The likely candidates included Silicon Valley, Boston, San Diego and North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
At his State of the Union address in early 2022, then-President Joe Biden called on Congress to create a new federal research agency, called ARPA-H, that would aim to develop world-changing healthcare technologies in the mold of DARPA, the Pentagon research agency that’s been credited with helping create the internet and GPS.
The splashy announcement — and billions of dollars in government funding on the line — set off a high-stakes competition among cities around the country to host the new headquarters, and in the fall of 2023 the agency selected Boston and metro Washington, D.C., two traditional medical research powerhouses.
But it also chose Dallas, after an unlikely coalition of partners had pushed hard for over a year to develop what was generally considered a long-shot bid.
Business Briefing
“I thought there is no way, during an election year, that Joe Biden is going to give a gift to Texas, because Texas is out of play for him,” said Dale Petroskey, the president and CEO of the Dallas Regional Chamber, the area business group that helped lead the effort. “And that is a testament to a lot of people who believed in it and came together and made the pitch.”
It was also a testament to Petroskey, who had spent the previous decade helping elevate the Dallas Regional Chamber into a nationally respected dynamo. In early July, Petroskey announced he’d be stepping down from his high-profile post, citing a desire to spend more time with family after his wife’s cancer diagnosis. In October, the chamber named SMU executive Brad Cheves as its next leader.
Brad Cheves, senior vice president of Southern Methodist University, was appointed head of Dallas Regional Chamber in October 2025.
Hillsman Stuart Jackson / Dallas Regional Chamber
Petroskey’s last day is Dec. 31, an exit timeframe that’s given him plenty of time to reflect on his own tenure — including through two extended interviews with The Dallas Morning News — and was meant to provide a smooth transition for Cheves. It also provided the area’s top business leaders a chance to heap rare praise on an executive they say quietly helped give rise to the modern shape of North Texas.
“The legacy that he’s left with the DRC and the impact he’s made on this community is just remarkable,” said Jim Springfield, president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas and the current DRC board chair. “Dale’s really an icon in this town.”
An early gift
The interior of Petroskey’s office, on the 26th floor of Downtown Dallas’ Ross Tower office building, hints at an extraordinary American life. On one wall — opposite an impressive collection of Dallas sports memorabilia and above a desk brimming with family photos — there’s a framed picture of a much younger Petroskey on the White House south lawn, in front of a large helicopter, walking alongside Ronald and Nancy Reagan. “Marine One,” Petroskey explained. “There I am carrying the bags.”
CEO Dale Petroskey shares stories of the pictures on his office wall at the Dallas Regional Chamber on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025.
Christine Vo / Staff Photographer
Other photos show Petroskey with Reagan in the Oval Office and with the Clintons; in another, from 2001, he’s standing at a podium alongside George W. Bush, in front of a crowd that includes baseball legends Lou Brock, Tommy Lasorda and Al Kaline. “I saw him at the Alfalfa dinner,” Petroskey said, referencing the 43rd president and the exclusive D.C. social club, “and I said, ‘I’ve got an idea for you: Every Hall of Famer to the White House to start the season.’”
Petroskey, 70, with a quick smile and the polished, unflappable air of a distinguished statesman, grew up in Michigan and spent decades in high-profile communications and executive roles. In the mid-1980s he served as a press secretary in Reagan’s White House, and for most of the 2000s he was president of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He’s also held top roles with the National Geographic Society and Texas Rangers.
But in early 2014, when he was appointed to lead the DRC, he had never worked for a chamber of commerce. In his first week on the job his predecessor, James Oberwetter, the former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told him he was leaving him “a little gift,” Petroskey recalled. “He said, ‘Next week, you are going to be in the seat when it’s announced that Toyota is moving here from California.’”
That relocation, which moved the carmaker’s North American headquarters from Southern California to Plano, eventually brought some 4,000 jobs and billions of dollars to North Texas, representing one of the biggest economic boosts in the region’s history.
