Whenever you hear someone — like, oh, the mayor, say, or the city manager or a City Council member — complain about what a dump Dallas City Hall’s become, how it’s so deeply dreary and woefully obsolete and insanely expensive to repair, I beg you: Spare a thought for men and women who work in the Southeast Service Center.
“A dump,” says one of the few council members to tour the South Dallas facility. Which is the nicest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about the place.
Dallas’ leaders, such as they are, have spent more than 20 years promising to do something about the Equipment and Fleet Management facility off Bexar Street, where the city sends many of its 5,400 vehicles for maintenance. And they only got around to delivering on that promise last week, hand to God. And even then, not really.
Because for as long as anyone can remember, the conference room and auto parts storage room at the Southeast Service Center floods, and not just when it rains. Sewage seeps into bathrooms, some of which are locked away in a rotting section of the building. Paint peels from the ceiling. Workers keep the doors and windows open because there’s no air conditioning, and the few box fans that do work somehow make a hot box even hotter.
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I spent five minutes there on Friday, just watching guys work on pickups and garbage trucks, and left thinking I’d sprung a leak.
Walking the Southeast Service Center, a sprawling complex just a few blocks from where Bexar dead-ends into Bonton Farms, wasn’t high on my summer staycation schedule. But only two days earlier, at its final meeting before summer break, the City Council approved spending $1 million to build a small vehicle maintenance facility at the Southeast Service Center — on a gravel parking lot where the city’s mechanics now work on vehicles too tall for the existing structure.
That vote, which really won’t do much at a place that needs so much more, was a long time coming. And not just because it occurred well past 10 p.m., long after the mayor had left and chambers had emptied.
Doing something about the sorry state of the Southeast Service Center has been on the city’s list of to-do’s since long before 2006. Which is why Mary Suhm, early during her tenure as city manager, included it when pitching council on the 2006 bond program. In a May 2006 proposal sent to council, Suhm recommended spending $10 million on the “construction of replacement building for fleet Southeast Service Center,” as well as improvements to other facilities in the complex and its endless parking lots.
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This isn’t the only facility at the Southeast Service Center without working air conditioning. But it’s been on the city’s to-do list the longest.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
That number was ultimately trimmed: When voters approved the $1.35 billion bond package in the fall of 2006 — by far the largest in the city’s history at the time — there was $34.75 million set aside for all city facilities. And, hahahaha, that included Dallas City Hall. “I think the city manager has put together a near-perfect bond program,” said Laura Miller, then mayor.
At the end of 2006, the council was told that consultants would be consulted about remaking city facilities but that time was of the essence — “to avoid further deterioration resulting in higher cost.” I found out last week that employees at the Southeast Service Center were even told three separate times to prepare for temporary transfers to other locations while the city teased the fleet maintenance center with an extreme, and extremely long overdue, makeover that never happened.
Why that never happened, that time or the other time or the time before that, I cannot say. But, fret not! The current city manager can’t, either.
Last week, long after dark and still in the dark, Kimberly Bizor Tolbert told the council she’s “asked for information” about why something in the 2006 bond program hasn’t yet been funded.
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“I don’t have any explanation for why this didn’t happen already,” Tolbert said. “And so it’s unfortunate. But this is what we have.”
And now we have yet another contender for the Official City of Dallas Motto™.
The council was actually supposed to vote on this back in April, until council member Chad West asked to defer it so city staff could deal with a contracting issue. At which point his colleague Adam Bazaldua wondered why the city was still funding projects that were in the 2006 bond package and his colleague Cara Mendelsohn asked for a briefing and a tour of the facility.
Make this picture black and white, and it will look like it was taken sometime in the 1940s.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
“I think the public deserves to understand why they approved money 20 years ago that hasn’t been spent for a facility at the time deemed to need a replacement,” Mendelsohn said.
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She got that tour a few months ago and discovered “the worst building I’ve been in in this city,” she told me Monday.
“It’s shameful, just shameful,” Mendelsohn said. “It’s a dump. And we send people to work there. Every day.” Were this a private business, the Far North Dallas council member said, the city would have code-condemned it long ago. Meanwhile, she said, there are people working at 1500 Marilla “complaining there’s too much air conditioning at City Hall.”
When the Southeast Service Center came back to council last week, Mendelsohn called Vincent Olsen, the director of Equipment and Fleet Management, to the podium. Olsen, who studied political science in college and once repaired vehicles for the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, confirmed every horror story the council shared.
Olsen, who seemed exhausted by the late hour and long grilling, explained the need for the million-dollar building: Many of the vehicles they work on are too tall for the existing building, he said, and they need to “get staff inside off the gravel — out of the parking lot, out of the rain and out of the wind — to service these vehicles correctly.” Mendelsohn said she couldn’t believe anyone wanted to work there at all.
Insert joke here about how that looks like a City of Dallas tombstone outside the Equipment Services building at the Southeast Service Center.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
As the clock slow-ticked toward bedtime, I might have tuned out the discussion altogether had other council members not chimed in.
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Like Chad West, who evoked the City Hall debate and the sins of councils and city managers past who didn’t sink enough money into facilities in desperate need.
And Kathy Stewart, the only other council member to tour the vehicle repair facility, who said, “I would ask each one of you to remember that at 10:18 on the night we were here until probably midnight that we noticed, we stopped for a minute, we paused and we went, ‘Oh, my goodness, we are asking people to come to work in these conditions.’”
In the end, of course, all 14 remaining council members voted to spend the $1 million. Which, maybe, will be just enough to get a few city employees off of the gravel and out of the rain.
And it’s unfortunate. But this is what we have.