The city’s case for moving Dallas’ 911, 311 dispatch centers out of downtown 

In one week, the Dallas City Council will be at the deadline to call a bond election for this November. 

By the end of Aug. 12, Dallas voters should know whether or not they’ll be asked to approve more than $900 million for public safety projects. The money could contribute to pension obligation bonds, funding for the new police training center in southern Dallas, and a $40 million relocation of 911 and 311 call services out of City Hall. If approved, the package propositions would be the second city bond package Dallas voters have been asked to consider in the last two years. 

That last bullet point is most intriguing. Moving Dallas’ emergency call centers out of City Hall is an argument that has emerged alongside the broader debate over whether City Hall is worth salvaging at all. As it stands right now, phone operators who answer emergency calls are based out of the City Hall basement. 

Some officials argue that the office’s central location has caused problems. When major events happen in the city’s core on weekends, holidays or off hours, responding police traffic can prevent Dallas’ emergency management team from getting to work, Dallas’ Director of Emergency Management and Crisis Response, Kevin Oden, said.

“During the cheerleading incident last summer, we were not able to access City Hall in any reasonable amount of time,” said Oden during a June 10 council meeting, referencing the 2025 downtown cheerleading competition that was evacuated after reports were made of a shooting. “We had to actually relocate to do coordination of that event, because of the traffic in and around downtown. And so we believe that moving these critical functions outside of where the center of government is, in addition to the traffic and the potential risks that downtown faces, expedited our ability to provide emergency operations.” 

According to Oden, this has been a problem nearly every time downtown has been struck by major incidents. After the July 7 ambush of police officers in 2016, “getting into downtown was next to impossible.” During major ice and snow storms, Oden has to find ways to keep employees based throughout downtown “24 hours a day,” just to ensure that those workers can maintain access to the building. 

In February, the council’s Finance Committee unanimously recommended that the city manager move forward with relocating emergency operations out of City Hall “as quickly as possible.” (In government time, ASAP is at least a year.) Despite impassioned lobbying to preserve City Hall, the 911 issue has avoided much of the public scrutiny that other efforts to reduce the building’s workforce have received. 

Oden noted in June that keeping emergency services out of a city’s core is generally considered a best practice. Dallas’ peer cities, Austin and Houston, both have located their emergency management teams outside of their downtown hubs. 

At the end of July, The Dallas Morning News reported that a city-owned tower in the Cedars is the city’s preferred site for a new 911 and 311 dispatch center. City staff “anticipates that” the former IBM building “will serve as the project site,” a solicitation document obtained by The News states. Approval, however, remains in the council’s hands. 

Ultimately, the move would be a multi-million-dollar expense, requested right in the throes of a budget season with no money. Hence why a November bond election is on the table. 

CBRE, the consulting group that has largely steered the City Hall “Love It or List It” conversation, estimates the cost of moving 911, 311, and emergency management services to a new building at $40 million. That number would get the city “a modern design criteria,” and bring things up to “what the industry best practices are.” 

And even if the issue has not yet earned the full-throated opposition that nearly every other City Hall-adjacent agenda item has inspired, not all are convinced that this is necessary. During the June 10 council meeting, representative Paul Ridley questioned whether the types of extreme events Oden described truly necessitated such a drastic change. 

“It just seems that if that is going to cost us $40 million for the off chance that [an emergency] may happen once or twice in 10 years, that’s a really low capital investment priority,” Ridley said. 

In this issue, there’s one more key consideration that the horseshoe will have to make. 

As currently proposed, the public safety facility funding needs include $40 million for emergency management’s relocation, but the bulk of the $441 million bond would be used for upgrades to Dallas Police facilities such as the law enforcement training center and crime scene and evidentiary storage. Dallas voters already approved funding for the training center as a part of the 2024 bond, although an $82 million funding gap remains that this theoretical November bond could fill. 

Issuing additional debt comes at a cost. Dallas’ Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland has warned that moving forward with the proposed November bond package would delay some projects that were included in the 2024 bond for an additional year. Delaying projects that the community has asked for and voted for, and the risk of construction cost escalations that come with time, have to be considered. 

“We will have to make some hard choices,” said council member Kathy Stewart. “These decisions have a huge impact on our residents and what their expectations are, what their neighborhoods need, what they’re waiting for. … I think we have to always keep our residents in mind, and under this particular scenario, I don’t know that they fare particularly well.”