Nathan Hunsinger
Audio By Carbonatix
The Dallas City Council’s Finance Committee will receive a briefing on the “State of City Hall” on Tuesday, the thesis of which will likely be: it’s not lookin’ too good.
If you’re out of the loop, here’s what you need to know: Downtown’s most Brutalist building was designed by the renowned architect I.M. Pei, making our City Hall the more aggressive, lesser-known little brother of the pyramid outside of the Louvre museum and the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. Despite the acclaim Pei’s name brings to the building, the city has done a poor job of maintaining it. Nearly $100 million is needed to bring the building back up to speed, and in the meantime, city staff are dealing with issues such as the failed toilet valve that flooded the mayor’s office in May.
No one really wants to spend that kind of money on bringing a municipal building back to its original state, so the City Council could consider selling it. What really brought this conversation to a head, because these are old, worn-out problems, is the Dallas Mavericks’ emergence as a potentially enthusiastic buyer. The team is looking to build a new stadium that will be ready to move into when their lease with the American Airlines Center expires in 2031, and for a while now, the threat of Dallas’ NBA team moving out of Big D (as our NFL, MLS and MLB teams have done) has loomed heavy.
“Dallas is a sports city!” insists Mayor Eric Johnson, one that would do just about anything to keep the Mavs in town.
Expect to see some heated discussions on the subject come Tuesday. City Hall really is a mess, but it’s unclear where a new City Hall would be, or if it would look like a traditional City Hall at all. (As in, would our municipal government still be coalesced in one, publicly accessible area. In a literal sense, our City Hall is already untraditional in appearance.) It also undeniably stings to think Dallas could tear down another building for sport.
The briefing materials for Tuesday’s discussion aren’t online yet, but last summer, city staff estimated that around $80 million is needed to address deferred maintenance. A significant chunk of that change needs to be put toward the building’s foundation, which is less than desirable due to water leaks.
Council member Zarin Gracey, who sits on the Finance Committee, said he is open to hearing from both sides of the debate before taking his position, but his final stance will likely be determined “by the numbers.”
“From a feasibility standpoint, I’m looking at how much is it going to cost to continue to maintain the building? … And where would that money come from?” Gracey said. “We tried to make an attempt to do that in this last bond program, and there wasn’t a lot of heart for it at the time, so I’d be interested to see where the temperature is now, given these discussions.”
At one point, nearly $28 million for building repairs was considered during the development of the 2024 $1.1 billion bond, but that allocation was slashed before the bond went before voters.
Before becoming a council member, Gracey worked for the city. If this conversation had come up years ago, he said he likely would have been in favor of decentralizing Dallas’ government and finding ways to expand into different neighborhoods. Now, though, he sees the value of a governing nucleus, and he hopes that if the Council moves in favor of selling the Marilla Street building, conversations about where council meetings would be held and how much that, in turn, would cost soon follow.
Council member Maxie Johnson, the sole freshman appointee to the Finance Committee, declined to comment on his opinion, stating that because the issue had not yet been discussed as an agenda item during his time at the horseshoe, his weighing in would be “pointless.”
Some horseshoe veterans, though, haven’t been shy about where they sit on the discussion. Council member Paul Ridley, whose district includes parts of downtown, said the funds needed to breathe new life into the Marilla Street structure aren’t anywhere near what it would cost to build a new City Hall.
“A bomb blast could go off and wouldn’t dent that building. It’s one of the safest in Dallas for inclement weather, and it’s paid for,” Ridley told The Dallas Morning News. “I don’t know why anybody would tear it down.”
While the conversations about City Hall’s wear and tear aren’t new, they feel different this time. Mayor Eric Johnson has instructed the Finance Committee to “consider all potential options” when it comes to evaluating the city’s real estate holdings, and even though this is, at the end of the day, a decision for the council, it starts to feel a bit premeditated when major players like the Mavericks, or downtown developer Ray Washburne, start salivating.
“I don’t want to give the public the perception that this is a foregone situation with the Mavericks because frankly it’s not,” council member Chad West told Inside Politics last week.
We’ll see about that on Tuesday.
