When the Dallas Mavericks or Dallas Stars glance out their arena windows, City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert wants them to see a skyline, not a strip mall.
Dallas is the play, she said Friday. If they leave the urban core, she said, their view might be more Applebee’s than bright lights and buzzing streets.
“Yes, I said it,” Tolbert told a ballroom crowd, drawing applause and cheers.
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The quip, delivered at a Greater Dallas Planning Council event, came as Tolbert said the city is working to keep both teams in Dallas, “where they belong.”
Political Points
The city has tied those talks to broader economic development, citing the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center overhaul and surrounding district investment to strengthen the case for staying in the urban core or elsewhere within the city.
Although the city has collaborated with the Mavericks in scoping sites for a new arena, the hockey team is considering a move to the suburbs, including looking at the Shops at Willow Bend in Plano.
They are co-tenants at the American Airlines Center, and the Mavericks sued the hockey team for building a headquarters in Frisco, despite contractually agreeing to keep both team operations within city limits.
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The Stars countersued. They argued the Mavs, too, had violated the contract after the team’s ownership changed and they listed their corporate presence in Las Vegas.
They alleged the Mavs were trying to push the Stars out of the AAC, and that the city of Dallas should have flagged that. The city has said it isn’t involved in that dispute.
In her speech, Tolbert had a broader message. She said the “city was truly moving in the right direction,” and she chronicled the changes at City Hall — reducing permit backlogs, picking battles and modernizing how the city government is run — to make her case.
Other highlights:
Safety
Tolbert said businesses do not invest, families do not thrive and communities do not grow if they don’t feel safe. But she said Dallas is in good hands.
To that end, she hired police Chief Daniel Comeaux and fire Chief Justin Ball within four months of becoming the city manager, and touted a 12% reduction in violent crime citywide.
Data analysis from the City Poverty Action Lab, a research and development nonprofit, showed the city reduced the number of high-violence neighborhoods by 10% between 2024 and 2025.
But while some neighborhoods saw crime decrease, a nationwide trend, the city’s most violent neighborhoods had actually seen crime tick up.
Still, the police department’s efforts had been fruitful, Tolbert said. A Dallas Police Department initiative helped apprehend 349 people with violent criminal issues in less than four months, she said.
Through another initiative, law enforcement arrested 118 people last with sexual assault and other sex crimes arrest records last year, “ensuring accountability and justice for those survivors,” Tolbert said.
She noted that the city also resolved a yearslong legal dispute with the police and fire pension system after securing a settlement late last year. “It was not easy, but we understood that we had to live up to our commitment to make sure that we protect those who protect us,” she said.
Economic development
To become a globally inclusive city, Tolbert said Dallas has offered incentives to various businesses to grow downtown and other parts of the city, such as South Dallas.
Last year, the City Council approved a $100 million incentive to refurbish the Bank of America Tower downtown. The move will reduce the existing office space and pack the renovated building with new retail and a hotel, part of a trend of evolving downtown into a mixed-use neighborhood.
City efforts helped Scotiabank move to Victory Park as well as Goldman Sachs, which is building a corporate campus in the same neighborhood.
To add to that, the city also announced that Atlético Dallas, a new professional soccer team, will move their headquarters near Fair Park.
Quality of life
Tolbert emphasized the work the city was doing to improve residents’ quality of life, through modernizing government services.
Part of those efforts: sanitation trucks with artificial intelligence cameras to monitor code compliance in neighborhoods and a clean-sweep team to clear trash from public spaces are part of those efforts.
Tolbert urged the audience to take a more proactive role in tipping city officials off to areas that need attention.
She also said the city partnered with the county to invest $20 million to quickly move people out of shelters into homes to free up beds. Before that, the city had invested in a street-to-home program to remove encampments from downtown and rehome people.