The Supreme Court of Texas ruled Wednesday afternoon that the Dallas City Council must remove three proposed charter amendments it placed on the November ballot.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, a majority of council members advanced the three propositions (K, M, and N) in a bid to undercut three proposed amendments stemming from a citizen-led campaign seeking to increase accountability on the part of City officials and bolster public safety resources.
The bipartisan nonprofit Dallas HERO, which organized the campaign, and a Dallas resident filed a lawsuit against the City after the council members passed their poison pill amendments, which would have overridden the public safety and accountability propositions if approved by voters.
“[T]he propositions contradict each other, and the ballot language as a whole will confuse and mislead voters because it does not acknowledge these contradictions or address the effect of the primacy provisions, which are chief features central to the character and purpose of the council-initiated propositions,” wrote Justice J. Brett Busby for the court.
“Because the citizen-initiated propositions must appear on the ballot and the parties have agreed to the ballot language for those propositions, we conclude the proper remedy is to direct the city council not to include its duplicative propositions on the ballot. …[W]e conditionally grant mandamus relief in part and direct the City to remove Propositions K, M, and N from the ballot,” the ruling states.
The council members complied with the ruling, voting to remove the three proposed amendments to the Dallas City Charter.
If approved by voters, Dallas HERO’s three charter propositions would require the City to increase police pay, require roughly 1,000 more officers to be hired, bolster the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, tie the city manager’s bonus pay to an annual resident survey, and enable citizens to sue City officials for failing to abide by the Dallas City Charter, Dallas City Code, or state laws.