Meetings of Interest: "Saving" Downtown 🌇

The taxable value of the area bound by the “highway loop” has risen from about $3 billion in 2005 to $8.7 billion as of last year. It will rise again this year.

There is more than $8 billion in planned or active development.

The population has gone from a few hundred at the turn of the century to nearly 16,000 today.

We’ve added more than 20 acres of signature parks in that same period, more than any other major American downtown.

The Arts District and the Farmers Market are among the most successful, livable, and well-visited areas in our region.

Safety is up, homelessness is down, and Downtown now has more officers assigned than at any point in history.

Police and fire overtime and employee health insurance costs — including payments for GLP-1s — is driving the projected $34 million budget shortfall, City Council members were told in a Wednesday briefing you can read here. Learn more from NBC 5’s David Goins.

City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert’s team will deliver a briefing to City Council on Wednesday, May 20, on phase 1 of a potential City Hall rehabilitation program, as requested by council members. The briefing will include a private closed session discussion of potential relocation options for all City Hall staff and functions, including 911, 311, the City’s emergency operations. Read more.

Speaking of that possible relocation, it looks like former Mayor Mike Rawlings hasn’t run his last campaign after all. On Thursday, he launched a push “to build support for relocating City Hall, using newspaper and social media ads, a website and other outreach to promote redevelopment there, possibly for a sports arena and entertainment district,” The Dallas Morning News reports. Learn more by visiting the “Say Yes to Downtown” website.

Halperin Park — a long-planned Oak Cliff deck park over Interstate 35E near the Dallas Zoo — opened to the public this weekend to wide acclaim.

Check out the City’s revised motorized scooter rules here. Lime, Bird, and Spin are expected to be permitted to continue operating for the 2026-27 permit cycle. Read more.

Here’s the complete city manager memo packet for Friday, May 8, 2026.

Officials with the City’s IT, HR, and Civil Service departments will likely make their case in separate briefings that they are all lean and efficient machines. A challenge for the leaders of these departments is none of them have obvious political constituencies. Nobody rallies for HR software upgrades or civil service testing modernization. Voters may well support reducing “bureaucracy” in theory. But the functions being discussed here — cybersecurity, hiring, payroll, emergency dispatch systems, disciplinary appeals — are essential to keeping a 15,000-employee government functioning.

Dallas Police Department sworn staffing stands at 3,391, as officials continue to make steady progress toward a goal of 4,000 cops. Read more.

Dallas’ planned police training center at the University of North Texas at Dallas is advancing into construction documents with early site work and a September groundbreaking penciled in. The project’s budget is still listed at $185 million, but the latest estimate is about $227 million, putting pressure on Council and the mayor’s private fundraising group to close a gap that could affect the schedule. Read more.

Overall violent crime is down 7.44% year to date, with murders, robberies, and aggravated assaults all decreasing, including a 42% drop in business robberies and a 14% drop in murders compared with 2025. Read the briefing.

Average officer response times to 911 calls are trending in the right direction, but still short of department goals for all four categories of emergencies, according to this dashboard.

After 18 months of planning and training, Dallas is “entering final operational readiness for the FIFA World Cup,” according to this memo.

Item 4 is a federal grant-funded acquisition of equipment to “detect and respond to unauthorized or malicious drone activity,” according to background documents. The equipment is intended to be used for high-risk events, including the upcoming FIFA World Cup.

Item 6 and Item 7 together will add two new kiosks at Dallas Love Field, expanding food, sweets, and alcohol options in tight terminal spaces while generating a projected $4.53 million in revenue for the Aviation Fund over seven years. Dallas Love Field is running out of room for food and retail inside the existing terminal and is using small remodels and a couple of new kiosks to keep up with record traffic until a bigger expansion and a full concessions strategy come back to Council, according to this memo.

Item 25 is a $123,397 amendment to an existing Dallas Streetcar study contract to explore using a paid parking zone (Parking Benefit District) as a self-sustaining funding source for the line’s $2.5 million annual operations and maintenance costs. The streetcar, operated by DART, runs 2.45 miles from Downtown to Oak Cliff's Bishop Arts District.

A Tarrant County district court ruled on May 5 that the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) unlawfully fired Michael Morris, the Dallas-Fort Worth region's Transportation Director of 35 years, and ordered his immediate reinstatement. The court found that NCTCOG, which serves only as a fiscal and administrative agent, had no legal basis to terminate Morris, and the court determined the dismissal caused “imminent and irreparable” harm to the region.

NCTCOG is now enjoined from pursuing a replacement and from allowing board members outside the 12-county area to vote on transportation matters — a significant rebuke of what the RTC's own filing called "a brazen power grab" timed, notably, just weeks before our region hosts more FIFA World Cup matches than any other North American venue.

The RTC meets this week to ratify that posture: the agenda includes votes to approve a new TxDOT agreement that explicitly names the RTC — not NCTCOG — as the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), the federally required board that decides how a region spends its federal transportation dollars.