Dale Petroskey, president and CEO of Dallas Regional Chamber, gives remarks during Rawlings final State of the City address at the Dallas Regional Chamber luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Dallas on Tuesday, December 4, 2018. (Shaban Athuman/The Dallas Morning News)
Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer
It also set the tone for the next decade: Since 2014, the year Petroskey took over as head of the chamber, more than 700 companies have announced moves or expansions into Dallas-Fort Worth, and more than 180 have relocated their corporate headquarters, according to the chamber’s count. It’s a list that includes major players from industries that range from tractors (Caterpillar, Kubota) to high fashion (Louis Vuitton). Over the past few years, in particular, North Texas has also emerged as a major finance capital, welcoming three new stock exchanges and boldface names like Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Over the same period D-FW has added over one million jobs, according to chamber figures.
“If you drive around Dallas,” Kip Sowden, CEO of the Uptown-based commercial real estate firm RREAF Holdings, told The News earlier this year, “you’re seeing cranes. You’re not seeing that in a lot of other parts of the country.”
Exactly how much credit the chamber — let alone one executive — deserves for the surge is, of course, up for debate. But long before so many splashy corporate announcements, it was often Petroskey and his team who served as out-of-state executives’ first point of contact, then worked for months behind the scenes to leverage connections and ultimately sell them on North Texas.
Dale Petroskey, President & CEO of dallas Regional Chamber speaks about the lost Amazon bid during a press conference at the Dallas Regional Chamber office in Dallas, on Tuesday, November 13, 2018. (Vernon Bryant/The Dallas Morning News)
Vernon Bryant / The Dallas Morning News
The outgoing DRC leader, who says his own role in the high-profile moves is often to pick up the phone and help clear the way for his team to follow through, is quick to share credit for the relocation frenzy, especially with his close confidant Mike Rosa, whom he calls “probably the best economic development professional in the country.”
“I think leadership is about having a vision,” Petroskey said, “understanding how it all fits together, having a talented team in place, making sure that we’re communicating all the time.”
But some of the biggest names in Texas business are just as quick to point to Petroskey.
“He really was the face of Dallas business,” said Ross Perot Jr., chair of the Perot Companies business group and a board member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “We’d bring in clients, and we’d be promoting Dallas, and there wasn’t a better salesman than Dale Petroskey.”
“Dale is as professional as it gets,” added Robert Allen, president of the Fort Worth Economic Development Corporation.
“Look, you can talk about the projects and the Toyotas of the world and leading efforts on Amazon HQ2,” Allen said, “but what really stands out for me, frankly, is more just the ability for him to lead a coalition of business leaders in Dallas. I mean, pick the time — it could be a relocation, could have been a political moment, could have been a workforce moment. Dallas Regional Chamber was always leading the effort, or at least on the team that was involved.”
Growth mindset
Several years ago, Petroskey was in Florida, at a table with a couple of dozen chamber CEOs from around the country, when the group started talking about challenges they were facing. “And the first three chamber presidents talked about, ‘What I worry about is companies leaving town, I’m always playing defense,’” Petroskey recalled.
Petroskey knows he’s never had that problem. “We were going with the current … but we really worked hard to maximize what has happened here in the past 12 years,” he said. “It’s a lot better than going against the current.”
Amazon’s HQ2 effort still amounted to a rare disappointment. In 2017, when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ announced the company was searching for a second North American headquarters — a project that would mean tens of thousands of high-paying tech jobs and an estimated $5 billion impact for the winning city — Petroskey and his team scrambled to lead a joint bid for North Texas.
The D-FW bid made the company’s shortlist, but in late 2018, when the company announced it had chosen New York and metro Washington D.C., the rejection hit hard. Petroskey still came away with a characteristically optimistic take: The Amazon vacuum ended up serving as a greenlight for relocations from other companies that may have felt squeezed out by the retail giant, he said. Others have also pointed to the unusually collaborative DRC-led bid as a kind of turning point for the DRC and the broader D-FW business community.
CEO Dale Petroskey listens to employees presentations during staff meeting in the Dallas Regional Chamber on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025.
Christine Vo / Staff Photographer
“That went as smoothly as it could go,” Rosa said of the bid effort. “And we had a lot more friends coming out of that process around the region than we even had going in.”
Another Petroskey priority was marketing Dallas to the wider world. During his tenure, the DRC launched the city’s well-received “Say Yes to Dallas” campaign, which enlisted Mark Cuban as a pitchman to help lure young professionals. The former White House official also joined multiple D-FW trade missions, including one trip to Japan where he recalled his delegation humorously presented a Dallas Cowboys jersey to a confused local official. “I was thinking, as we gave him the Cowboys jersey, ‘We probably could have done a little better here by playing to the baseball angle.’”
