5/27 Dallas City Hall

Our first meeting of the day was with Paul Dyer, the city of Dallas Director of Parks and Recreation. He provided insight as to the master plan of designated parks and new acquisitions by the department. We discussed the Woodall Rogers park, which for those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, is a 6 acre park over a freeway that will connect the predominately commercial, central business district with the residential uptown area. He discussed receiving $16.7M of stimulus money for shovel ready projects. It was the sole receiver of this grant for city improvements in the state of Texas.

We met with the Dallas Mayor, Tom Leppert, who discussed the various challenges that Dallas is currently facing. He was particularly interested in discussing our sustainability and adaptive reuse topics and touched on the initiatives of the cities in both these areas. Dallas is one of the most forward thinking cities as far as sustainability goes. They strive to use adaptive reuse to meet these goals as much as possible. He also touched on the new developments that will result from bridges across the Trinity River. Dallas strives to attain LEED certification with city and public building whenever possible. They form public private partnerships with developers interested in adaptive reuse and are trying to revitalize the downtown area.

After this meeting, we met with Teresa O'Donnell. She had some interesting insights as to how surrounding municipalities differ in their approach to homelessness. She touched on where the public programs and private funding intersect. The continuum between urban cities that focus on their core, like Chicago, and cities that have rural specificity, like Detroit, were discussed in detail. Although Dallas was much more towards Detroit on this line, they are looking to achieve the vibrant inner core that Chicago has attained.

Our final meeting was with David Whitley from the new Dallas City Design Studio, and Karl Zavitkovsky, the Director of the Office in Economic Development. They jointly talked about the challenges that face the South Dallas, East Dallas, and the Oak Cliff areas. Major redevelopment projects in this area are planned and have designs laid out for the future. The design program is a new initiative with $5M of new funding. They are focusing on redeveloping this area which is the most underutilized location, as far as highest and best use goes, that is still close to downtown.