Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
Dallas, the magazine said, was a city whose \u201cmanagement of its public facilities could stand as a model for large cities all over the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which, right there, packs a solid punchline. And the hits keep coming.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile many other towns and cities are slowly crumbling, Dallas has established its reputation as a city that works,\u201d read the piece. \u201cThe reasons include a favorable climate, a booming local economy, an encyclopedic computerized maintenance schedule, and a government that abhors the idea of deferring scheduled repairs to keep its current expenses low.\u201d<\/p>\n
That TIME piece was based on The Future of Dallas\u2019s Capital Plant, published in 1980 by the Urban Institute, whose board at the time included Warren Buffett, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and her old friend Robert McNamara. That Dallas study was one in a series funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development\u2019s Office of Policy Development and Research. The other titles focused on New York City and Cleveland (plagued at the time by well-known \u201ctenacious difficulties\u201d) and Cincinnati (on the downswing at the time, but with arrows pointing up). Two more would follow in 1981 about Oakland and Boston.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
George Schrader, far right, was Dallas’ city manager when this was \u201ca city that still worked.\u201d Seen here with Andy Warhol and Patsy Nasher, at her home in 1979, Schrader told\u00a0TIME\u00a0that \u201ca city government is like GM or U.S. Steel, and the infrastructure is our assembly line.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the archives\/The Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n
Dallas was the outlier in the series\u00a0\u2014 a rare \u201cmunicipal success story,\u201d as the Dallas Times Herald characterized the study upon its release in March 1980. A researcher at the Urban Institute named Peter Wilson had taken a long hard look at Dallas\u2019 infrastructure\u00a0\u2014 specifically, our streets, bridges, pre-DART\u00a0transit system and the sewer and water systems\u00a0\u2014 and how much the city spent maintaining those, and concluded that \u201cthe management of the Dallas facilities serves as a model for emulation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
Part of the city\u2019s success stemmed from an \u201cexpanding tax base,\u201d Wilson wrote at a time when the population numbered 904,000 residents (compared to 1.3 million today). There wasn\u2019t much past the Gemini Drive-in and Como Motel when you headed north on a four-lane Central Expressway,<\/a>\u00a0and Frisco, Celina and Princeton were still cattle pastures.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDue to a booming local economy and cautious financial management the city of Dallas is in excellent fiscal health,\u201d Wilson wrote. By all indications, he said, in a country filled with deteriorating cities whose streets were shabby and whose water pipes leaked and whose public buildings fell to shambles, we were the metropolis of the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport, not yet renamed DFW International Airport, had just opened in 1974. Dallas City Hall was only 2 years old in 1980. Reunion Arena had just tipped off. The J. Erik Jonsson Central Library was still two years from checking out its first book.<\/p>\n The pothole was not yet Dallas\u2019 mascot, deferred maintenance not yet its business model.<\/p>\n Our \u201cnetworks of streets, sewers, water mains, and other urban facilities are in good condition,\u201d Wilson wrote, the result of ongoing investment in the growing city\u2019s infrastructure. Dallas, he wrote, \u201cserves as a benchmark for measuring the deterioration in older cities.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Wilson, and later TIME, made a big deal out of the fact that Dallas\u2019 streets were repaired using a \u201ccomputerized street condition inventory\u201d updated annually and that our water mains didn\u2019t leak\u00a0\u2014 that \u201conly 3 percent \u2026 is lost through leakage.\u201d That was a drop in the bucket compared to 21 other big cities surveyed.\u00a0<\/p>\n A Dallas Water Utilities crew looks on as a 12-inch water main sprays water from a break at Winslow Avenue and Samuell Boulevard in March 2021. Water loss has only increased since this photo was taken five years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n From the archives\/Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n As then-council member Lee Simpson told the magazine, \u201cWe\u2019ve put our infrastructure in the hands of high-quality professionals, and our citizens have little tolerance for failure. That\u2019s why any weaknesses stand out.\u201d<\/p>\n Repeatedly Wilson and TIME hailed Dallas Water Utilities\u2019 use of cameras to inspect underground pipes. Which, true story, the city still does today<\/a>: Just two years ago the council approved spending $5.59 million for \u201ctelevised sewer inspection, maintenance, and repair services\u201d through 2027. DWU officials told me that about 36% of the system is inspected with cameras annually.<\/p>\n But a memo sent to the City Council just four weeks ago<\/a> warned, too, of an uptick in water loss: 10.36 billion gallons in 2025 alone, compared to 10.15 billion gallons reported in 2024 and about 10 billion gallons the year before.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n That\u2019s an 11.9% water loss, according to DWU officials, in part because of our lousy soil and weather\u00a0\u2014 and, right, aging infrastructure. The memo says that despite ongoing investments and water-line replacements, the city will still need \u201cadditional contracted repair resources to supplement existing in-house capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n NBA Commissioner Larry O’Brien toured the Reunion Arena construction site with then-Dallas mayor Robert Folsom during its construction. The arena opened in the spring of 1980.<\/p>\n From the archives\/The Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n As for streets, Wilson wrote in 1980 that \u201cthere is a modest backlog of needed street resurfacing projects, but the city has reduced the mileage in TIME said in 1981 that Dallas \u201cexecutes its maintenance work with a precision similar to that of the Dallas Cowboys on a pass pattern.\u201d Which maybe explains everything. But surely there\u2019s another, longer book to be written about how we got from the Bright and Shiny 1980 to this moment defined by hiring freezes and furloughs; an inexplicable rush to abandon Dallas City Hall, which staff maintains needs hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of fixes, for what\u2019s likely an even older office tower; and a pizza party with the city manager<\/a> if you throw out enough trash.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n But one thing is remarkably clear: Just 46 years and 400,000 additional residents later, Dallas has become one of those sagging cities over which it once towered. All those small towns around us got big. And we just got old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the little things about this town that are starting to chap my hide, which is a much…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-384303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384303","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=384303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
poor condition by upgrading many unimproved streets and resurfacing deteriorated pavements.\u201d Forty-four years later, the Department of Public Works told the council it was $100 million short<\/a> to make needed repairs, despite more than $500 million going toward transportation<\/a> in the $1.25 billion 2024 bond program.<\/p>\n