Emails Surface Showing Select Council Members Were Offered Tours of Potential City Hall Sites
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The fallout from last week’s special-called City Council meeting on the fate of Dallas City Hall appears poised to intensify as questions about transparency continue following recent media reports on city communications related to potential relocation sites.
As previously reported by CandysDirt.com, the often-tense marathon meeting resulted in a resolution directing City Manager Kimberly Tolbert to explore — rather than pursue — City Hall relocation options and model alternative expense scenarios for the repair of 1500 Marilla St.
Questions About Site Tours
One aspect we didn’t explore extensively in our previous reporting was the concern raised by some council members opposed to relocating City Hall that discussions about alternative sites may have occurred outside the view of the full council. That issue resurfaced this week after internal emails discussed plans to invite a few council members to tour potential relocation sites.
During last Wednesday’s late-night meeting, Bazaldua asked city consultant Peter Jansen, executive vice president and southwest regional manager for the commercial real estate firm CBRE, whether council members had been taken on tours of potential relocation sites.
Jansen declined to answer the question, saying it was his opinion that revealing information such as the number of site visits could compromise the city’s future negotiating position if the city ultimately moves from 1500 Marilla St.
“I’ll tell you, as a council member, I haven’t been asked to go on any tours,” Bazaldua said. “I don’t know about these places that you’re exploring. So if we’re going to tell the public that this isn’t moving at a fast pace — and I’m telling you as your elected official in District 7, I have not been privy to these conversations — this is absolutely moving at a rapid pace, and it’s moving with a lack of transparency.”
City Manager Responds
In a statement, Tolbert said she was tasked by the City Council in November with reviewing office space available for lease and purchase citywide and reporting the findings to the Finance Committee.
“As part of that due diligence process, members of the Finance Committee were invited to meet with CBRE and visit potential sites. Finance Committee members did not meet together in a quorum, no deliberations occurred, and no decisions were made by any party,” she said.
The Dallas City Council’s Finance Committee includes Chad West, Kathy Stewart, Zarin Gracey, Maxie Johnson, Jesse Moreno, Jaime Resendez, and Gay Willis.
“Additionally, all council members were invited to meet one-on-one with the entire review team, including CBRE and AECOM. Each council member had an opportunity to ask questions about the facility condition assessment, the real estate market engagement, and all other deliverables requested by the city council in November,” she added.
The Finance Committee voted unanimously last month to recommend to the City Council that Tolbert be directed to pursue relocation options.
Emails obtained by The Dallas Morning News indicate that the tours were organized by the Dallas Economic Development Corporation. Per DMN’s reporting, EDC CEO Linda McMahon told CBRE’s Jansen in an email that the city manager wanted to “offer a few council members an opportunity to tour prospect buildings.”
Jansen advised that efforts should be made to protect the city’s negotiating position by ensuring council members tour every site that the consultants had and that the visits occur after the city council is briefed on initial findings but before relocation options are narrowed, according to the emails.
Both Tolbert’s statement to CandysDirt.com and DMN’s reporting leave it unclear whether the tours were held before last week’s City Council briefing or have yet to take place.
“The emails, part of a large cache of messages among city officials, consultants and others, likely will intensify complaints from opponents who say the process has unfolded largely out of view,” the newspaper wrote.
Downtown Stakeholder Pressure?
The broader debate over the fate of 1500 Marilla St. has also included speculation whether redevelopment of the site could eventually include a new Mavericks arena. Some members in the Save City Hall camp have raised questions about transparency, considering how much developers and downtown property owners could stand to benefit from redevelopment of the property.
Those concerns surfaced during last week’s meeting when Cara Mendelsohn (District 12) proposed prohibiting any landowners within two miles of City Hall from participating in redevelopment of the site. Bazaldua suggested that a smaller radius — something like half a mile to three-quarters of a mile — might be more appropriate.
“The last thing I do want to do is facilitate a land acquisition deal for someone who’s just been holding out on vacant properties and wants to piece together that last billion dollar opportunity, whatever it is,” he said.
Mendelsohn elaborated on the aim of her proposed amendment.
“My concern, frankly, is we have a landowner that is already involved in other projects that doesn’t need to take over … the whole downtown, and we’ve had other landowners that have written op-eds trying to force us to act in certain ways and make certain moves,” Mendelsohn said. “We’ve had other landowners that have come down here and literally said to us that it’s our job to help them make more money — and that is not our job. Our job is to serve the people, and I hope we can create conditions so that they can make a lot of money. I hope so. But that is actually not my primary job.”
The amendment failed on a 10-5 vote, with Bazaldua, Mendelsohn, Council Members Paula Blackmon (District 9), Bill Roth (District 11), and Paul Ridley (District 14) voting in favor.
Now, there are still plenty of property owners within a half-mile radius, some of whom have suggested the site could become a major redevelopment opportunity. Several downtown property owners have expressed support for further development of the area surrounding City Hall. One example is Dallas developer Ray Washburne, who owns multiple holdings in the southern sector of downtown.
Washburne has previously said he would like to see the City Hall site redeveloped and has proposed relocating municipal functions to his downtown Founders Square property.
Last year, Washburne and the city found themselves at loggerheads over the former DMN campus (about half a mile away from City Hall), where the Dallas real estate magnate had hoped to partner with the city on redevelopment. Blaming poor communication on the city’s part, Washburne said he planned to sell the property to a data center company. It wasn’t long after that that the city acquired the bulk of the campus.
He still owns a piece of the site. Two days after last week’s marathon meeting, D Magazine published an interview with Washburne in which he floated his vision of a 30-story, 1,000-room hotel tower for the site to complement the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center redevelopment.
“You cannot build a convention-center hotel without city participation,” he told D. “But City Hall has distracted everyone’s attention. If I said ‘go’ today to my architects to start on design work, I couldn’t start construction for at least a year… I’m ready to roll. But the city needs to step up and engage in conversation for this.”
He told the magazine that the project could run around $800 million and would warrant as much as $160 million to $200 million in taxpayer incentives.
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If more than one City Council member meets with someone on city business outside a city-sanctioned meeting, you need to determine whether there was a violation of the State of Texas Open Meeting law.