Dallas Area Rapid Transit
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It’s been a tough year for the Dallas Area Rapid Transit service (DART). Although the service spent the summer altering its budget in a months-long hearing series mired in controversy to reach a truce with a handful of dissatisfied member cities, it was not enough, and the battle for member cities to reduce their contributions or end deals with DART completely has begun again.
The city of Plano announced that it would call a special session this week to discuss adding a ballot measure to allow voters to decide whether the city should sever its ties with DART in the May election. Highland Park and Farmers Branch are also holding special sessions to discuss their dealings with the service.
“For years, the City of Plano has worked to hold DART accountable for the hundreds of millions of tax dollars contributed by our residents,” reads the release from the city announcing the special session. “… Despite Plano’s repeated efforts to address this imbalance, DART has maintained that it requires every dollar it receives… Given these circumstances, city leaders believe it is time to ask residents directly: should DART continue to operate in the City of Plano?”
The announcement from Plano is not entirely unexpected. Years ago, the city indicated that it would vote to leave DART if it could, and the city’s House Rep., Matt Shaheen, has filed legislation that would allow the city to significantly reduce its contributions to the service several times. Plano is one of the largest contributors among all member cities, and if it were to withdraw, not only would services end and millions of dollars in infrastructure investment be wasted, but DART’s total yearly budget would decrease by millions, impacting the entire system and every rider.
“Obviously, there is a financial impact to DART as a whole,” DART CEO Nadine Lee said at a press conference on Tuesday. “We obviously would be very concerned about the impact it would have across our entire network of services for our riders, and so the thing to remember is that the riders will be impacted by any action that is going to be made.”
Lee was joined by the brand new chair of the DART Board of Directors, Randall Bryant, who may be having the worst first week on the job of anyone in history. Bryant’s induction ceremony was the night before Plano made their announcement.
“Honestly, [I am] 24 hours into this new role of mine, and I said here last night, I asked for unity, I asked for a way to expand new cities, I asked for a solution, and this was not the news that I thought I’d hear today,” he said.
The move comes just days after the grand opening of the DART Silver Line, which runs directly from Plano to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a project that took years to build and faced several delays. It was one of the few wins for the service this year. If Plano and other cities decide to withdraw from DART, that line, and all other services, would halt completely and immediately, according to Lee.
“I think the timing is extraordinarily unfortunate,” she said. “I think we had a lot of really positive feelings about DART, coming out with the Silver Line opening. I think it’s just really heartbreaking. I’m really heartbroken, mostly for the riders, because I think the riders who are impacted, I don’t believe, have a voice in this right now.”
Rider Rights
Tyler Wright is a public transportation fanatic. The vice president of the Dallas Area Transit Alliance often rides the bus to work in Plano, usually several times a week. He enjoys the ride, but more so, he needs it as part of a single-vehicle household. There are countless other people like him who dart in and out of the 13-member cities via public transportation.
It’s those people, people who live outside of the cities wanting to leave but rely on DART to get into them, that Lee says will be most impacted, and it’s those people who don’t have a choice in the matter.
“I’m an Addison resident,” said Wright. “So I can’t vote. I have no way to officially make my voice heard outside of council meetings.”
Wright has been following the Plano secession conversation since it began, watching the last session on the edge of his seat as Shaheen’s bill to reduce contributions made it farther than it ever had before. By now, Wright has little expectation for Plano and its elected officials, and thinks the city has been plotting for a while and will continue to do so until it gets what it wants.
“Valid measures like this or considerations to pull out of a mass transit system probably take months of internal conversation,” he said. “It is disappointing from Plano.”
In their press release, Plano affirmed their commitment to providing a “microtransit solution” within city limits if constituents elected to leave DART. But Wright says the interconnectedness of DART is the crux of its value.
“The need for transit is there regardless of our feelings for DART,” he said. “I don’t know how they’ll meet that need for people who work in Plano but live outside of Plano. I don’t know how they’ll meet that need for paratransit users, or seniors or people who need healthcare.”
It’s All About The Money
In their release, Plano cited an inequitable return on service for their contributions, a conclusion drawn from a well-circulated third-party financial audit analyzing the 2023 fiscal year.
The report found that Plano paid more than $109.6 million but received only $44.6 million in return for services. Compared to Dallas, which contributed $407.8 million, the total service offerings received were $690.5 million. The press release also noted more than $800,000 in executive bonuses as a reason for their desire to leave. However, Lee says the financial audit is misleading and that DART’s budget is easily accessible online.
“It pretty much takes us an entire year to prepare our budget for the next year,” she said. “We do it in a very transparent way… We had a very extensive community engagement process this past year, particularly because of the potential impacts to our service based on our current budget revenues. And so I believe that those accusations are unfounded, and I think we are quite transparent.”
