Dallas Wants to be Developer Friendly. Will That Come at the Expense of Parks?

If we ever give Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson flowers for one thing, it’s his administration’s fealty to parks and green spaces. Johnson began hammering on his dedication to parks (one of the four “Ps” crucial to his governance of Dallas) years before the $1.1 billion bond package in 2024. Johnson wanted parks to come out on top.

His dedication has paid off; our park score has increased every year since 2020, and we currently sit at 34th in the United States for park access, equity, amenities, investment and acreage. We are spending more money per resident on parks than ever before, and more than the national average. The number of Dallas residents living within a 10-minute walk of a park has increased 30% since 2017.

Rudy Karimi, Dallas Park and Recreation Board member for District 14, knows the work isn’t done there. But he believes the city could be hamstrung in future pursuits of park expansion, if an under-the-radar agenda item intersecting green space and development continues to fly unnoticed.

The issue concerns something called park land dedication fees. When a developer looks to build in Dallas, they get a bill from the city, on top of their construction costs. Things like zoning changes, plat amendments, even cutting down a tree, come at a cost. For residential builders, a park land dedication fee is charged based on the number of dwelling units in a development.

That fee goes into a fund managed by the park board, and is used for major purchases like acquiring land or developing a park in a meaningful way that enhances the way residents use the space. The fund, which was started by a 2018 ordinance (Dallas was late to the park land fee party), sits at around $13 million right now.

In 2023, the Texas Legislature cracked down on park land dedication fees with House Bill 1526. The bill only applies to Texas’ five largest cities — Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio — because, simply put, some places were getting a little crazy with their fee amounts. As Karimi points out, Dallas was not one of them.

HB 1526 introduced a cap on what cities can charge developers for park land dedication fees. Although the bill meant Dallas had to reevaluate its ordinance (something that has now taken two years to do), our fees are well below what the state says the city can charge for its park fund. Currently, a developer building single-family housing is asked to pay $1,165 per dwelling unit into the fund. Multifamily developments with one bedroom cost $457 per dwelling unit, and two or more bedrooms cost $917 per unit.

In a post-HB 1526 plan approved by city staff and the Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee in 2024, single-family housing would see a 12% increase to $1,308 per dwelling unit. The increased fee for multifamily housing developments would be more substantial: a 43% increase on one-bedroom units for a $654-per-unit fee, and a 42% increase on units with two or more bedrooms for a $1,308 fee. Those costs were determined based on a weighted percentage applied to Dallas’ median family income over the last five years, city staff explained.

“This stuff is designed to be hard to understand,” Karimi says, which is why he believes a proposal to gut those fees has gone largely unnoticed. “It costs the city nothing to keep this.”

The Objection

As an independently-governed group, the park board does not often have to run its plans by many others.

Park land fees, though, are one of the rare instances where a parks initiative overlaps with a different board, specifically the City Plan Commission. In February of this year, Assistant Director of Parks Ryan O’Connor presented to the CPC, which has jurisdiction over fees charged to developers, to give what he expected to be a straightforward presentation on a successful city program managed by a peer department.

Instead, he was, as a park board member would later call it, “ambushed” at the horseshoe.

A major qualm was in the city staff’s suggestion to do away with a provision that was in the original park land dedication fee that allowed developers to build their own green space as part of a development instead of paying into the city fund. Commissioners were upset at the idea that the option would be removed, although O’Connor said it hasn’t been utilized a single time since the ordinance was put into place. In most cases, he said, it’s cheaper and faster just to pay a bill to the city and move on.

“I don’t miss many meals, but I’d bet my lunch and dinner they didn’t know what they were voting for." — park board member Rudy Karimi

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There was also frustration at the suggestion of where funding could, or should, be spent for future parks. The newly written park land dedication program splits Dallas into five sectors, and funds generated in a sector have to be spent on park land acquisition within that sector. That ensures that a developer in South Dallas isn’t paying for a park to be built in Lake Highlands. But Downtown Dallas funds would be allowed to be funneled into any sector of Dallas, O’Connor said, because land-purchasing for green space in downtown isn’t a very likely thing.

District 14 Commissioner Melissa Kingston, whose district includes parts of downtown, was frustrated by this and worried that a lack of prioritizing Dallas’ urban core while also de-incentivizing green space development on the developer's end would stifle housing growth in areas adjacent to Dallas’ trail systems like the Katy Trail.

