You don't have to care about I.M. Pei, Brutalism, or historic preservation to see the problem here. The city is about to make one of the largest property decisions in its history, and it has priced only one side of it.
In June 2025, repairing City Hall cost $81–121 million. By October it was $142–345 million. By February 2026 the consultant's number was more than $1 billion — a twenty-year modernize-everything program with financing folded in. The city's own figure for what is urgently broken is $330 million, and an independent estimate put phased repairs at $531–610 million. Each number counts something different, and the differences have never been laid side by side. Dan Noble, CEO emeritus of the Dallas architecture firm HKS, put it this way: “When a cost analysis conveniently aligns with a preferred outcome… it stops being neutral analysis and begins to look like advocacy disguised as arithmetic.”
And the other side of the ledger? Moving out, leasing office space, demolishing the building, selling the land — none of it has ever been given a public price. The council voted $3 million to search for somewhere to go before anyone published what going would cost. That is the whole objection, in one sentence: one option priced four different ways, the preferred option priced never.
City Hall's repair bill is discussed as if it were unthinkable. Here is what the same city has committed to buildings within a few blocks of it — and to one across town, a generation ago.
And the building itself:
The point is not that those other projects were wrong. It's that “we can't afford it” has never been how this city talks about buildings it wants.
Internal emails discussed touring relocation sites in ways that avoid quorum rules — no public meeting, no public record — until roughly 5,000 pages of them surfaced. A judge had to issue a restraining order under the Open Meetings Act to stop votes from being taken. The $3 million site search was funded with money moved off a City Hall generator and electrical repair line. And the decision is being pushed to a head in the middle of budget season, when public attention is thinnest.
Say everything goes the way the council majority wants. The city pays for the site search. It pays to move its employees out. It signs a lease on someone else's office tower — the terms under discussion have never been published — and pays rent on it, every year, forever. Then it tries to sell a concrete building whose demolition cost has never been published either, which means any buyer subtracts that cost from the price of the land. Nobody has shown what Dallas would actually clear from the sale. Nobody has shown the twenty-year cost of renting against the twenty-year cost of owning.
Today the city owns a paid-for building on sixteen acres of its own land. At the end of this plan, it is a tenant. That is the trade on offer, and neither column has been published.
Two things, neither radical. Publish an honest price for every option before deciding — repair, relocation, demolition, sale, side by side, on the same terms. And repair the building the city already owns, starting with the $330 million the city itself says is urgent.
The council decides this in open meetings, and the public gets the microphone. The next chances to say something are here.
1500 MARILLA