The City of Irving says it’s opposed to planned Dallas Area Rapid Transit, or DART, bus route cuts in the city, which are set to take effect in January.
This comes on the heels of months of back-and-forth over the fate of public transit in the city, including Irving’s mayor signing on to a June letter supporting DART funding and governance reform efforts at the state level, which ultimately failed.
During their work session Oct. 23, at least one council member pointed to the possibility of a DART pullout referendum, which lines up with other Irving city officials’ stances in recent months.
The resolution, approved unanimously by the council, expresses objection to DART’s planned elimination of bus routes 225 and 255, the latter of which was added last year. The text of the resolution “requests the DART Board of Directors to reconsider their decision to eliminate the bus routes and remove them from the list of eliminated routes.”
DART approved the cuts at their September board meeting.
During the council work session, Mayor Rick Stopfer laid out concerns about the city’s overall “return on investment” in DART. Stopfer is also a member of the DART executive board of directors.
Council Member Dennis Webb said “we definitely need to make sure that we as a council send a loud message to DART that this is just not Rick that's having a problem with them. It’s all of us.”
Webb later told KERA that discussions on resolving some of these issues are ongoing.
“There are meetings taking place between city managers, DART and some other people, especially through the North Texas Commission, trying to broker some agreements to help, you know, solve some of the issues that the cities have,” he said.
Webb described city officials’ stance as “pro transit,” but said they’re dissatisfied with the amount of funding Irving puts toward DART services, especially as routes are being cut.
“The climate in Irving now is that we've gotten tired of being shortchanged by DART, and there is a movement afoot to exit DART,” Webb said.
Tyler Wright is vice president of Dallas Area Transit Alliance, or DATA, a grassroots public transit advocacy organization.
He expressed concern that the council publicly taking issue with DART serves to “manufacture consent” for state legislative measures altering DART’s funding and governance, or for a potential pullout election.
But Wright said leaving DART ends with cities lacking some services while still being financially on the hook for infrastructure built while the city was part of the DART system.
“I think it's important to be clear that any city that pulls out does not just get that money back to provide to residents or to provide to their citizens,” Wright told KERA.
During the council work session, Council Member Al Zapanta said of a potential pullout election, “We’ve got to be really understanding what the implication will be of that vote and what the cost is going to be, because whether we like it or not, we're going to have to put a lot of money up to get out.”
Irving has been a part of DART since the early 1980s. Since then, voters have twice chosen to remain in DART.
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