Dallas city manager’s missteps could cost us with Mavs

Dallas Morning News
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There are many voices in Dallas now calling for the preservation of I.M. Pei’s wedge-shaped City Hall building at 1500 Marilla St.

We firmly believe that, if given a choice, a majority of Dallas residents would choose a multi-billion dollar reinvestment in downtown over a brutalist structure that, as architecture, is beautiful to some, ugly to others and divisive at best.

It is still possible that a reinvestment will happen, one that is centered on a new arena for the Dallas Mavericks and that breathes life and opportunity into our city’s core. 

But the outcome strikes us as increasingly remote, in large part because of the way City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert has handled the opportunity. (Our mayor, as far as we can tell, has been all but absent as a public player in this debate.)

Tolbert has done a good job as city manager overall. Those of us who follow city matters know she is fast to respond to urgent issues that represent threats or opportunities for the city. It was Tolbert who changed the failed approach of her predecessor when it came to policing downtown. Tolbert personally engaged to try to keep Neiman Marcus in downtown. Tolbert pushed for a budget that aggressively added funds for more police. We could go on.

But the Mavs opportunity has exposed what we think is an error in her management. This was a case that needed to be handled as a public debate about the opportunity for downtown from the very beginning.

Instead, the public debate has revolved almost entirely around the physical condition of City Hall. If you’ve spent any time in that building, you know it’s a mess. But you have to be naive to believe that its maintenance is suddenly an urgent matter that could cost Dallas hundreds of millions of dollars. The building needs help, but it’s not going to fall down. 

Last year, when Tolbert raised with Mavs leadership the possibility of using the City Hall site for a new arena, she should have followed up with a briefing to the council in executive session about her thinking. She should have made the case that this would be better for Dallas in the long run because it would bring lasting investment to the city.

Instead, we got the debate over the condition of City Hall, and some who want to preserve the building have treated the secrecy of the Mavs opportunity as a conspiracy. We don’t see a conspiracy so much as an attempt to keep sensitive negotiations secret. Either way you see it, the business was done behind closed doors in ways that are unhelpful.

From the beginning, we’ve urged city officials to make this a public debate about the opportunity we stand to lose against the building we stand to keep.

Good people can disagree about which is more important. We think it’s the opportunity for Dallas. We need a vibrant downtown that anchors not just the city but the region. City Hall has never and will never be that.

Tolbert has demonstrated she can lead on questions of this importance. She needs to lead now with what Dallas could gain or lose.

Dallas Morning News editorials are written by the paper’s Editorial Board and serve as the voice and view of the paper. The board considers a broad range of topics and is overseen by the Editorial Page Editor.

This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas.