On Friday, the Dallas City Council will hold a meeting on the 2024 Bond Program without the presence of Mayor Eric Johnson, who is in Switzerland this week for the World Economic Forum.
A council meeting was previously scheduled for Wednesday, January 17. However, Mayor Johnson requested via memo that the meeting be postponed, as he would be unable to attend due to being in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum (WEF).
As previously covered by The Dallas Express, Johnson was invited to the WEF to speak on a Thursday panel entitled “Decongesting Cities.”
Johnson requested that the bond meeting instead be held on January 31.
However, three council members — Paula Blackmon, Adam Bazaldua, and Jaime Resendez — requested another bond meeting for this Friday, January 19, which will take place before Johnson returns from Davos.
The council members requested an earlier meeting via a memo on January 4, claiming that postponing bond discussions until January 31 “could jeopardize” the option of holding the bond election in May.
“We realize that there is a possibility that not all of our colleagues will attend, resulting in a lack of a quorum and no meeting,” the council members wrote in a second memo to City Manager T.C. Broadnax on January 16.
“However, given that this is a special called meeting and speakers will be attending, we would like to allow those speakers to address councilmembers who are present,” the memo read. “We understand that if we lack a quorum, those council members who are present cannot have any discussion but may only hear the speakers.”
According to the memo, the primary purpose of the meeting will be to consider whether the bond election will be held in May or November and whether the bond capacity will be $1.1 billion or $1.25 billion.
While the bond is currently set to total $1.1 billion, its capacity could be increased by another $150 million to the $1.25 billion. In a memo on January 12, Assistant City Manager Robert Perez discussed the potential of adding more dollars to the bond, as The Dallas Morning News reported.
The first and only other bond meeting took place on December 6, when Community Bond Task Force (CBTF) Chair Arun Agarwal presented the task force’s bond recommendations to the council. City staff also shared a different set of recommendations for how the $1.1 billion bond program should be spent, which City Manager Broadnax said officials should use as the basis for ongoing bond discussions.
Johnson said he was unable to attend the December meeting “due to a medical reason.” The mayor said that while he could not be there in person, he was “keenly interested in the discussion” and said council members should utilize the recommendations of the council-appointed CBTF, The Dallas Express reported.
At the bond meetings, the city council will determine the final allocations and capacity of the bond program, which will then go before Dallas voters for final approval either in May or November this year.
The Dallas Express reached out to council members Blackmon, Bazaldua, and Resendez for comment but received no response by press time.
Two council meetings are currently scheduled to take up the bond program, one on Friday, January 19, and the other on Wednesday, January 31.
