The city’s budget for the next fiscal year is the largest in Dallas history, $4.35 billion supercharged by federal stimulus dollars as well as better-than-expected property and sales tax revenue. I don’t have a Lego version of Dallas to explain it to you like Arlington did, but I do have some words.
Mayor Eric Johnson called it the “back to basics budget,” but it was also back to kumbaya.
Last year’s budget narrowly passed by a vote of 9 to 6, nearly unheard of in this annual matter. This year was back to normal: 13-2, the two opposing (Gay Donnell Willis and Cara Mendelsohn, of Preston Hollow and Far North Dallas, respectively) because it didn’t drive down property taxes enough.
Last year’s budget was contentious. There were dozens upon dozens of amendments, which caused meetings to run late into the evening. This year, there were about a dozen total. Everyone seemed (mostly) onboard with how the city manager allotted funding. The city got about $355 million from the feds to help emerge from COVID-19. Most of that will go to infrastructure improvements the city has long failed to address.
Last year, the murder of George Floyd spurred thousands to pour onto the streets in protest, a movement that became a broader push to reform police spending. They didn’t get much from their elected representatives besides debate; the council famously cut $7 million from the police overtime budget, but that was the largest line item cut for public safety.
This remains, by far, the largest city department: public safety will receive a little over $565 million, enough to hire 250 new cops in 2022 and 275 in 2023. The department was losing about 205 officers each year but was only budgeted to hire 150. Police Chief Eddie Garcia has tampered expectations in the past about how long it will take to staff up. He has called for “responsible growth” that doesn’t come from depleting city services elsewhere. The department now has a little over 3,000 sworn officers, down from more than 3,600 in 2011. Most of that loss occurred around 2016, when the police and fire pension cratered.
“I know we’ve lost about 600 officers in the last few years,” Garcia told D in May. “I couldn’t take 600 officers right now even if I could. I don’t have the infrastructure to train them in the academy, I don’t have the infrastructure to train them in the streets. … We need to grow incrementally.”
The city manager seems to have delivered what the chief asked for.
Overtime was again the biggest fight this budget season. Mayor Pro Tem Chad West wanted to put $10 million in a reserve fund that the department would have to request to access. The department spent about $6.6 million this current fiscal year beyond what was budgeted for 2022; that’s nearly equal to what was diverted to help pay for more civilian hires during last year’s negotiations.
After an audit found no evidence of waste or abuse in the department’s overtime usage, West lost most of his support—even though that audit found that overtime requests were rarely documented properly. And anyway, $10 million is pennies in a fountain for the police department. As consulting firm KPMG found years ago, the real issue is resource allocation and strategy: freeing officers from rote tasks that can be performed by civilians, implementing new performance indicators, and analyzing crime trends to be more proactive.
Elsewhere in public safety: Half a million dollars will go toward traffic calming infrastructure, meant to cut down on speeding and street racing. About $200,000 is devoted solely to a pilot project to address street racing and intersection takeovers.
The RIGHT Care program is doubling from five teams to 10. That’s the program that pairs cops with social workers for mental health calls, allowing healthcare providers to drive the encounter rather than an officer with a gun. (This is a huge demand, by the way. They’ll respond to 13,000 calls a year.)
“This police department gets dispatched to mentally ill calls where it could be something from my son is not taking his meds, we need someone to take him to the hospital,” Garcia told D back in May. “I’m at a loss as to why we’re going to send men and women with weapons to that call.”
The other interesting thing about annual budgets: it shows what the city hasn’t addressed. Let’s start with the 911 call center. For years, Dallas set the salary at $30,000 a year for these incredibly stressful, difficult jobs. That was lower than pretty much every other Texas city.
That’s now jumping to $43,000 and the city has plans to hire another 60 call takers. The goal is to have 90 percent of all calls answered within 10 seconds.
More basic stuff:
- $15 million for sidewalk improvements
- An enormous $300 million to improve street conditions on about 1,700 lane miles
- $10 million for water and sewer infrastructure near new affordable housing
- Replacing 100 traffic signals
- Replacing 1,000 “outdated school zone flashing beacons”
- $5 million for restriping lane markings and crosswalks
- $3 million for wi-fi in parks, attempting to help people nearby get access to Internet
- Jumping pay for sanitation drivers from $16.50 to $20. (I’m sure you had delays in getting your trash picked up in recent months. It’s a simple fix: pay better.)
The budget also includes $25 million for a partnership with the county and nonprofits to provide housing for individuals experiencing homelessness. The city had for years spent money on infrastructure, now it is trying something new: giving them a place to live. (You can learn more about that here.)
There are now plans to re-zone the Tenth Street Historic District, one of the city’s last remaining Freedman’s towns—one that was damaged by a highway—alongside the Office of Historic Preservation. The city is also subsidizing water and sewer infrastructure in areas that need it—so long as a developer builds housing for individuals earning between 60 percent and 80 percent of the area median income. (That would be between about $31,000 and $50,000.) There is enough money to support infrastructure for 250 single family homes or 1,000 multifamily units.
There is plenty more that we’ll dig into in the coming weeks. And, you know, on second thought, maybe the mayor is right. It is a “back to basics” budget. But in the future, maybe the city should set a goal to not have to go back to provide what is being deemed “basics.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story used an old estimate of federal funds the city planned to receive. It actually got $355 million, not $377 million.
