Last Friday, one of the nearly 20 memorandums issued by the Dallas city manager’s office addressed concerns about how police pay raises proposed in the 2025-26 budget compare to the mandates outlined in Proposition U, the Dallas City Charter amendment that narrowly passed into law in November.
It’s one of the city’s most direct acknowledgements of the amendment to date, and it epitomizes exactly where City Hall is going wrong on this issue. The amendment earmarks 50% of the city’s new revenue for police and fire pensions, and calls for additional funds to be spent on higher starting salaries for officers and growing the force to at least 4,000 police. (At the end of May, the department sat at a little over 3,200 officers.) When it comes to starting salaries, Prop. U also calls for Dallas to rank in the region's top five highest-paying police departments.
The charter amendment was long and the last item on a very long ballot. On Election Day, it became clear that many voters didn’t know what they were voting for. Some, as reported by the Dallas Morning News, didn’t realize charter amendments would be on the ballot at all. Others said they were in favor of the “public safety, accountability and quality of life” advantages that the organization that pushed the amendment, Dallas HERO, vowed the amendments would bring.
Public safety, accountability and quality of life: It’s a message that’s impossible to say no to — and was served up to voters like a package of Skittles at the exact moment you’re craving something sweet.
It’s City Hall that’s been left with the toothache.
Since the November election, and especially since the start of budget talks, Dallas’ leaders have been playing defense when it comes to the messaging surrounding Prop. U. But in early drafts of the budget, City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert said city leaders managed to do all that was asked of them in Prop. U, and then some. She proposed Dallas’ starting salary for police be raised 7.7% in the upcoming year — more than what was agreed upon in the city’s meet and confer agreement with the department, and more than enough, the budget claims, to comply with Prop. U.
That rubbed Dallas HERO the wrong way. Public safety advocates went to City Hall last Wednesday and accused the council of “gaslighting” voters by failing to meet the demands of Prop. U. Their main point of frustration is the top-five in the region stipulation.
"Why aren't you taking them seriously" Dallas HERO Executive Director Damien Leveck grills city council for not taking the voters seriously when it comes to Prop U. Even with the proposed $5,835 increase in police pay, DPD starting salary is still 12th in the region.
— Dallas Hero (@dallas_hero_) September 4, 2025
This is… pic.twitter.com/xnfPZvCwaf
Anyone with access to Google can do their own search of what neighboring municipalities pay their officers, and will find, based on the publicly available information, that Dallas’ new proposed salary would actually put the police department at 12th in the region. That would suggest that the proposed budget is not compliant with Prop. U, as the city has said — at least, not based on what the average Dallasite believes Prop. U says.
One would assume that Dallas has a team of lawyers who have read Prop. U backward and forward and know exactly what they need to do to technically comply with the ordinance. But City Hall has a problem with the disconnect between those technicalities and what the Dallas electorate actually thinks they voted for.
When most Dallasites think about Prop. U, they go back to Dallas HERO’s simple, impossible-to-argue message that more cops and better salaries are good for public safety. People want to feel safer, and Dallas HERO has told them that Prop. U is the way to make that happen.
The organization has also harped on the need for accountability, which weakens City Hall’s “trust us” approach the early budget drafts took. The stance weakens even further when a person can Google around and find information that seems to conflict with what they’re being told to trust. Ongoing issues with the Office of the Inspector General — both the hiring and firing of an underqualified individual and the lawsuit filed by a former inspector general who alleges retaliation for pointing out improper spending — further underscore this feeling that Dallasites can’t, or shouldn’t, have faith in the people charged with leading their city.
This brings us back to the memo Dallas’ Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland filed last Friday.
The memo, released in the afternoon of a Friday, is eight pages long and, through tables and charts and paragraphs bolded for emphasis, explains that, in the city’s reading of Prop. U, the proposed budget is legally compliant. The memo states that because the city is paying 50% of the year-over-year growth in unrestricted revenue into the pension system, they are exempt from funding initiatives such as starting salary raises and additional hiring. That, the city states, is being done out of the city manager’s commitment to public safety.
A jargony, esoteric charter amendment got Dallas into this mess, but jargony, esoteric memos won’t get us out of it. We’d wager that most Dallasites don't know that city manager memos exist. Fewer care to check for them when they get dropped on Friday evenings. And even fewer still see eight pages of legal justifications and think, “Ah, yes. Some light reading.”
When it comes to Prop. U and its difficulties, City Hall isn’t speaking to Dallasites where it matters. If skittles are what voters have an appetite for, Marilla Street has to find a way to make their stance on the charter amendment quick and sweet. Not double down on legal technicalities while offering transparency via memo system.
Dallas City Council member Cara Mendelsohn tells the Observer that, according to the city attorney, the Nov. 2026 election date falls several days short of the two-year period required between charter amendment cycles, and therefore is ineligible to have new charter amendments on the ballot. The November 2024 election was held on Nov. 5, and the November 2026 election will be held on Nov. 3. That means that the earliest Dallas voters can see new amendments will be in the May 2027 election. If the horseshoe moves forward with a long-discussed plan to do away with May elections due to low voter turnout, voters may not vote on another charter amendment until November 2027.
The first step will be figuring out how to talk about Prop. U with voters, lest they erode even more trust and support.
Dallas HERO certainly has.
