{"id":163796,"date":"2026-02-13T22:22:05","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T22:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/163796\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T22:22:05","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T22:22:05","slug":"plano-mayor-discusses-whether-city-will-remain-with-dart-after-dallas-and-transportation-leaders-make-significant-concessions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/163796\/","title":{"rendered":"Plano mayor discusses whether City will remain with DART after Dallas and transportation leaders make significant concessions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plano and five other cities have two weeks to decide whether to cancel their withdrawal elections.<\/p>\n

PLANO, Texas \u2014 There has been significant movement over the past week in the attempt to save mass transit in North Texas.<\/p>\n

Six member cities are scheduled to hold a vote within a couple of months to let their residents decide if they want to walk away from Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART).<\/p>\n

So, we asked Plano Mayor John Muns if he thinks that, based on what\u2019s transpired over the last several days, Plano will cancel its withdrawal election.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter yesterday\u2019s meeting with the RTC (Regional Transportation Council)<\/a>, that was almost the last hurdle to get over to really have an opportunity to take it back to the council and rescind the item on the ballot,\u201d Mayor Muns told us on Inside Texas Politics.<\/p>\n

In the political world, that\u2019s as close as you\u2019re going to get to a yes, before any movement has actually happened.<\/p>\n

And Mayor Muns tells us it could all happen very fast, within the next 10 to 12 days.<\/p>\n

But several things had to happen over the last few days to get us here.<\/p>\n

Watch the full Inside Texas Politics episode here:<\/p>\n

The RTC approved $75 million in incentives for member cities\u00a0<\/a>to call off withdrawal elections and remain a part of DART. DART itself also tentatively agreed to major concessions on its funding.<\/p>\n

The city of Plano pays one penny of every dollar collected through sales tax to DART. An original member since 1983, Plano has contributed more than $2.2 billion in local sales-tax revenue since then. But an independent analysis by Ernst & Young found that in 2023, Plano taxpayers paid $109 million to DART, while only $44 million was spent within the city.<\/p>\n

So, the city wanted to lower the amount it paid to DART to half a penny. Mayor Muns says the funding decisions by the RTC and DART would get them close.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey will kind of partner in being able to bring that penny down to .75 of a penny. And by doing that, we\u2019re also going to do a stair step for the next five years. So, this will not all happen in year one. It will work its way to year five,\u201d the Mayor explained.<\/p>\n

The city of Dallas has also agreed to give up its majority control of the DART board<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In its current state, Dallas occupies seven full seats and one partial seat on the board, while only Plano, Irving, and Garland also have a full seat on the board. With the new structure, all of the 13 member cities have at least one full seat on the board. Dallas would keep its seven full seats and maintain a 45% voting power on the board.<\/p>\n

Mayor Muns recognizes it was a major decision on Dallas\u2019 part.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, this week has been pretty significant. For all the things to have occurred and really, just this week, it\u2019s been amazing,\u201d Muns said with a smile. \u201cI think what we\u2019ll see is the continuance of DART as a whole. So, we\u2019ll have the buses. We\u2019ll have the express. We\u2019ll have paratransit. We\u2019ll have our rails.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all an attempt to persuade the six cities – Plano, Irving, Addison, Farmers Branch and the Park Cities – to cancel their May 2 withdrawal elections.<\/p>\n

The cities have to submit ballot language within the next two weeks in order for the election to be put on the May ballot, so they’ll have up until that point to decide whether or not to cancel their elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Plano and five other cities have two weeks to decide whether to cancel their withdrawal elections. PLANO, Texas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161],"class_list":["post-163796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-plano","tag-plano","tag-plano-headlines","tag-plano-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}