The latest scenario, presented Wednesday by city financial officials to the City Council on how to divvy up the money, proposes setting aside $25 million for IT-related projects. Council members suggested last month the May 3 ransomware attack was a reason to increase the city’s investment in technology outside of the annual budget.
“For anything that could fit the criteria of a bond program, I think our city needs to take a really hard look at having technology be a category in that,” said council member Gay Donnell Willis during a May 8 public safety committee meeting. “I think that this underscores that need and that our residents would give that a hard look in a positive way.”
Dallas’ Information & Technology Services had an initial ask of $135 million in the bond package for IT-related upgrades. There was no allocation for IT in previous proposed scenarios.
The latest list of possible funding allocation for the proposed 2024 bond is preliminary and non-binding. A task force of City Council-selected appointees has been meeting since May to discuss and eventually narrow down a list of infrastructure projects to recommend to the City Council to be paid for with the $1 billion. That list is expected to be finalized in November, presented to the City Council in December and a public hearing on the recommendations is scheduled to be held that same month.
The City Council is tentatively scheduled to vote in late January to approve the bond package and put it on the May 2024 election ballot for voters’ approval.
Jennifer Nicewander, the city’s interim director of bond and construction management, said 376 requests for projects to be funded through the bond program have been submitted by the public thus far through an online request form.
Jack Ireland, Dallas’ chief financial officer, said the city might know as early as late July if there is enough capacity to seek more than $1 billion in bond money.
“We’re scheduled to brief the council in August or September,” he said Wednesday. If the amount remains at $1 billion, he said the city would plan to issue $200 million in debt annually over five years and pay it back over 20 years.
He said that’s the same plan used for its $1.05 billion bond program in 2017.
“The assumption is that our tax rate stays the same over the course of 20-plus years,” Ireland told the council. He later added that the city’s forecast “is assuming that we do not increase the tax rate to be able to issue the debt that we’re talking about.”
Ireland told The Dallas Morning News after the meeting that the city has yet to issue $130 million in bonds under the package approved by voters in 2017. He said that will happen sometime in the next fiscal year, which starts in October.
Dallas voters have approved $3.6 billion in bond funding from four propositions since 2003. The largest portion, almost $1.5 billion, has gone toward street and transportation projects.
But even the latest bond won’t plug all the gaps. City officials said in March that Dallas had an estimated $12.3 billion in needs, including almost $3.5 billion for streets, $2.8 billion for parks and almost $2.5 million for flood and storm drainage.
The overall tally of needs was estimated to rise to $13.5 billion in 2024 and $14.1 billion in 2025.
In the latest proposed scenario for the 2024 bond, city officials say funding requests from departments including IT, transportation, public works, housing, homeless services, police and fire are at $2.3 billion.
The public works department asked for $520 million for funding for streets, $400 million was requested from the parks department, $320 million from the police department and $118 million for the fire department. The housing department and Dallas Water Utilities each requested $150 million and the homeless solutions office asked for $38 million.
None of the city departments get the full amount of what they requested in the latest bond funding scenario. The proposed tally ranges from $400 million for streets to $20 million for homeless assistance facilities.
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