The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Board gave the agency’s CEO a $60,000 bonus, just months after a funding shortfall led to massive service cuts.
The DART Board voted 10-4 to give CEO Nadine Lee a $60,000 bonus, plus $12,000 in cost-of-living adjustments, in its meeting on November 18.
Just months prior, in September, DART made the largest service cuts in history, citing a budget shortfall of $42-43 million.
Irving Mayor Rick Stopfer – a board member – opposed the bonus. He told The Dallas Express he was uncomfortable with that kind of payment, especially considering DART’s low ridership.
Stopfer explained Lee’s contract makes her eligible for up to an $80,000 bonus per year, so the DART board agreed on a 75% bonus.
“I have a hard time when there’s challenges with ridership – we haven’t even got to pre-pandemic numbers, and we still have the issues that people are talking about with safety and security, even though some of those things we now have implemented,” Stopfer told The Dallas Express.
“Those were things that we’ve been working on for three, four years. They’re just now getting addressed at this level. I just didn’t feel comfortable giving up that type of raise,” he added.
All eligible staff members receive a 3% cost-of-living raise, and the percentage raise paid to the CEO is then distributed to others, according to Stopfer.
“Nobody wants to say the employees don’t deserve the cost of living, and if they’ve done something to deserve the performance bonuses, then that’s one thing,” said Stopfer.
“But the system is somewhat flawed in that people assume they have to give Nadine something – the president and CEO – a certain amount, so the rest of the organization gives them out.”
The Dallas Express reached out to DART, but did not hear back.
During the meeting, Plano board member Anthony Ricciardelli said he supported the cost-of-living adjustment but opposed the bonus.
“I think bonuses are for when things are going exceptionally well,” Ricciardelli said. “Four of DART’s member cities have called withdrawal elections because they don’t see sufficient value in continuing as members of the agency. Moreover, in reviewing the goals that were set for this year for the agency, I determined that the majority of them were not met.”
Ricciardelli said he had served on the Plano City Council for eight years, and the city withheld bonuses when it was not possible. He added that DART has been aiming to increase ridership, but it has not done so year over year.
“When you look at the current situation of the agency, I just don’t believe that it would be appropriate to do bonuses,” he said. “I don’t view bonuses as just something that is par for the course… I just don’t think this is a year for bonuses.”
Dallas and Cockrell Hill Member Enrique MacGregor disagreed, saying Lee and staff have been working “incredibly hard.”
“If you go back, not just year after year but over four years, ridership is better,” MacGregor said. “I am extremely opposed to suggesting in any way that staff and this president have done anything other than a stellar job.”
Dallas Member Carmen Garcia emphasized DART’s accomplishments since COVID-19.
“We have a fantastic CEO that really had to roll up her sleeves and do the job she came here to do, and she has done an outstanding job,” she said. “I know I have colleagues around the table that said she has done an outstanding job, but this is the way that we show it.”
Dallas Member Roy Lopez, however, sided with Stopfer and Ricciardelli. He said he would vote against the motion, though he supported the cost-of-living adjustments and wished they were separate.
“What we’ve seen with our federal government, with our city government, with our county government – where they’re experiencing huge deficits, and as well as the political turmoil, I just don’t feel like this is the right time for across-the-board bonuses,” Lopez said.
“I really feel like we have a systemic problem with the way we evaluate our CEO and president. I hope to improve on this,” he added.
Farmers Branch, Highland Park, Plano, and Irving voted earlier in November to hold DART withdrawal elections in May 2026, as The Dallas Express reported at the time. City officials have expressed growing frustrations about imbalances in the agency’s governance and spending.
Deeper Problems
The DART bonuses can sometimes seem built in because the pay structure relies on the CEO’s bonus percentage, according to Stopfer.
“The percentage that she gets, then gets paid out to other people in bonuses throughout the agency,” he said. “The fact that she has it in her contract, what she can make up to, somewhat gives you the perception that it’s an automatic.”
Stopfer explained that DART uses different formulas that incorporate maximum and minimum bonus amounts.
“It’s very detailed and intricate, the whole process,” Stopfer told DX. “We talk every year about how we can make this more reasonable to understand, and we always walk away trying to figure out how.”
While state law bans cities from raising taxes more than 3.5% per year without voter approval, Stopfer told DX that DART is not subject to the same restrictions.
“They really don’t have any restrictions on the dollars that they receive,” Stopfer said.
“DART isn’t subject to that in the same way that cities are required to hold bond elections before they sell bonds. DART has the ability, just by board approval, to sell bonds. Cities, the residents, really don’t have any input.”
Stopfer said he feels DART is insulated from some of the same economic constraints that local governments face.
“That’s one of the challenges,” he said. “A couple of us have been on councils or on boards where we’ve had to cut personnel, and had to cut budgets and things of that nature because of the caps that are out there. We’re not having to do that.”
DART paid out more than $2.4 million in executive bonuses from 2020 to 2024, even as the agency prepared for September’s massive service cuts, as The Dallas Express exclusively reported.
Meanwhile, the agency is under billions of dollars in debt.
“I believe the DART board sometimes doesn’t really understand the complexities of a city and the responsibilities of a city, and the mood of the city,” Stopfer said. “We really need to understand how to deal better with the things that are always talked about – cleanliness, safety – but the one thing that really is driving Irving more than it is the other cities, I believe, is the lack of ridership.”
While a 2023 study found Irving was receiving more in services than it was paying to DART – unlike suburbs including Plano – Stopfer questioned whether the numbers accounted for everything. He also said DART recently planned to cut two routes in Irving.
“We’re spending twice as much money today as we were five years ago, and we’ve got less riders,” Stopfer told DX. “At what point do we step back and say, are all these things that are happening affecting people who really need to ride DART?”
“That’s our concern right now: how do we build ridership? How do we put the rider first?” he added.
Stopfer pointed to the Denton County Transit Authority, which hired Via Transportation to build ridership for the larger public transit system. He said Irving has also discussed a similar strategy with Via and got an estimate for $5-6 million.
“We can then take your buses off, or a lot of your stuff off, and we can just do a couple of routes,” Irving officials told DART, according to Stopfer. “We’ll build ridership, and we’ll feed it into the Orange Line and the TRE, and we’ll start to see if we can get some bang for our buck.”
He also said DART counts each leg of a trip as a separate rider – so if 500 people took four legs of a trip, the agency would count it as 2,000 riders. Stopfer said he wants to work with DART to boost true ridership, ensuring cities are getting the best results in return for their money.
“If we’re going to spend this much money, and we’re not going to be able to do the other things because we’re spending this much money, it needs to provide a service for the city,” he said.
Meanwhile, DART lines have been shuttling homeless people across the metroplex, as The Dallas Express previously reported. Stopfer said the transit lines bring groups of homeless people across the metroplex to receive services in different cities on different days, and the DART stations become gathering areas.
“[The homeless] know that if they go to a certain bus stop in Plano on a certain night, there’s a group that’s giving out food, or they know another night they can go over to Richardson and somebody’s giving away clothing,” he said. “They use the system to get between these types of opportunities.”
Dallas maintains a vast majority on the DART board, while cities like Highland Park share a single representative with three other member cities, as The Dallas Express reported. Member city mayors have expressed frustration in the past with their inability to represent their constituents.
“I don’t think there’s anything malicious or intent to hurt anybody,” Stopfer said. “They obviously want what they want, because they’re the big dog in the room and they assume that they can have it.”
Stopfer said it can be tempting to simply ask for more money to solve a system’s challenges.
“All of us could do more if we had more money,” he said. “At some point, you have to figure out how to work with what you have.”