In a memo to interim City Manager Kimberly Tolbert, Dallas City Council Member Cara Mendelsohn said she plans to call a meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on General Investigating and Ethics in August to address how a City-owned property became a nuisance.
“Based on the article in today’s Dallas Morning News about the property located at 9999 Technology Blvd, there are important questions to be answered about how the City has mismanaged this property and process,” she wrote in the memo. “Overall, please explain how the City has allowed the neglect of the property and created a hazard, eyesore, and legal liability.”
In the memo, Mendelsohn said that “there are important questions to be answered about how the City has mismanaged this property and process.” She offered 11 of them:
- Who exactly owns the building? If it is the PFC, please explain the City’s liability for the building.
- Who has an obligation for maintenance and security? Why wasn’t this taken care of?
- What security measures were put in place before the sale to the PFC/City of Dallas and why were they not maintained? What security measures did the PFC/City take once the sale of the property was complete? Did the City know there were vandals, looters, drug activity, and possibly squatters at the site?
- What facility and ground maintenance was instituted by the PFC/City after purchase?
- What steps did Code Compliance take to respond to 311 calls? Why wouldn’t a property like this be elevated as a problematic situation so it could be resolved immediately? Were residents told no action is required?
- How many 911 calls have been made about the property? What steps were taken to address the findings of the property from a criminality standpoint? Was the location noted as a possible threat and no action taken?
- What is the date the developer applied for a permit for demolition?
- What is the expected turnaround time for a demolition permit and why has this one been delayed?
- How has the deteriorated state of the building affected the nearby hotel, businesses, and apartment complex?
- What is being done immediately to address these issues? I hope there will be fencing and security before the end of the day.
- What is the status of all other vacant PFC/HFC/City-owned properties?
“The status of this building, as described in the article, when coupled with the buildings at 711 S. St Paul St and 7800 N. Stemmons, shows a troubling lack of effective city management,” Mendelsohn said in the memo. “I intend to call a meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on General Investigating and Ethics in early August to review the answers of this memo and determine next steps.”
The article in question that prompted Mendelsohn’s memo was an op-ed written by Dallas Cothrum and published by The Dallas Morning News.
“When I stepped inside (every door being propped wide open or outright torn off) I saw ceilings and fixtures pulled down,” Cothrum wrote. “Walls were broken through. Wires were stripped out. Flooring was torn up, exposing hollow, sodden squares of what once was insulation. The once beautiful building, an architecturally interesting office space made entirely of glass on the outside, is now a total ruin.”
In May, The Dallas Express began investigating who owned the building and why it had become a magnet for vagrants and burglars. A month later, records provided by the Dallas Police Department through a Texas Public Information Act request showed that five reports of trespassing were generated over a four-year period, and five people were arrested on several offenses and warrants.
Officers “were on a mark out assisting Code Compliance and Homeless Solutions on clearing a commercial building that belongs to Dallas Public Facility Corporation (Complainant) located at 9999 W. Technology Blvd, Dallas, Dallas County, Texas,” according to police records. “The commercial building belongs to the City of Dallas. … No individuals have consent to be on the property, and the building is supposed to be a vacant building. [Officers] observed that several glass windows were shattered and several doors around the building were open.”
Records also show that complaints “have been made to the City Council” about people unlawfully entering the building in Northwest Dallas.
The property is in Council Member Omar Narvaez’s District 6. A worker whose office is near the property has shared photos and other information about the property with DX. Heavy equipment was seen there on June 5 in what appeared to be a clean-up effort, and several Code Compliance Services trucks were on the property last Thursday.
French company Teleperformance abandoned the 15-acre site in 2019 when it closed the call center and laid off hundreds of employees as part of its restructured operations, according to the Dallas Business Journal. Data from the Central Appraisal District shows the City of Dallas has owned the two-story gold-veneered glass-paneled building, constructed in 1984, since July 2023. As of last year, the site’s certified value was almost $1.7 million.
“So many of the outside glass panels are broken that you walk around on a carpet of silvery black shards crunching under your feet,” Cothrum said in the DMN op-ed. “Daylight streams through the massive holes that were glass walls, but the building is still ominous on the inside. The hallways and offices are dark and decayed.”
Cothrum also said that “floor-to-ceiling graffiti portraits” have been painted on walls, and an open elevator shaft “filled to the first floor threshold with water was an oily death trap.”
A Code Compliance Services spokesperson did not return a DX request for comment.
In a slight mockery of Dallas City Hall, the columnist mused whether City leaders hope the producers of The Walking Dead are scouting film locations. He called the property “a harrowing waste and a smorgasbord of code violations — overgrown, unsecured, looted and dangerous.”
“The first kid who wanders over from the apartment complex next door could find himself in a dangerous spot. I wonder what visitors in the hotel across the street are thinking about Dallas.”
Narvaez has ignored DX‘s requests for comments on the building, but he told Cothrum, “My office and I have been working diligently with staff to get the issue taken care of.”
The Dallas Express reported in June that the Dallas City Council amended an agreement with DPFC to allow the construction of a multifamily property at 9999 Technology Blvd. The agreement called for DPFC to acquire property “in preparation for housing, which property the DPFC will subsequently enter a lease to one or more affordable housing developers to be developed in two phases.”
At the time, the project included the construction of 615 units “of safe, affordable housing, revitalizing a declining vacant property in an existing neighborhood,” and collecting “increased revenue to fund additional investments” in housing.
The approved resolution authorizes using the Community Development Block Grant as part of the one-phase developer agreement with DPFC for The Park at Northpoint. The number of apartments to be built was reduced from 615 to 426, but the ground lease agreement with Kentucky-based LDG Development remains a 75-year term.
“In District 6, we’re always welcoming more housing, more workforce housing, things of that nature,” Narvaez said during the June 12 council meeting. “It’s something we need to do. We’ve already done different housing projects in this exact same area. I’m very excited about this and look forward to hopefully getting this approved so we can get this project going.”
LDG Development plans to demolish the building at 9999 West Technology Blvd. According to Cothrum, the developer blames the City of Dallas for the delay, saying the company has been waiting for demolition permits since January.
“What an irony that the city’s inability to process permits falls back on itself,” Cothrum wrote. “Remember, the city also failed to get permits for its building.”
That comment was a reference to the overly hasty transition of dozens of City employees from the Oak Cliff Municipal Center to 7800 N. Stemmons Fwy before receiving the appropriate occupancy certificates for the building, which still had ongoing construction on some floors.
The Dallas Express has reported that the Department of Planning and Development has struggled to resolve permit backlogs, long turnaround times, and various inefficiencies under former City Manager T.C. Broadnax.
In June, then-chief building officer Andrew Espinoza told the Economic Development Committee the department’s performance had improved, as seen in the public launch of the commercial permit activity dashboard.
“We’re happy to report that we’re following through on our commitments,” Espinoza said at the June 3 meeting. “The data we’ve collected revealed Development Services is performing at a very high and consistent level.”
The new dashboard went online on June 3, less than a month after Espinoza told the committee that some residential permits had been issued within four days.
Dallas Code Compliance Services vehicles are seen on Thursday at 9999 Technology Blvd., a former call center now owned by the Dallas Public Facility Corporation | Image by worker whose office is near the building.