Dallas Deserves More Than 4 Ps: What Johnson Must Say in His City Address

The time has come once again for Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson to deliver the annual State of the City address, a city charter-mandated speech meant to touch on the highs and lows of the past year and the mayor’s vision for the next. And while he probably won’t acknowledge it to the degree some might appreciate, this year’s address comes at the end of a very weird year where, for every problem the city has solved, three more have sprouted out of thin air or reemerged from the road they’d been kicked down.

Johnson’s 2025 address will be given tomorrow morning over a livestream on the city’s YouTube channel. Last year, the address was presented in the City Council chambers before an audience, and the year before that, it was broadcast on the radio. It’s a bit odd that the mayor is opting away from having an audience at this year’s speech, but more important than that will be what Johnson chooses to talk about. 

For the past few years, the State of the City has been all about “the four Ps”: parks, public safety, potholes and property taxes. If you put Johnson’s 2024 and 2023 speeches side by side, they were nearly identical. And really, they weren’t all that different from the 2022 address, either. This year’s speech needs to be different because in just one year, it feels like something in Dallas has shifted. 

According to a spring survey by the Partnership for Public Service, only one-third of Americans feel they can trust the government, and this lack of faith continues to deepen as everyday governance becomes increasingly partisan. City Hall has undoubtedly become a partisan endeavor. Those floodgates were opened by Johnson in 2023 when he joined the Republican party, and two years of RNC speeches, Fox News stints and GOP shoulder rubbing via X have only widened them. At the same time, anyone who regularly tunes in to the horseshoe that the national distrust in the government has trickled down into Dallas’ local politics. 

For longtime Dallas residents who moved here because of the once-low cost of living and the good schools, moments like the May approval of the Pepper Square redevelopment have signaled that their neighborhoods are no longer a part of the city’s vision. During the vote that some tenured council members described as the most complicated they’d ever had to consider, Johnson was absent.

Immigrant residents, on the other hand, spent months of this year waiting to hear whether or not their new police chief would support the federal deportation initiatives targeting their communities. When Police Chief Daniel Comeaux finally offered some assurances that the DPD would not participate in immigration enforcement, it was Johnson who reopened the conversation about partnering with ICE. 

Residents are frustrated about the handling of Fair Park, which becomes more dilapidated by the day. Half of Dallas is angry about crime and police hiring, and the other half is pissed that the police department’s budget inflated even more in the latest city budget. People are worried about 911 call response times, and few can make their paycheck stretch as far as it did last winter. 

Deep Ellum’s crime numbers exploded over the summer, and the task force designed to handle it shut down jazz music halls. The city fired, then hired, then fired its way through the inspector general’s office this year, and one of those former generals is suing the city for wrongful termination. Somehow, it isn’t the one who was let go because he failed to meet the posted job requirements — never mind the fact that the council knew his resume at the time he was brought on to the job. And speaking of lawsuits, there are the ones Dallas keeps losing (short-term rentals), the ones it’s facing (Death Star Bill) and the ones that keep being threatened (too many to name). 

The horseshoe doesn’t even really seem to trust itself. A few months ago, several council members accused their colleagues of committing an open meetings violation by holding a closed-door session on fighting homelessness. Other representatives now believe that the push to move out of City Hall is a thin shroud over a back-door deal with the land-grabbing Dallas Mavericks. 

And that’s just the stuff the city is doing on its own. Add to that the mandates constantly coming out of Austin and Washington — everything from painting over rainbow crosswalks to deleting the city’s racial equity plan — and Dallas doesn’t feel like a stable place. 

Johnson probably isn’t the person who will help us feel better about any of this. He has exacerbated or worsened several of those issues while largely ignoring many others. He doesn’t have a strong record on coalition building, and his ambivalence towards Dallas has reached such a level that hardly anyone believes him when he says he isn’t going to vacate his seat to run for higher office. 

Some might argue that Johnson’s address is irrelevant because Dallas operates under a weak mayor system, where he serves as a figurehead rather than a changemaker. But this undermines the power a figurehead can have when they genuinely try to lead. City Manager Kimberly Tolbert may be at the ship’s helm, but Johnson is a sail that could catch a guiding wind if he’d bother to unfurl.  

On Thursday, this city needs Johnson to say that while things might get a little rocky, we’re going to get through. That the next year will look more pragmatic than partisan (another P!) and that Dallas truly is a city for everyone. That’s something we say a lot, but how many people feel that it’s true? 

If tomorrow’s address is a fourth year of Ps, we won’t be surprised. However, we hope Johnson does more and does better, because as the City Council debates whether to move the next city election to November 2027, it’s becoming clear that Dallas could have two more years with Johnson on our ship. We hope they go a bit smoother than this one did.