The Trinity River passes under the Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct, at right, and the Houston Street bridge in 2012.
File photo/Dallas Morning News
To the ongoing debate over the fates of the two bridges connecting downtown and Oak Cliff, add another surprise — and a twist.
First, the city expects to reroute the Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct heading from Oak Cliff into the city center. Like, soon. Maybe as early as June. But by August, at the latest.
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That’s the surprise. City officials said Tuesday, during a special-called meeting of the Transportation Committee, that the downtown end of Jefferson will be closed due to the demolition of the old TXCN building on the former Dallas Morning News campus, as part of the convention center redevelopment project. The detour will reroute traffic from Jefferson to Houston Street to Young Street using the old Reunion Arena parking garage as a cutover.
That’s right. The garage that hasn’t been used in almost two decades. That has giant trees growing inside. Where people were living until recently. What luck we held on to that giant code violation all these years.
Now, here’s the twist: The city owns that parking garage. But billionaire oilman Ray Hunt owns the air rights above it for the next century or so, thanks to a deal he cut long ago with the city. Hunt also owns some 41 acres of cracked concrete and empty land on the west side of downtown, including the old Reunion Arena site, most of which abuts the new convention center the city’s building.
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And according to a letter Hunt Realty Investments CEO Chris Kleinert sent to an assistant city manager Wednesday, which I got hold of Wednesday night, the city can’t make any changes to any streets that might impact Hunt’s property without, you guessed it, Hunt’s approval. That includes the Houston and Jefferson viaducts over the Trinity River, the latter of which the city is talking about reconfiguring and rerouting with new ramps and bridges since current plans have it crashing into the footprint of the new Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.
“As our last meeting on May 14, I thought we made it clear that the concepts currently being evaluated for potential consideration by the City would materially and adversely impair vehicular access to the parking garage and planned development within the Agreement Area, including any planned commercial development associated with the Viaduct Air Rights,” says Kleinert’s letter to Dev Rastogi, the city manager over transportation and a former vice president at infrastructure consulting firm AECOM. “Hunt cannot support any changes to the Jefferson Street or Houston Street Viaducts that would materially impair Hunt’s rights and interest under the Reunion Master Agreement.”
The view of the downtown Dallas skyline drivers from Oak Cliff had when driving on the newly opened Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct in 1973
Tom Dillard/Dallas Morning News
A city spokesperson would only confirm receipt of Kleinert’s missive, which was also dispatched to City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert and council member Paul Ridley, chair of the Transportation Committee. City attorneys are now reviewing the city’s longstanding agreements with Hunt.
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That means Oak Cliff residents opposed to any alterations to Jefferson, one of their few straight shots into downtown, have a new and unlikely ally. It might also explain why the City Council is days away from reopening the discussion about the design and layout of a convention center that’s already approaching a $3.8-billion price tag, according to a recently released city audit, and scheduled to open in 2029. Well … maybe. We’ll see about that.
This isn’t just one of The Most Dallas Projects Ever. It’s a parody of one, with Ray Hunt, who keeps promising developments that don’t develop on that side of downtown, right back in the thick of it. Same as it ever was.
Tuesday’s four-hour Transportation Committee meeting — which was attended by all the council members save for Jaime Resendez, Adam Bazaldua and the mayor — was Rastogi and staff’s second shot at presenting options for routing Jefferson around the new convention center, after a failed attempt at tackling the problem in March. Jefferson became an issue late last year, when the council demanded Convention and Event Services Executive Director Rosa Fleming shave a bunch of money off the new KBH’s price tag.
Fleming and the architects and the contractors, including Perkins&Will and developer Jack Matthews’ Inspire Dallas team, did as demanded. They shrunk the building, which Tom Reisenbichler, a regional director at Perkins&Will, said Tuesday involved making about 25 significant changes to its design. Among the alterations: shortening the building by 16 feet, removing a ballroom that was supposed to extend over the DART tracks and reducing its size by many hundreds of thousands of square feet.
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All of that reduced the convention center’s price tag by some $568 million, according to staff’s latest numbers. But it also put the shrunken building smack in Jefferson’s path, which is what the council and city staff have been grappling with for months, getting the Oak Cliff connector into downtown without dead-ending it at the convention center.