District 1 Commissioner Christian Chernock also expressed concern that the suggested fee increase would impose a hefty cost burden on developers, which he worried would be passed on to renters.

“At a time when our city is in the midst of a housing crisis, don’t you think the ask to increase the fee by 42% is egregious?” said Chernock. “It moves the needle in the wrong direction onto the backs of renters who are already squeezed to the limits. We have an opportunity to do something about it right now.”

Chernock suggested an amendment to the city’s plan that, rather than raise the fees, would cut the existing amounts in half. That would mean single-family and two-or-more bedroom developments would come at a $654-per-unit fee, while one-bedroom apartments would cost $327-per-unit.

He added that, “on the heels of a bond package that just gave parks $350 million,” the fee cut seemed fair.

“Bad Politics”

City data shows that out of the North Texas region, Dallas sits somewhere in the middle of what other cities are charging for park land dedication fees. (Those cities, you’ll remember, are not capped by HB 1526.)

In Southlake, developers are charged between $6,500 and $8,700 per dwelling unit. In Plano, the fees can be as high as $2,865. Park land fees are more expensive in Forney, Lancaster, Frisco and Arlington than they are in Dallas, and that’s based on the amount recommended by city staff and ZOAC that would bump our fees up.

“Show me one developer who saw these fees and ran for the hills. Find me one. They didn’t, because the hills are higher,” Karimi says. “We need to be friendly to our developers, but we’re friendly enough.”

When the board heard their fees had potentially been slashed during a meeting on Feb. 20, they expressed “shock” and anger. Park and Recreation Director John Jenkins said that although the department did get a substantial amount of funding during the last bond, the department did not lobby for funds that could specifically be used for land acquisition because they were relying on the fees.

One park board member, Lane Connor, called the vote to cut park land dedication fees in half an act of “bad politics.”

“I think there is quite a bit of retribution going on here,” he said. “I think this might be a fallout of ForwardDallas not going the way that some CPC members wanted it to go. Maybe the housing folks not getting what they wanted in the bond. And frankly, I’m bothered. I’m disgusted that it’s always us versus them.”

O’Connor believes that something about the park land dedication program got “lost in translation” ahead of the vote, and Karimi agrees. The briefing was held on the same day the CPC was chewing on a chunk of parking reform, which overshadowed the issue.

“I don’t miss many meals, but I’d bet my lunch and dinner they didn’t know what they were voting for,” Karimi said.

One of the issues with cutting the fees in half, to put it bluntly, is that land in Dallas is expensive. And although the proposed plan cuts Dallas into five pieces, the ordinance enacted in 2018 had the city split into seven. With limits on where money is generated and spent, that means the fund’s $13 million total only amounts to around $1-2 million for each sector. Furthermore, the funds have a 10-year expiration date, at which point a developer can ask for any unspent money to be reimbursed. Karimi said lowering the amount of money generated, at a time when land is only getting more expensive, would all but guarantee that the funds expire year after year.

“It moves the needle in the wrong direction onto the backs of renters who are already squeezed to the limits. We have an opportunity to do something about it right now.” — CPC Commissioner Christian Chernock

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The City Council’s Park, Trails and Environment Committee was briefed on the conflicting fee-change recommendations in June, and several council members expressed concern at the CPC’s dramatic decrease. District 1 Council member Chad West, who sat on the plan commission prior to joining the council and recalls the original park land dedication fee ordinance passing, said he’d always been concerned that the issue would “inevitably [become] political.”

He added that he does not feel it is the plan commission’s place to weigh in on fee changes. But now that they have, it will take a three-quarters majority of votes at the city council to overturn the CPC-approved 50% fee reduction.

While council committees have yet to be named, a representative for Council member Kathy Stewart, who chaired the Park, Trails and Environment Committee last year, said the dedication fee issue will likely have to be heard in a committee setting at least one more time before it can go to council.

Meanwhile, city staff have noted that this issue is currently affecting revenue and that it’s “in [the city’s] best interest to move expeditiously” on how to proceed.

With the parks department already facing substantial funding cuts in the upcoming budget, Karimi believes that recapturing that revenue is vital to keeping Dallas on its park-positive trajectory.

“We have to stop the bleeding,” he said.