Dallas can’t make a smart decision about whether to keep City Hall at 1500 Marilla St. without putting all the facts on the table. Right now, we have some knowledge, but it’s incomplete.
To help remedy that, City Council members should approve a proposal on Wednesday directing the city manager to study the issue further and report back to the finance committee by February.
The wide-ranging estimates city staffers recently presented serve as a solid starting point for this conversation. They illustrate the scale of City Hall’s dilapidation and the likely cost magnitude of fixing it. But scale and likelihood are not firm enough for a decision as important as this one.
The proposal would instruct the city manager to “leverage external expertise” to review city staffers’ deferred maintenance cost estimates. As part of this effort, the city should get a qualified engineer to provide a much more precise estimate of what it will cost to repair the building’s structural issues. Those services should be acquired through the city’s standard bidding process as expeditiously as possible.
Opinion
Wednesday’s proposal also calls for an evaluation of possible spaces city functions could move into, and a comparison of the cost of leasing, buying or building a different space versus repairing City Hall. It would also instruct staff to evaluate the economic development potential of the site “in a manner supportive of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Master Plan.”
All of that information can help address what should be the core of this debate: the real dollar cost and the opportunity cost of staying at City Hall weighed against the potential cost savings and other benefits associated with leaving.
Dallas has countless needs but not enough dollars to go around. We can’t afford to let this debate become an architecture contest or a question of sentimentality. Quite frankly, there are other properties in the city that deserve heavy investment much more than City Hall. Fair Park comes to mind.
We were initially concerned that council members would make a final decision too fast. The timeline Wednesday’s proposal sets out is short to be sure, but not unreasonable. After staffers report back in February, council members can consider what they learn and decide how to proceed.
If City Hall is too expensive to fix, this decision will be fairly simple, if not easy. And if there’s a better use for the site, that should be a factor too.