He’s also occasionally waded into contentious national issues. In 2017, amid heated rhetoric over a potential Texas “bathroom bill” that would force transgender people to use restrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates, Petroskey discussed the legislation with Gov. Greg Abbott and openly opposed it, highlighting the billions of dollars it could potentially cost the state. “I hope it never gets to the governor’s desk,” he told The News at the time.
In 2019, after then-President Donald Trump imposed a 5% tariff on imports from Mexico, the Reagan appointee also spoke out forcefully, emphasizing that Texas had “more to lose by this action than any other state,” and in the summer of 2020, amid the national racial justice reckoning inspired by the murder of Texas native George Floyd, the DRC also created a permanent diversity and inclusion council.
“Dale called me on the phone,” recalled Latosha Herron Bruff, who ended up joining the DRC that fall to lead the diversity push, “and assured me that this was not window dressing and that he thought that this was a moment in time where the business community should lead.”
But this year, Petroskey has been quiet on Trump’s renewed, supersized trade war — a shift that is in fact a reflection of North Texas business leaders’ different political attitudes, he said.
“Here’s what guides us in the way we do things: If there’s overwhelming support or opposition to something, we will speak out on it or we’ll take a position on it,” Petroskey continued. “If there are some of our companies that are on this side and some of our companies that are on that side, we don’t. … Companies are wary now of getting on the wrong side of the administration.”
Hitting the streets
The large windows in Petroskey’s corner office mostly face west, offering a sweeping view of Dallas that includes glimpses of Oak Cliff, the Trinity River and Uptown — arguably the epicenter of Dallas’ recent boom, where unfinished skyscrapers hint at more prosperity to come. Bank of America’s new regional headquarters, one of the glitziest corporate developments yet, is currently under construction on Klyde Warren Park, and the chamber helped score a big win this fall when Scotiabank announced a regional headquarters project in nearby Victory Park.
But for several years Petroskey has sought to turn the chamber’s attention especially to economic development and quality of life issues in southern Dallas County, where many ZIP codes have poverty rates of 25% or higher, several times those of the county’s wealthier northern neighborhoods. “I think a lot of us believe that that’s the next frontier,” he said.
CEO Dale Petroskey’s office at the Dallas Regional Chamber overlooks the skyline Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025.
Christine Vo / Staff Photographer
The DRC’s push has included workforce training, philanthropy partnerships and education efforts, as well as events like a recent investment forum at the Shops at RedBird, the landmark South Dallas mall that’s currently being redeveloped.
The CEO has also gotten involved personally. Several years ago Petroskey developed a relationship with leaders at South Oak Cliff High School, serving as honorary principal and later delivering remarks over a DRC-catered dinner to the school’s powerhouse football team. Petroskey and Herron Bruff, a former leader with Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity, would also later march down Marsalis Avenue in one of the team’s championship parades. Petroskey loved every minute of it, Herron Bruff said.
In the spring of 2020, when COVID-19 was still ravaging North Texas, the DCR president and his team also took on a vaccine outreach campaign, funded with up to $1 million, that was aimed particularly at benefiting Dallas’ disproportionately impacted communities of color.
Along with pop-up vaccine drives, the effort included social media and billboard ads, a new website and donated tickets and airfare from major sponsors. On weekends, Petroskey often personally visited the community centers and megachurches hosting the pop-up drives.
“Everyone here was rolling up their sleeves to get this done,” said Herron Bruff. “And he really thought this was a chance to set ourselves apart as really showing that we are concerned about all of our community. Not just some of it, but all of it.”
By the end of summer the campaign exceeded its goal of vaccinating 600,000 North Texans, amounting to a massive local public health achievement that would also benefit the region’s business community. It also ended up earning the DRC a coveted national chamber of the year honor — and provided Petroskey with perhaps his proudest moment as DRC chief.
“Some would say that this is outside the purview of a chamber,” he told The News at the time. “And it is for most chambers. But we’re not a normal chamber.”
Business editor Javier David contributed to this report.
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