Dallas City Council unanimously approved a city audit plan Wednesday that prioritizes looking into a lead abatement program that should have addressed hazards in residents’ homes. The lead abatement program is one of 13 areas prioritized in the Fiscal Year 2025 Audit Work Plan, which is conducted annually by the Office of the City Auditor to evaluate city services as recommended by the city council.
District 13 Council Member Gay Donnell Willis and District 1 Council Member Chad West requested that the lead removal program be added to the audit last month, after a Dallas Morning News investigation revealed its overwhelming failure. The investigation found that 90 homes had asked to participate in a federally funded city initiative designed to remove lead from homes, but only four received abatement and nearly 40 were ignored completely.
Loucious Miller’s home was documented as receiving $12,000 for abatement through the program, though he told the Morning News he is doubtful the full amount was spent as intended. At Wednesday’s council meeting, Miller broke down in tears while speaking of his experience participating in the lead abatement program.
“Come see what the housing program has done to my house,” Miller urged the council. “I’ve been down here speaking to people trying to get help, and nobody wants to help me. Why?”
The city audit is expected to answer questions about the challenges the program faced and whether Dallas' experience was comparable with peer cities. According to the Morning News report, Fort Worth has received waves of funding from the federal lead abatement program since 2005 and has completed work on 66 homes in 2023. Though COVID-19 temporarily slowed down the program in 2020, 75 Fort Worth homes had lead removed in 2019.
The audit will also examine whether other city grant-funded programs are lagging in execution. The Dallas Morning News reached out to a number of city officials at the time of the investigation, but few were able to speak to the lead abatement program’s status, much less what went wrong. One city official stated that the Dallas Housing Department believed the grant to be “cumbersome to administer,” resulting in the program's being dissolved.
West told the Observer he expects the audit to verify the Housing Department’s claims that the program was mismanaged on the federal level, something that local congressional leaders could be charged with remedying.
“I believe the lead abatement program problems are stemming from the onerous federal requirements that make it really impossible for the city to have a valid program,” West said. “Sometimes the government can’t get out of its own way and I think this is one of those cases.”
Other City Processes the Audit Will Address
While not labeled as a priority, a comprehensive evaluation of the city’s zoning process is included in the FY2025 audit. The primary question on that topic is whether the Planning and Development office has performance metrics in place to determine whether zoning requests are processed in a timely manner.
District 12 Council Member Cara Mendelsohn seems interested in getting a head start on this one. In August, Mendelsohn filed a memo signaling her intent to pull all zoning cases in an effort to begin documenting the time between submission of a zoning application and when the case makes it to the council. For nearly two months, Mendelsohn has marked Wednesday council meetings with a Tweet documenting the amount of time each zoning case on the council’s agenda spent tied up in municipal red tape.
This week, Mendelsohn calculated the average time between application and council as 299 days, or nearly 43 weeks.
Average time from application to city council action in this week's zoning agenda is 299 days, 43 weeks.
— Cara Mendelsohn 🟦 (@caraathome) October 24, 2024
Z1: 4/18/24, 188 days/27 wks
Z2: 5/13/24, 163 days/23 wks
Z3: 5/31/24, 145 days/21 wks
Z4: 6/3/24, 142 days/20 wks
Z7: 6/7/23, 504 days/72 wks
Z8: 6/27/23, 484 days/69 wks
Z9:… https://t.co/as94ItuzZe
West hopes the audit will reveal the "big picture" of challenges facing the zoning process; while staffing challenges could be contributing to a lengthy process, so too could commissioners holding cases for political reasons, developers requesting delays and community members requesting input, he said.
The Audit Work Plan has also been tasked with looking into the performance of Dallas’ 18 active Tax Increment Financing districts, or TIFs, which are designed to help incentivize development in under-performing pockets of the city. The auditor has been instructed to determine whether the TIF districts are helping to increase affordable housing and by how much, as intended. The TIF inquiry is listed as a priority.
The work plan also asks whether 911 calls are being answered and responded to in a timely fashion — a topic that frequently appears in the city's annual audits as an annual check-in — and whether changes to the city's permitting process have helped relieve a backlog that appears to be an issue more often than not. Whether the cause of Dallas' permitting delays are being addressed will be a priority for the Office of the City Auditor, council members instructed.
It’s unclear what the timeline will be on the city receiving answers to any of these questions. Fourteen topics are still pending in the FY2024 audit, with an estimated 3,710 hours of work left to be done.
