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30 Apr 2025

Dallas Is on Fire—And You’re Holding the Hose

In this episode of Let’s Talk Local, we dive into the issues that matter most to you—so you can head to the polls feeling informed and confident.

Tune in to our forum with several city council candidates, where we asked the questions that matter most to your daily life—topics like public safety, homelessness, and the rapid growth of the DFW area.

We believe that informed voters are empowered voters. So, we invite you to take a few minutes to get to know where the candidates stand. No matter who you support, your voice matters—make it count on election day.

0:00

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

Host

Kendal Richardson

Guest

Kebran Alexander

Guest

Cydney Walker

Guest

Bill Roth

Guest

Jose Rivas

Guest

Elizabeth Matus

Guest

Jessica Lightbourne

Guest

Machelle Wells

Guest

John Sims

Guest

Episode Timeline

00:08

Intro

01:52

What are your conversations about while block walking?

05:26

How will candidates address public safety in their district?

08:31

How will you support both the growth happening in DFW and small business at the same time?

12:44

What will make the biggest impact in addressing the homeless crisis?

16:00

How will you prioritize spending and where will funding come from?

19:48

Election Day is May 3. PLEASE VOTE!

Full Transcript

00:08

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

Hi. I'm Sarah Zubiate Bennett. Welcome to Let's Talk Local. Early voting has officially wrapped up, and election day is right around the corner, which means now is the time to get informed, get inspired, and get involved. The decisions made in this election will shape our day to day lives here in Dallas for the next two years. So understanding who's running and what they stand for is more important than ever. At Let's Talk Local, we're aiming for record breaking voter turnout this year, and here's the truth. Informed voters are empowered voters, and empowered voters show up. Just a few days ago, the Dallas Express hosted a dynamic panel featuring candidates from some of our city's most hotly contested districts. It wasn't a debate. It was a real honest conversation about the issues that matter most to us. Everything from homelessness and crime to development and quality of life. Now while I can't walk you through the entire panel discussion today, I do want to highlight a few moments that really stood out, plus share some personal insights from the Behind the Ballot interviews I've been having with candidates over the past few weeks. So let's dig in. Let's talk local, and let's get ready to vote.

01:09

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

Every year, the city of Dallas conducts a survey to hear from its citizens, And year after year, the results? Practically identical. People are asking for the basics. They want to feel safe. They want our streets fixed. They want to afford to live in the city they call home. These aren't extravagant demands. They're fundamental needs, human needs, the kind any tax paying citizen should be able to count on in any city. Yet somehow, these priorities continue to be treated like a mystery by our city leaders. So during our Behind the Ballot interview series, we brought in candidates from several Dallas districts and asked them directly, What are you hearing from the people you hope to represent? What concerns come up most while you're out block walking, meeting neighbors, listening on doorsteps? Here's what they had to say.

01:52

Jose Rivas

Every time they talk to me, it's about crime.

01:56

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

About crime.

01:57

Elizabeth Matus

So I happened to stop at a just a Family Dollar store right off of Buckner, not too far from where I live. And I just happened to go by, and I and I happened to see the cash the lady that works at the cash register outside, and I walked up to her and I said, can I just ask you a simple question? I said, is it hard to work here? How how safe do you feel? And she just threw her hands up in the air and said, I'm tired. And I said, well, please share with me. And she said, well, we have people coming into the store stealing products on the daily. And then they call police, and because it's not a super urgent issue, which I totally understand, and I don't blame the police officers because we're, you know, we need more officers to begin with, and they're short staffed. Of course. They run out with items, they can't do their jobs, they're concentrating on having to chase the person from the store, and they can't work.

03:03

Machelle Wells

Yes. I've done a lot of walk walking Mhmm. And a lot of speaking, and it's the same thing over and over again that people don't feel safe. Yep. They wanna be able to have children, especially the younger generation that has moved into my district. And I've I've literally been told by a woman that just found out, she's a lawyer, just found out that she was pregnant. And she said, I wanna be able to have my baby here but I don't know if we can stay in this house, in this area. We have gunshots going off. I don't feel safe that my kids would be running around. It's a big issue.