Back in March, Far North Dallas council member Cara Mendelsohn said that maybe shrinking the convention center wasn’t a good idea, and that perhaps the cost savings didn’t justify rerouting Jefferson. “Short-sighted,” she said at the time. Others agreed and sent city staff back to find some better options.
These were the four scenarios presented to the Dallas City Council’s Transportation Committee on Tuesday — a sort of before, during and after look at Jefferson and Houston.
Courtesy/Dallas City Hall
Which they thought they did with their presentation Tuesday. It was filled with possibilities for Houston Street, which may one day be surrendered to pedestrians and cyclists and streetcars, and Jefferson, which they showed two-wayed and rerouted thisaway and that for the convention center. Further down the road, too, there was a hypothetical bridge connecting Jefferson to Young Street over the Union Pacific railroad.
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Except the railroad hasn’t been contacted about the bridge. And it will cost upwards of $67 million. And nobody knows where that money might come from.
But Tuesday’s meeting didn’t stay on those bridges for long. Mendelsohn eventually made a motion to bring the whole convention center redo back to the council, which was hear-hear’d by most of her colleagues on the committee. That means the council will juggle the City Hall love-it-or-leave-it debate while relitigating the new convention center’s cost, height and footprint.
Demolition has begun on the existing convention center, but turns out city officials aren’t done arguing over the new one scheduled to open … in a few years, let’s say, just to be safe. Fleming warned about delays, about steel being milled and scheduled to ship this week. Someone else grumbled that Craig Davis, president of Visit Dallas, might have to call those conventions booked for 2029 and warn them that the new joint might not be ready by then.
But a city spokesperson reminds: The TXCN demo is already underway to make way for the new convention center, and “as demolition progresses and materials start to be removed, it will prompt the need to close the northeastern section of Jefferson for safety. The Reunion garage detour, if approved, would need to be enacted at the time of demolition.”
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Right. So we’re back there. At the city-owned, Ray Hunt-controlled garage labeled “potential hotel site” in March’s initial briefing about Jefferson alternatives. But, like everything else ever promised on Hunt’s land, nothing’s certain. Fleming made mention Tuesday of “changes we recently heard of” from the Hunt team, without further clarification.
The downtown skyline as it appeared to Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct drivers in 2013, 40 years after it opened
File photo/Dallas Morning News
Hunt, who already fought high-speed rail crossing his land, has long been angling to get the convention center turned toward his property . I’m not saying this is another attempt at that. But I’m not saying it’s not, either. And Hunt’s folks aren’t saying anything at all outside of that letter.
Tuesday afternoon I sent a long list of questions – about the use of the garage, about development plans, about the convention center, about long-promised plans for all of that empty land – to Paul Schulze, Hunt Consolidated’s vice president for public affairs.
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“Thanks for reaching out,” he eventually responded, “but we have no comment.”
Almost everyone on the City Council, chief among them reps for Oak Cliff and southern Dallas, is also deeply troubled by and terribly unhappy with the suggested fixes for Jefferson — and with the people who brought them to the council.
“I’ve said it very clearly,” said Oak Cliff council member Maxie Johnson. “I can’t support anything that doesn’t give access to southern Dallas. And it seems like we are being excluded from decisions … that are being made in my district.”
Chad West, North Oak Cliff’s council member, told staffers they were “failing Oak Cliff.” He said he didn’t like to criticize without offering suggestions but in this case was willing to make an exception. He complained that the convention center was showing its backside to Oak Cliff.
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An aerial rendering of the new Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center that was presented to the Dallas City Council last year.
Amplify Dallas/Inspire Dallas
He then pointed to the tangled options for Jefferson and asked, “Does this make life better for Oak Cliff residents?” No one answered.
“It’s not rhetorical,” he said.
It’s certainly not to rhetorical to someone like Phyllis Lee, an Oak Cliff native who showed up to the Eloise Lundy Recreation Center in The Bottom Friday night for a preview of Tuesday’s presentation. Lee was among many Cliff-dwellers begging the city not to touch Jefferson.
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“That bridge is vital,” she said.
It was hard to hear in the packed gym, so I went over after she spoke to clarify. I thought she said, “That bridge is survival.” She said that works too.
Maybe Lee will get what she wants. Because Ray Hunt usually gets what he wants.
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Correction: An earlier version of this column put the price tag of the new convention center at $3.8 million. The estimated price is $3.8 billion.