There’s a pretty good novel found among the 5,000-plus pages of City Hall emails, memos, letters and grievances that started hitting the newspaper last week. Its title could be The Big D — desperation, denial, drama, dysfunction. So many D’s.
There are plenty of riveting storylines beyond the rush to turn the public square into center court for the Dallas Mavericks. Plenty of charismatic characters too, including private-sector wizards plotting to control a city essentially abandoned by The Mayor Who Wasn’t There.
After days of reading, re-reading and annotating these emails, what has emerged is a narrative depicting a free-for-all over at 1500 Marilla, where private interests vie for control of the public’s business. This isn’t just about the land beneath Dallas City Hall. It’s about what happens inside the building, too.
In a city where conspiracy theories are baked into the natives’ DNA, the document dump confirms the suspicions that we’re being kept in the dark about almost everything.
We still don’t even know who first told the Dallas Mavericks that the City Hall site would be an ideal location for a new arena. Or when. I find it hard to believe the Mavs looked at City Hall and decided, yeah, let’s do it there. And why does Mayor Eric Johnson not want the City Council discussing it publicly when it’s the most open secret in the city?
Opinion
Dallas city manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert (left) follows as Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson leads a press conference announcing a city-sanctioned trip to New York to promote the planned Texas Stock Exchange, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, at Dallas City Hall.
Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer
Johnson himself gave up the game in his Sunday newsletter. The mayor who won’t take questions took shots at our news coverage of the emails — “tabloid-style articles about boogeymen and sensational-sounding MacGuffins.” Then he wrapped his lengthy rant by conflating his feelings about I.M. Pei’s City Hall (“It’s unfortunate that the current building doesn’t work as intended and the vision for a thriving government district never materialized”) with the team’s search for a new arena (“At the same time, it must fight to keep the Mavericks in the city of Dallas”).
It’s almost as though the mayor thinks it unfathomable and unforgivable that council members and taxpayers might have questions and concerns about the fate of their City Hall.
But that’s all we’re left with after reading the tranche of emails, which has resulted in several significant stories published in this newspaper. About the tours of at least 15 prospective replacements given to some council members but not all. About AT&T’s departure from downtown. About a demand for $5 million from the company fired by the city after it let Fair Park fall further to shambles. About a mayor who can’t be bothered to return a CEO’s phone call. About WFAA-Channel 8’s need for a new home. About the taxpayer-funded Dallas Economic Development Corp.’s outsized influence on everything.
No doubt there will be more to come as reporters — and Facebook friends plucking emails to post on their murder boards — continue connecting the dots and filling in the blanks, which are numerous.
Dallas Mavericks CEO Rick Welts (left) joined Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson (center) and team governor Patrick Dumont (right) for the national anthem at a game at the American Airlines Center in 2025.
Tom Fox / Staff Photographer
That’s especially true when you see what’s in there concerning Tolbert’s meetings with the Mavs’ CEO, Rick Welts, who was hired in December 2024 after he’d spent seven years overseeing construction of the $1.4 billion Chase Center in San Francisco for the Golden State Warriors.
I only saw dates removed from two emails in the entire cache. Both of those involve meetings between Tolbert and Welts. One refers only to “a lunch meeting w/Rick Welts;” the other, to a “2nd Meeting” with “Mavericks CEO Rick Welts.” The email for the second meeting was also addressed to Mark Boekenheide. He’s the senior vice president of global real estate development at Las Vegas Sands Corp., the casino and resort company that shares an owner with the Dallas Mavericks, Miriam Adelson.
We still do not know when they met or what they discussed. Which leaves plenty of room for the mind to wander about just who’s in charge — and what’s the play.
Look no further than a previously unreported email that three dozen business leaders and downtown property owners – among them developers Mike Hoque, Ray Washburne, Lucy Crow Billingsley and Ted Hamilton, as well as former Mavs’ CEO Cynt Marshall — sent to a council member on Nov. 10. That was two days before a majority of the council directed Tolbert to consider alternate spaces for City Hall.
To which council member the email was sent, we do not know. It’s the only name in the entire tranche of emails that has been redacted, as far as I could tell.
In that email, these move-it supporters, many of whom stand to make a fortune from a wholesale makeover of downtown’s southern end, insist it’s “time to reimagine how Dallas government operates and aid the growth and prosperity of the city’s core.” The signatories’ bios, including their bankruptcies and net worths, are included in a separate document prepared by the EDC titled “City Hall — Abandonment Research.”
The old Texas Air National Guard hangar at Hensley Field, which shows up in the emails when AECOM expresses interest in helping the city redevelop the long-contaminated, long-litigated land.
Robert Wilonsky
Many of the emails offer copious clues and context to a yearlong narrative about who’s running the city and who wants more control over it.
Some are interesting chapters, such as AECOM’s desire to handle the redevelopment of Hensley Field, paused after an assistant city manager’s October mention of “pending litigation” over decades-long remediation efforts. AECOM is the engineering consultant that put a billion-dollar price tag on City Hall’s renovations.