03:42

Bill Roth

Overwhelmingly, people are concerned about financial security. They're concerned about physical safety and security.

03:52

Bill Roth

They're concerned about the leadership and the direction that the city is going, and they're concerned with just basic services. They just wanna make sure the trash is picked up, the alleys are fixed Mhmm. And the potholes are taken care of. Mhmm. And they wanna make sure that they can feel safe and comfortable walking in their neighborhoods and going to the grocery store.

04:14

John Sims

Everyone everyone is concerned about crime. The the council is a nonpartisan position.

04:20

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

Mhmm. That's right.

04:21

John Sims

But when you're out block walking, you you meet people that are partisan. And it doesn't matter if I meet someone that's that's a Republican or a Democrat. Everyone cares about infrastructure and crime.

04:32

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

That's right. It's how we all live.

04:35

John Sims

Right. Everyone wants to wants to feel safe in their home. Yep. They wanna be able to go out and shop and and hang out with family, go out to eat, and not worry about, you know, being robbed, their car being broken into or stolen, or someone watching their house. And when they leave, they run-in there and steal their property. So crime is is, across the board, the number one issue that that I hear from whenever I go out and block walk.

05:03

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

Did you notice that pretty much every candidate mentioned crime and public safety in Dallas as a serious top concern? So at the Dallas Express Forum, we asked the candidates one key question. According to a poll the city conducted in February, 55% of Dallas residents believe that crime is a major issue, yet we don't have enough police officers to combat the issue. How will you ensure public safety while addressing recruitment and community trust? Here's what Kendal Richardson from District 11, Kebron Alexander of District 4, and Cydney Walker of District 7 had to say about it.

05:37

Kendal Richardson

We have to deal first with with the pension issue. That's the number one thing. We have to deal with the corruption and the embezzlement of the money. We need to deal with the people who have dealt with that, that sat on the board that invested the money in places and lost it. We need to find out where all of that money is first. We have a bad, reputation in collecting officers. On TikTok, you have other agencies, especially Fort Worth, making fun of how they stole offices from from Dallas because they don't pay competitively, but until that, we're gonna go in for negotiation settlements, but they have to have a new image. Dallas has to come up with a new image and get rid of the corruption.

06:32

Kebron Alexander

I would start with allowing police to do exclusive police work, and stop expanding the requirements and responsibilities of officers, where we have non essential personnel who can respond to a homeless situation, as an example, and de escalate and get people the help that they need, that allows officers to deal with crime instead of being part time social workers. Another thing I think we should do is we should make sure that downtown is a place where people go to work. When downtown thrives, all of Dallas benefits. Right now, Collin County's benefiting, Las Colinas is benefiting, Grand Prairie's benefiting. We're not seeing those tax receipts, we're not seeing those tax dollars, and the city of Dallas is suffering as a result.

07:29

Cydney Walker

Anytime that they would make an arrest and go to Lew Sterrett they would be able to return back to the streets in two to three hours. Now it is an all day event. We need to look at the changes that occurred that are tying up our police officers at Lew Sterrett, okay? If you've gone from two to three trips to Lew Sterrett down to one, there is a huge cog in the wheel that is slowing down our officers getting back out on their beat. Secondly, we have a lot of specialty teams. I would like to evaluate if those teams are really needed so we can put more officers on the street because people seeing the officers on the street, they're gonna feel more safe because we see them patrolling.

08:14

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

Now the candidates might have different ideas on how to tackle crime and public safety, but one thing is clear. Everyone agrees it's the number one issue facing our city right now, but it's not the only challenge on the table. The Dallas Metroplex is growing fast, really fast. And that kind of growth brings its own set of questions like, how do we support small businesses? How do we create jobs that keep up with all of this expansion?

08:35

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

So we put that question to the candidates. Here's how District Eleven's Bill Roth, District Seven's Jose Rivas, District Five's Elizabeth Matus, and District Three's Jessica Lightbourne plan to support growth in their respective communities.

