3 March 5 - 11, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents I’m Sorry, How Much? Council ‘skeptical’ of billion-dollar pricetag on City Hall repairs. BY EMMA RUBY T he Dallas City Hall building is not at risk of toppling over. That is where the good news began and ended during the Feb. 23 meeting of the City Council’s Finance Committee, in which nearly six hours were dedicated to discussing the com- prehensive condition report the council commissioned for the building late last year. The report, made public on Feb. 20, out- lines $1 billion in repairs needed for the 47-year-old building that looms over Marilla Street. It is a price tag that has ballooned so much that “ballooned” feels an inadequate word; during summer 2024 conversations, city staff guessed $80 million would be needed for deferred maintenance. In Octo- ber 2025, a memo raised that estimate to $345 million. Now, the forecast is 10 figures. Not every- one is sold. “Many of us up here at the horseshoe are skeptical of the $1 billion price tag included in the presentation,” said Council member Chad West, the chair of the Finance Com- mittee, at the start of the briefing. Still, the report painted a dire picture, and by the end of the meeting, the Finance Committee approved a slew of recommen- dations that will now be weighed by the full council, and which seem to point towards change. Among the recommendations are a directive for the 311 and 911 call centers to be moved out of City Hall and into an alterna- tive government facility as soon as possible, a directive for the city manager’s office to pursue redevelopment and relocation op- tions, a look at funding sources and initiate a community feedback survey and a request for an additional briefing by May of this year. The very nature of City Hall, a brutalist building, means it presents an abnormal construction scenario, said Assistant City Manager Donzell Gipson. According to a condition report devel- oped by a team of engineers, architects and city stakeholders, City Hall is failing on vir- tually every front. Plumbing, HVAC, electri- cal and power systems are beyond their useful lives. The aluminum-framed win- dows, a key feature of the building designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei, are “ther- mally inefficient.” The third-level basement, which de- signers never finished building out, is full of water; code compliance is an after- thought; major gathering spaces, like the City Council chambers, are not accessible to individuals with disabilities; and floors one through six of the building lack fire sprinklers. None of that includes the ineffi- ciencies in how the space is used and man- aged across departments. All of that is going to add up, officials told the council. While the meeting was officially a Finance Committee briefing, all 14 council members attended at least parts of the brief- ing, and City Manager Kimberly Tolbert made an appearance. The only member of the horseshoe who did not show was Mayor Eric Johnson, who launched the City Hall discussion by charging the group with ex- ploring the “effectiveness” of the building’s management and the “fiscally responsible course” for City Hall’s future when he ap- pointed the committee. “Overall, our assessment sees that if you want to hold on to this building in the long- term, a large-scale systems replacement [is necessary],” said Steven Duong, a vice presi- dent with the infrastructure consultant firm AECOM. The Repairs T o replace every failing system in City Hall with a working version of the same system would cost $329 mil- lion. That spending would not be enough to modernize the building, bring those systems up to code, make progress on ADA accessi- bility or address any change orders or sur- prises found along the way, such as the asbestos that Monday’s presenters are all but positive floats in City Hall’s walls in abundance. The billion-dollar fix-up assumes all of the repairs needed at City Hall are done at once. $133 million is earmarked for tempo- rarily relocating city departments, $165 mil- lion would be needed to make the building move-in ready and $299 million is for the 20-year financing that makes the whole thing possible. While some council mem- bers appeared interested in exploring a phased repairs approach, Duong warned that it would “lengthen timelines and in- crease budget.” He pointed to complications in Boston, a city that found itself in a similar predica- ment, as evidence that an all-in-one dive on the building would be beneficial. The Bos- ton City Hall was designed following a mas- ter plan by I.M. Pei, and the brutalist, 55-year-old structure (which was once voted the second-ugliest building in the U.S.) required $95 million to get whipped back into some kind of fighting shape. For some members of the horseshoe, City Hall repairs would be an irresponsible way to spend such a large sum. Tolbert reminded the council that in the last bond priority sur- vey, residents pointed to infrastructure, parks, homelessness and public safety as the issues they wanted to see funds directed to- wards. City Hall maintenance ranked third from the bottom. “We have needs outside of this building that are great. We have libraries and a police academy that we’re building and fire sta- tions that need to be updated. I understand the focus outside of this building to all of those spaces,” said Council member Kathy Stewart. “My concern is that no matter what we do, whichever direction [we go], we are going to decide how we want to prioritize.” The council members who appeared most skeptical of the report are not members of the committee and were not able to vote on the directive to move the issue to the full council. Council member Cara Mendelsohn, who has been an advocate for saving the building since this discussion began, said her impression of the report was that it was “one-sided, prede- termined and agenda-driven.” Council mem- ber Adam Bazaldua, an advocate in 2024 for including maintenance funding in the bond, said he was not convinced by the presenta- tion that leaving City Hall is the right move. Despite their hesitations, the presenters told the council that they do not believe that an audit of the report is necessary to verify its findings, and that the billion-dollar esti- mation is likely accurate. “While I respect that people have an opinion, it is not relevant to this because I have confidence in the numbers that we’ve presented,” said Linda McMahon, CEO of the Dallas Economic Development Corpora- tion, which helped lead the conditions re- port. “This is not about sentiment, it’s about stewardship of taxpayer money.” ▼ SPORTS MONEY BALL FORMER LAKE DALLAS HIGH SCHOOL STAR QB SUED FOR $1 MILLION AFTER JOINING TEXAS TECH. BY KELLY DEARMORE H ere’s a headline that simply couldn’t have existed just a few years ago: Star College Athlete Switches Schools, Gets Sued for Breach of Contract. Not only does that headline exist now, with increasing regularity, it involves a prominent former North Texas high school quarterback. Last week, the University of Cincinnati sued former Lake Dallas quarter- back Brendan Sorsby for $1 million in fed- eral court for leaving the school to play at Texas Tech in the upcoming football season. Cincinnati is but the most recent stop for the three-star recruit. After graduating high school, Sorsby played for University of Indi- ana for two seasons before joining the Bearcats in 2024, where over the course of two seasons, he racked up impressive stats, all-conference honrs and became the top- rated transfer prospect in this year’s transfer portal class. That position led him to land a one-year name, image and likeness (NIL) deal for $5 million to play for the Red Raiders in 2026. The folks at Texas Tech even paid for a mas- sive Times Square billboard to welcome Sorsby to Lubbock. As it turns out, that didn’t sit well with Sorsby’s old school. “In his lucrative NIL agreement with Cincinnati Athletics, Brendan Sorsby com- mitted to stay and play for two seasons as a proud Bearcat representative,” the Univer- sity of Cincinnati said in a statement to ESPN. “He also agreed that if he left the uni- versity before that time, he would pay the university a specific amount for the substan- tial harm that his breach would cause.” The school says that amount is $1 million in liquidated damages and, according to the ESPN report, they have been “advised that Sorsby refuses to pay the University any- thing.” Predictably, however, Sorsby’s represen- tative doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the school. “University of Cincinnati, through its revenue-share structure, paid Sorsby $875,800 for a season he fully completed and in that time, he generated millions in value for the program,” Ron Slavin said in a statement provided to Courthouse News on Thursday. “Attempting to recover those funds now sends the wrong message to cur- rent and future student-athletes and risks damaging the long-term credibility of Cin- cinnati football.” There was a time when NCAA athletes were prohibited from accepting payments of any kind and would have to sit out | UNFAIR PARK | Nathan Hunsinger Dallas City Hall, built in 1977 and designed by I.M. 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