DART support from Dallas City Hall may be too little, too late – The Dallas Morning News

At the time the Dallas City Council began talking about using DART as a piggy bank to solve its pension woes earlier this year, dissatisfaction with the transit agency and desire for change were hardly new. Suburban leaders who support cuts to DART’s sales tax funding have been in discussions about defunding the transit agency for years.

But after the city council of DART’s largest member publicly floated the idea, it caused a domino effect among the suburbs, which kept their displeasure more or less to a low murmur. The result is likely to be an ugly scandal in the 89th Texas Legislature and possibly a diminished regional transit system.

Now Dallas is taking 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 behaves as if it were not the spark of dry dust.

Dallas’ leadership on the issue of DART’s future has been tenuous at best, and when it has led at all, it’s largely been in the wrong direction. This kind of dysfunctionality and indecision has real consequences for the city and the region.

Since its founding in 1983, DART has been funded primarily through a 1 percent sales tax on every dollar spent in its 13 member cities. That collection totals about $834 million in fiscal 2023. The largest share of that comes from Dallas, just over $400 million.

But even though Dallas pays the most, it also gets the biggest return. Just consider the stretch of four converging light rail lines that runs through the city center. And that’s to say nothing of the many city bus routes and other DART modes of transportation like GoLink.

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

Now look at the cost versus benefit of Plano. It contributed nearly $110 million in fiscal 2023 and received $44.8 million in service, according to EY (formerly Ernst & Young). It’s the kind of discrepancy Dallas may not have wanted to draw much attention to.

We’ve long known that the suburbs subsidize transit costs in Dallas, but it’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 nice 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 out of this debate about the future of DART, we hope it serves as a lesson for the city. In the world of politics, it is extremely important to think before you open a can of worms.

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