08:48

Bill Roth

This key to growing a business in the community is has to be that we have to have a functional city government that makes it easy to get permits, to facilitate the opportunities for businesses to come, to expand, and to grow. And we've got to do that in an environment that's safe and that creates a significant priority for providing city services, and it also provides accountability for the financial wherewithal of the city. If we don't have a city processing that allows for businesses to proceed and progress, we are going to have difficulty growing the economic base of this city.

09:32

Jose Rivas

One of the things that I've heard from some of the neighbors and or business owners in District 7 is the crime. Their businesses are being broken into constantly, and they're not able to get any response there. So, we've got to deal with that. Aside from that, when we have development that starts to come into District 7, you know, we give tax abatements incentives, right? Tax abatements, we make we make stipulation carve outs for affordable housing. But one of the things I'd like to see is as businesses start to come in is that we offer that we offer an opportunity for hiring from our local community, not just service industry jobs, but actual jobs that pay living wages. And then lastly, the small businesses, we need to do we need to do grants. It needs to be a more hands on approach from the city to help them succeed.

10:26

Elizabeth Matus

I believe that in order for us to succeed in our neighborhood as as far as economic growth, we definitely need to address the safety issue. We're not gonna grow if we don't have that in place. There are several businesses like, they are saying they're getting robbed and police is not responding on time and that's hurting us. We've even I've even heard as people even call it, they were asked, why don't you bring a Chick fil A into our neighborhood, you know, and have money come into your neighborhood? And the owner of the Chick fil A said, no, we can't go into the jungle and I didn't like that. We're not the jungle. We're a neighborhood that has people who work hard, people who want the equal opportunities that every other neighborhood has. So, unless we address the safety issue, we're not gonna move forward.

11:23

Jessica Lightbourne

I tell people all the time, we have one of the most beautiful districts in the city of Dallas. We have beautiful hills, we have beautiful plains, just beautiful trees, and the way, as a small business owner myself, the way that we can help develop our economic capacity in District 3 is creating a platform for small businesses to have, whether it's in Red Bird Mall, whether it's creating farmers markets in our district, because we are in a food desert slash food swamp. In addition to introducing our residents to what's called green jobs, and green technology, which is where our district is moving, our city is moving, in that space, and even urban farming. Of course, we are never opposed to retail and quality restaurants, not fast food restaurants, but quality sit down restaurants and things of that nature. But those are some of the ways that we can also partner with, our chambers of commerce to get businesses up and running and into those spaces.

12:16

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

There's no one size fits all fix for the challenges that our city faces, but it's encouraging to see that this group of city council candidates has a real handle on ideas tailored to their communities. Still, there's one issue that cuts across every district in homelessness. It's something we simply can't ignore. In fact, a recent poll shows that 75% of Dallas residents believe homelessness, vagrancy, and aggressive panhandling are serious problems. So we asked the candidates, what do you believe will make the biggest impact in addressing the homeless crisis? Here's what they had to say.

12:49

Cydney Walker

Looking to put tighter controls on the homeless population. I have been watching the San Jose Mayor push for people well, homeless persons, that refuse services three times within an eighteen month period get taken to court, and they are forced to go through the services. One of the things, with homelessness is sometimes you could be trapped with the trauma that you've experienced that has led you to get to this place in your life. So one of the things is making sure that we get people out of their own way in order to become a functioning person in society. So, we're gonna have to give some tough love. I don't know if eighteen months is too long. I would like to look at that and see, you know, somewhere between a year to eighteen months and say you're gonna have to actually do something for yourself to get out of this place.

13:51

Kebron Alexander

There's no magic bullet that's going to solve the homeless problem in Dallas. With that said, there are there's no single factor that creates homelessness in Dallas. There is substance abuse, there's mental health issues, there's not enough money at the end of my at the end of the month, and then there are kids. Every homeless person can't go into the same place for obvious reasons. That's why we've got to share the responsibility of the homeless solution amongst the 14 council districts. We've got to have a safe place for kids who 's parents may have the substance abuse problem. Those kids are gonna be different and apart from kids whose parents have mental health issues, which will be different from places where their parents don't have enough money at the end of the month.

