A day after Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson slammed the City Council for approving “bloated” budgets amid escalating costs and a $33 million financial shortfall halfway through the year, three council members said the mayor hasn’t backed up his words with proposed solutions.
Council member Laura Cadena said everyone agrees the city needs to live within its means. But the mayor’s email did not offer any cuts of his own in the “already bare bone budget.”
“It’s easy to write a bunch of fiscal statements with zero plan to back it up,” Cadena said. “Here in Texas, we call that ‘all hat and no cattle.’ ”
Last month, City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert imposed hiring freezes, halted overtime and banned unnecessary spending. Johnson criticized the council, saying the belt-tightening should be a “wake-up call” for the council’s resistance to aggressive cuts.
“Council members will pay lip service to fiscal responsibility, but when it comes time to vote, few are willing to follow through. Each has favored projects and programs to which they will tolerate no reductions,” Johnson said in his weekly newsletter.
Johnson urged council members to identify programs to cut alongside those they want to preserve. He said resistance to cuts makes it difficult to follow through, pointing to the library system. The council recently approved four branch closures but later decided to keep all of them open.
Council members say their projects are often bundled with other tiers of work and disrupting one could have a ripple effect on others.
Cadena said she’s meeting with residents and community groups to learn their priorities. Council member Adam Bazaldua said he hoped the mayor “is just as enthusiastic on cuts being made to the unnecessary amount of security detail, he has ballooned his budget to include.”
The mayor is often flanked by at least two security officials. Public records from April last year show the police department estimated the mayor’s detail would have an annual cost of $1.7 million. Yearly overtime costs for the detail averaged $204,400 from 2021 to 2025.
Council member Paula Blackmon said figuring out ways to trim projects was the city staff’s role. “If [the mayor] wants to work with the city manager and develop a budget that we can all talk about in August, then he should go to work,” Blackmon said.
Blackmon’s was the first district to see a library shutter as part of cost-saving measures in 2025.
“The thing is, it does rip the soul out of a community when you close a school, a library, a rec center. It really does, and I don’t want to see another community go through that,” she said.
The city could slash the million-dollar stipends it pays to nonprofits such as Downtown Dallas, Inc. or the economic development corporation.
“That’s your library budget that they’re asking for,” she said.
Staff writer Everton Bailey Jr. contributed to the report.