos and emails with “Service First, Now!” she’s talking about serving us — with urgency.
A breakdown of the key revenue sources that feed our annual General Fund, as of the current 2025-26 budget cycle.
But that covenant has been cracking for years. As Jenkins noted in his May remarks, there are several reasons for this “structural change.”
One is a 2019 state law that limits the amount of property tax revenue cities and counties can collect from “existing properties” from one year to the next. If a city or county wants to set a tax rate that would generate more than a 3.5% increase in revenue from existing properties, they must put that tax rate up for voter approval.
Two other factors unique to Dallas are tied to police and fire funding.
The Dallas Police and Fire Pension System’s unfunded liability is $3.7 billion. The City and the pension have a 30-year funding plan that includes rising payments through 2030 and “actuarially determined contributions” thereafter.
Dallas voters also approved a City Charter amendment in 2024 that requires at least 50% of excess revenues each year to go first to specific public safety priorities. The same amendment calls on the city to fully staff the police department with 4,000 officers. The City is working toward that hiring goal but is still a few hundred officers short.
Some, including our mayor, say we could also do much more to reduce bureaucracy and scrutinize the budget for waste, excess, and inefficient spending.
Later this week, Tolbert will release a budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts on October 1. The budget must close a projected $51 million shortfall; the covenant will crack even more if that budget, as most expect, includes cuts to parks, arts, libraries, code enforcement, or other services that directly impact our daily lives.
Mayor Eric Johnson and his City Council colleagues will then spend the following six weeks debating amendments to the budget. If history is a guide, they will fight for hours over tweaks that amount to mere pennies relative to the roughly $2 billion total general fund budget.
Also this week, City Council members will deliberate on a plan to ask voters this November for permission to issue nearly $1 billion in debt to fund $500 million in police and fire pension obligation bonds and another $460 million for police and fire facilities and a fleet service center. The package includes funds to close a major funding shortfall for the long-promised Dallas police academy and a separate training center.
This bond proposal comes just over two years after the last bond, a $1.25 billion package. The new bond, if approved, could delay execution of some of the projects in the 2024 bond. But city officials say the pension obligation bonds could shift some of our pension burden from the general fund to the debt service bucket, potentially freeing up budget dollars for other needs.
All of these threads — the pension bill, the charter mandate, the budget shortfall, and now the billboard pitch — are symptoms of the same disease: a general fund that can no longer promise anywhere near what it once did.
Which brings us back to the park ads concept. It’s just one recent example of a push to generate new dollars. But we don’t get a direct vote on whether White Rock Lake, Fair Park, or a neighborhood park gets a massive digital billboard.
The bond works differently. If the mayor and City Council members move it forward, Dallas voters will get an actual say this November in whether they still trust City Hall with another billion dollars of debt.
More broadly, it’s shaping up as a referendum on whether Dallas voters still believe in that civic covenant at all.