14:50

Bill Roth

There's plenty of laws in Dallas that allow for the elimination of the homeless encampments that are plaguing our parks, our neighborhoods, our intersections. We have to enforce the laws. We have to arrest people that are breaking the laws and help them access and divert them into facilities and into places where there's wraparound services to provide them the help that they can get. There's 4,000 housing units available that have wraparound services. We need to explain to these folks that if they're not willing to access those those opportunities, that the city will not tolerate, becoming a haven for folks that are doing criminal activities.

15:42

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

No matter what issue we're talking about or what solution is on the table, one thing is clear. It's going to take funding to get Dallas back on track. But that raises a big question. Where's the money gonna come from? With calls for more police funding, overdue infrastructure projects, and major housing initiatives, we wanted to know how will the candidates prioritize spending, and what sources of revenue or savings are they counting on to make it all happen. Here's what a few of our panelists had to say.

16:08

Jessica Lightbourne

Already accommodating about 62% of our current budget and that alone is not enough. So public safety will always be the number one priority. When we're talking about savings and how do we go about saving, one of the best ways to do is, one of the best ways to look at it is identify waste and duplication. When we eliminate waste and duplication from the services that we provide, that's one way where we can save funds. A second way is looking at public private partnerships and potentially contracting out. There are certain things that the city can do amazingly, however there are other things such as making copies, that they're not so keen on doing, and that's something that we can contract out to a FedEx or a Kinkos. So you can save cost by looking at contracting out certain services, in addition to identifying the duplication and waste, in our city.

16:55

Jose Rivas

Public safety is number one. We've got we've got to address that. It's going to take it's gonna take more for us to be competitive, to hire more police officers and bring in lateral transfers. From a savings perspective, we've we've gotta stop hemorrhaging money. So just in the last few months, right, I mean, we we're losing $9,000,000 from a permitting problem that that wasn't discovered until last week. That's 9 that's a million dollars a month that we've lost since that went into place. We've spent about $14,000,000 on two homeless shelters that haven't housed any homeless, spent $20,000,000 on a on a property, that the city was supposed to move into. We've got a lot of waste. We've got $6,000,000 for the trees. We've got a lot of waste there, but there are there are other offices in the city that need to be looked at at maybe streamlining or downsizing.

17:51

Kebron Alexander

We are not dealing with normal times or normal processes. We are having to have public safety be the preeminent part of the city's budget, thanks to the HERO amendments. So the question is, what are you as a citizen willing to sacrifice in your overall package of services that everybody gets to enjoy? Is it going to be garbage collection, sanitation, water, parks, library? When we when the rubber hits the road, we've gotta make some different kinds of decisions and, oh, yeah, the discretionary fund that council members are used to having, that's gonna be diminished as well. We're probably not gonna get federal dollars or state dollars, so we're going to have a $5,000,000,000 budget and less money available for all the things that we want to see done. That's the reality of the situation, and we've got to be very clear eyed about what our numbers are before we start making any promises about what's coming next.

18:54

Cydney Walker

So yes, there is a problem with the data, but we also know with the data that we do have where we need to make cuts. So we just recently had an audit with Fair Park and saw misappropriation of funds, and we're also seeing that this probably wasn't the correct partnership to have with the Fair Park. So we're gonna have to start peeling back on these private public partnerships and actually put in a private entity that is going to do the work and streamline the process and make things more efficient for the city and those of us that are using the services. So for me, another area that we need to look at is cronyism. I know we have friends and they may do business with the city, but we're gonna have to really start looking at who gets those contracts and who is actually providing us with worthy services.

19:47

Sarah Zubiate Bennett

We've got some strong candidates stepping up to run for Dallas City Council this election season. And I know I've said this before probably more than once, but it's worth repeating. We won't see real change in our city unless you get out and vote. Posting on social media isn't the same as showing up at the ballot box. That vote, it's your power. That's your voice. So if you didn't make it to early voting, I'm asking you please make it out on Saturday, May 3. If you're frustrated with what's happening in Dallas, this is how you help turn things around. Your voice matters. Your vote matters. Let's use it. Thanks so much for spending time with us. If you missed anything, be sure to check out our behind the ballot series. Head over to the Dallas Express X account to watch the full candidate forum.