By the time the Dallas City Council started talking about using DART as a piggy bank to solve its pension woes earlier this year, discontent with the transit agency and a desire for change were hardly new. Suburban leaders who support reducing DART’s sales tax funding had been having discussions about clawing money back from the transit agency for years.

But after the city council of DART’s largest member publicly broached the idea, it set off a domino effect among suburbs that had kept their discontents more or less at a low grumble. The result is likely to be an ugly spat at the 89th Texas Legislature and probably a diminished regional transit system.

Now Dallas is walking it all back. The City Council voted earlier this month to support keeping DART fully funded as part of its legislative agenda. But the council is acting as if it wasn’t the spark on dry tinder.

Dallas’ leadership on the question of DART’s future has been weak at best, and when it has led at all, it has largely been in the wrong direction. This kind of dysfunction and indecisiveness has real consequences for the city and the region.

Since it was founded in 1983, DART has been primarily funded through a 1% sales tax on every dollar spent in the 13 member cities. That collection totaled about $834 million in fiscal year 2023. The largest share of that came from Dallas – a little over $400 million.

But while Dallas pays the most in, it also gets the greatest return. Just think about the stretch of four converging light-rail lines that runs through the core of downtown. And that’s to say nothing of the city’s many bus routes and other DART modes of transit like GoLink.

According to an EY study completed earlier this year, in fiscal year 2023, Dallas contributed $407.8 million in sales tax dollars to DART. But the cost of providing service in the city was $690.2 million. That means Dallas got nearly a 70% return on its investment — or about $282 million worth of service that it didn’t pay for.

Now, look at Plano’s cost vs. benefit. It contributed nearly $110 million in FY 2023 and got $44.8 million in service, according to EY (formerly Ernst & Young). That’s the sort of disparity Dallas might not have wanted to raise a lot of attention around.

We’ve long known that the suburbs subsidize the cost of transit in Dallas, but that’s more than we imagined.

Words have consequences, especially when they come from the governing body of one of Texas’ largest cities — and the center of DART’s service area. It’s good that Dallas is singing a different tune now, but the City Council’s open discussion has created an air of permissiveness about targeting DART.

Whatever comes of this debate about DART’s future, we hope this serves as a lesson for the city. In the world of politics, it’s critically important to think before you open a can of worms.

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