Also included in the tranche is Tolbert’s Oct. 3 letter to Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, in which the city manager first praises the hockey club (“you are a cornerstone of Dallas’ identity and a deeply valued part of our community”), then tells Gaglardi his team’s in default of the franchise agreement that requires the team to maintain its corporate headquarters in Dallas.
The missive was never intended to become public: “I do not negotiate in the media,” Tolbert wrote. But it’s now a centerpiece in the litigation between the Stars and Mavericks involving the American Airlines Center, which both teams now seem likely to abandon come 2031.
Others entries are long footnotes, like the testy July 2025 email from The Black Academy of Arts and Letters’ president Curtis King in which he begs Rosa Fleming, the city’s director of Convention and Event Services, for a Fair Park lease agreement he’d been expecting for five months. Turns out Fleming doesn’t speak to the media, nor to city partners being displaced by the $4 billion convention center do-over.
The Dallas Stars and Dallas Mavericks share the American Airlines Center until 2031, when it’s possible, if not likely, both teams will vacate the building for new homes.
Tom Fox / Staff Photographer
But the overarching narrative involves the EDC, run by Linda McMahon, the former president and CEO of The Real Estate Council, tapped in 2024 to run a private nonprofit to which the city initially committed $7 million.
There are hundreds of pages in which McMahon and Tolbert and the city manager’s staff are negotiating the nonprofit’s interlocal agreement, or ILA, with the city. That includes McMahon’s May 2025 working draft of a strategic plan McMahon said was written with the input of former U.S. Ambassador Jeanne Phillips, president of Hunt Global Partnerships.
Phillips is also an EDC board member, largely dealing with international trade. She hasn’t publicly supported a position on City Hall’s future. In fact, at February’s EDC board meeting, she inquired about whether preservationists in favor of staying in the building would be part of the review process. When McMahon told her no, according to board minutes, Phillips said it would be good to have that group’s perspective “as it will present a balanced view.”
But Phillips and the mayor also go way back. In fact, she’s the woman who in May 2019 told a group of well-heeled donors that then-mayoral candidate Eric Johnson “is the guy … the one we’ve been waiting for.” The “we” Phillips was referring to included her boss, Ray Hunt, who owns the graveyard on the west side of downtown where Reunion Arena stood before it was torn down to make way the American Airlines Center nobody now wants.
From left: Shawn Todd, founder of Todd Interests; Linda McMahon, CEO of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation; District 14 council member Paul Ridley; and Dallas City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert share a laugh as Jennifer Scripps, CEO of Downtown Dallas, Inc., speaks during a Downtown Dallas Inc. press conference at the downtown Dallas Neiman Marcus in February 2025. McMahon and Tolbert, with Scripps and Todd, worked to keep the downtown Neiman’s open after Saks Global threatened to close it.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
It was their guy who attended a Mavericks game with Welts and team governor Patrick Dumont in February of last year, weeks after Welts was hired to build a new arena. It was their guy who created the council’s finance committee last August, then immediately tasked chair Chad West with determining if it was too expensive to repair and remain in the City Hall the mayor hates. It was their guy who last month rushed the vote on determining the fate of the building he said in November’s State of the City address “risks becoming an albatross for our city.”
And it’s their guy who now wants you to believe these emails are “normal procedural steps” ginned up as “scandalous revelations.”
The emails lay out what we’ve known for months: McMahon has spent the better part of the last year introducing Tolbert – not Johnson – to leaders of Dallas’ top 10 taxpaying businesses, which includes, for now, AT&T. As McMahon noted in a May email to Tolbert, “Two companies that were in the top 10 moved out of the city since the last list I have which is from 2023. Another reason why this exercise is so critical.”
Two months later, after this paper published a story about emptying downtown buildings, Tolbert asked McMahon what she should do: “Do we need to convene an investor’s conference focused on downtown? … We are running out of time.”
As they were writing and rewriting the ILA, McMahon, Tolbert and Tolbert’s staff butted heads over efforts to lure Nasdaq to Dallas and incentivize Canadian aerospace manufacturer Bombardier to expand its operations at Dallas Love Field. McMahon wanted the city kept at arm’s length while she made deals; Tolbert complained to an assistant city manager that she was tired of the EDC’s “over reach.”
“City Manager respectfully. What do you want?” McMahon wrote just two months ago, when she and Tolbert clashed over a video meant to introduce the EDC. “Do you want us to lead with strength and vision or do you want bureaucracy to be the narrative as it has always been. No shade to great people on the city team but the EDC is ready to lead with vision, commitment, and support from the business community the likes of which the city has never had. Your call but here is what I want to offer – bold action – a change in narrative – a fight against anyone who wants to say Dallas is not a great city. And backbone.”
No wonder Johnson hates these emails. Linda McMahon’s the mayor of Dallas.