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Meetings of Interest: Sunday, November 19, 2023

Meetings of Interest: Sunday, November 19, 2023

Meetings of Interest: 🦃 Thankful For Meetings (Seriously)

November 19, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Good evening. There are no major public meetings at City Hall this week. With Thanksgiving approaching, let us reflect on the importance of the many government meetings Downtown Dallas, Inc. (DDI) tracks here every week.

Children enjoying Harwood Park opening weekend festivities in September. Decades of planning and meetings (so many meetings) preceded the opening.

Like other Dallas civic groups, we track or attend hundreds of public meetings every year. We advocate for the principles and projects outlined in our strategic

360 Plan

, including advancing urban mobility, building complete neighborhoods, and promoting great placemaking. Members of our staff serve on volunteer boards, commissions, committees, task forces, and subcommittees.

Why must we meet so much? Look around Downtown and count the reasons.

Consider the number of meetings it took over two decades to transform 20-plus acres of surface parking lots into four incredible Downtown parks that opened in the past few years. Community meetings, Park and Recreation Board meetings, 2017 bond task force meetings, and, of course, City Council meetings preceded the opening of Pacific Plaza, Harwood Park, West End Square, and the reinvented Carpenter Park. The Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy (formerly Parks for Downtown Dallas), DDI, and many other partners worked together to advance planning and development of these signature green spaces that are now the envy of downtowns across the country.

Meetings were held from Dallas to Austin over the years leading to last year's successful election to help fund a nearly $3 billion Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Dallas in Downtown. That project is expected to free up 30 acres of land for potential private development in partnership with the City, spurring a new connected mixed-use district that serves residents, workers, and visitors all year long. Many more meetings are yet to come to keep the project on track for a 2028 opening.

DDI's role managing the Downtown Improvement District also hinges on public meetings. The City Council must annually approve the assessment rate paid by Downtown property owners to fund the enhanced security, clean, homeless outreach, events, and marketing services that we have provided for 30 years. We are grateful for the responsibility and we never take it for granted.

This is not to say that these meetings are full of pleasantries and always ensure the desired outcome. Far from it. Oftentimes, government meetings complicate, delay, or derail plans. Emotions can run high. But when the process works, when stakeholders are engaged and policymakers are made accountable to the people they represent, plans usually end up even better than where they started -- even if they take a little longer than expected. That has been the case for Downtown Dallas.

Which brings me back to Thanksgiving.

With the holiday approaching, there are no major public "meetings of interest" scheduled this week. We are thankful for that.

We are also thankful for the work of our elected leaders and government workers. We are thankful that the meetings will soon resume, and with them more progress in Downtown and across our city... as long as we pay attention and stay engaged.

❎ Highlights From Last Week's Meetings:

-- Dallas City Council members weighed in on $152 million plans for a much-needed new Dallas Police Academy. That cost estimate has risen from the previously reported $140 million.

NBC 5

has more details

-- As chair of the Government Performance & Financial Management Committee, City Council member Chad West says he wants to know "how the City is strategically (or not so strategically) utilizing its book of real estate," West writes in his own email newsletter. "Council members quickly learned that the City does not have a strategic plan for managing its 50,000+ acres of land. At last week's committee meeting, West writes, "Council members doubled down on our request for a better and more collaborative strategy moving forward."

-- Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) held its first State of the Agency event, with President & CEO Nadine Lee sharing her vision for a safe, reliable system that works closely with its 13 service cities and towns as a strategic economic and mobility asset. "The future economic integrity of this region depends on a new approach to transportation," Lee, a DDI Board of Governors member, told the audience at Downtown's Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station. "We are taking DART into a new era."

D Magazine's

Matt Goodman

has more on the future of DART

Thanks to DDI's Nikia Summerlin, Urban Planning Manager, for monitoring hours of meetings every week to help compile these summaries.

📝 Memos of Interest:

-- The City's Office of Homeless Solutions (OHS) is establishing "The OHS Friends Group." The volunteer corps "will be engaged in various special projects including supporting the City’s temporary inclement weather shelters, volunteering at The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, and assisting, as needed, other local non-profits in the Continuum of Care," according to

this memo

-- Another City website and phone outage is planned for Tuesday, Nov. 28, beginning at 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. the following morning for a network hardware update. The 911 system will not be impacted.

-- Check out all the latest City Hall memos

here

and

here