Dallas City Hall can’t cut its way to success

After hours of debate last week, Dallas City Council members signaled their intent to lightly trim Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax’s proposed $4.6 billion budget for next fiscal year to provide what amounts to a fig leaf of tax rate relief.

This is the sort of thing that we are normally inclined to oppose. But a Council majority’s proposal to bring the current tax rate down from 74.58 cents per $100 in value to 73.57 cents is, we believe, a statement of what a majority of the residents of this city say they want from City Hall: more and better services.

Note: That rate does not mean a tax decrease for many Dallas residents. Home values have risen so fast and so much that modest rate cuts mean holding the line on taxes at best.

We credit Council member Cara Mendelsohn for demanding a serious debate on a much deeper rate reduction and accompanying spending cuts that she says are necessary to curb the city from spending beyond its means.

We can’t help but believe that her work led to a more thorough combing of city spending than we would have gotten otherwise. So far, the City Council found savings mainly by removing from the budget positions that have been vacant for at least a year, reducing the hiring goal for the police department from 290 to a more realistic target of 250. There were other cuts, at the margins, that we might not have seen absent Mendelsohn’s work.

But even if we agree with the spirit of Mendelsohn’s point, we can’t agree that the relatively small savings that a deeper tax rate cut would create for individual residents is worth the significant reduction in services it would require from City Hall.

Dallas residents have said repeatedly that they want the city to invest in streets and parks, reduce homelessness, streamline the city’s permitting process and crack down on code violations that diminish neighborhoods.

So with that, we support the amended budget a Council majority appears poised to approve.

But a serious caution is needed here.

Dallas’ fiscal future goes beyond year-to-year operating budgets. In coming months, city officials are expected to propose a $1 billion bond package to fund infrastructure improvements.

Then there is the looming crisis of a $3 billion (and counting) unfunded liability in the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System.

Plenty of special-interest groups are already lobbying for a fat share of bond dollars. It’s worrisome that the city is going about its normal borrow-and-spend planning without openly debating how we are going to deal with the pension nightmare.

All of these matters, from the annual budget, to bond planning, to the pension, need to be part of the same debate.

They aren’t. And that could spell trouble.

That said, engaging a major austerity program in the operating budget, as Mendelsohn proposes, is the wrong approach. It would only ensure that maintenance, from streets to buildings to parks, falls further behind, raising future costs.

And it would make Dallas less attractive to the future and current residents we are going to rely on to grow the city — the only real path out of the trouble we’re in.

For that reason, the wiser path today is to continue to support city operations and hold the line on taxes.

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