City Attorney Tammy Palomino’s office has allegedly manipulated ballot language for proposed charter amendments that were intended to strengthen the police department and hold City leaders accountable.
Dallas City Council members will vote on the proposed ballot language for the charter amendment propositions on Wednesday, three of which stem from local nonprofit Dallas HERO’s citizen-led petition campaigns.
One amendment would require the police department to hire roughly 1,000 officers and increase pay. The others create financial incentives for the city manager based on a community survey and allow citizens to sue leaders who dodge local or state laws.
Palomino’s office drafted the proposed ballot language that council members will vote on.
Pete Marocco, the executive director of Dallas HERO, said his team will sue the council members if they adopt the ballot language as drafted.
“The city council made a terribly foolish mistake of announcing their intent to deliberately mislead at the last city council meeting,” he told The Dallas Express. “If they were smart, they would have kept their mouths shut. But now their intent is public record.”
The Dallas City Council met last week to discuss the Dallas HERO initiatives. Several council members, along with interim City Manager Kimberly Tolbert, purportedly spread misinformation about the financial impact of the proposed amendments, as previously reported by DX.
“They were deliberately deceptive and misleading, and now when the language comes out, if they don’t fix it, there’s no way out,” Marocco said. “They will be held liable.”
DX reached out to each member of the city council. None responded.
Marocco said he was confident his team could land a victory at the Texas Supreme Court before the official due date for November’s ballot language.
In 2021, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the Austin City Council adopted misleading ballot language, likely in an effort to undermine the goal of the citizen-led petition. Austin officials were ordered to edit the language to better represent the petition’s intent.
Marocco took issue with the concluding line in the proposed ballot language for the amendment on the city manager incentives.
“They added a very derisive line at the end of the ballot language that implies they’re taking everything out of the hands of the city council and relegating that to citizens,” he told DX. “That’s a complete misrepresentation.”
The ballot question, as drafted by the City Attorney’s Office, reads as follows:
“Shall Chapter VI of the Dallas City Charter be amended by adding a new section compelling the city to conduct an annual community survey to be completed by a minimum of 1,400 Dallas residents that rates the performance of the city manager, the results of which will result in a fixed adjustment to the city manager’s compensation (between a 0 percent and 100 percent salary bonus) or the termination of the city manager, thereby transferring decision-making authority regarding the city manager’s compensation and employment status from city council to survey respondents?”
The proposed ballot language, as drafted by Palomino’s office, on boosted police resources reads as follows:
“Shall Chapter XI of the Dallas City Charter be amended by adding a new section compelling city council to appropriate no less than 50 percent of annual revenue that exceeds the total annual revenue of the previous year to fund the Dallas Police and Fire Pension, with any monies remaining to be appropriated to increasing the starting compensation of officers of the Dallas Police Department and to hiring a minimum of 4,000 police officers with the minimum number of police officers to increase in relation to an increase in City of Dallas population?”
Marocco said the language on this amendment proposal misrepresents the financial impact of the measure.
“They’ve made it sound like there is a much greater increase to the police than what is proposed,” he told DX. “They have made it sound like there is a much greater financial impact statement, which we anticipate they’ll list trying to scare people with an egregious misrepresentation of the budget impact.”
Marocco claimed his team spoke with members of the Dallas Police Department and Dallas Fire-Rescue who said several council members attempted to turn them against the charter propositions.
“These are really duplicitous, really aggressive council members that are super activists,” Marocco told DX.