6 April 11 - 17, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents somebody’s warehouse,” a property owner told council members last year at a council meeting. “I’m ready to sell my property,” she con- tinued. “All of us on North Goode Road are ready to sell our property. But so far the de- veloper that wants to buy our property has been ridiculous in his offer. … I am told that he is having several real estate agents call us. This week five calls to buy my house. Neigh- bors reported the same thing, so we’re being harassed. I’d rather see single-family homes than warehouses.” Driven by a former mayor with ambitions to grow Wilmer into a warehousing power- house, the city used the state’s local govern- ment code — the laws that prescribe what smaller city governments can do — to annex nearly 140 properties in late 2022 and early 2023. It found itself enmeshed in lawsuits, perhaps because it got a little too ambitious or downright greedy in corralling new areas to its odd boundaries. (On Google Maps, the outline of Wilmer’s city limits look like a child’s drawing of a Decepticon in mid- transformation.) The bitter fights over annexation got so bad that one litigant, Heran Patel, a property owner and CEO of a private equity firm in Dallas, became a whistleblower and faced a defamation lawsuit from the former mayor and city leaders because, as a judge later pointed out in Patel’s counterclaim, he dared to speak out on a public matter. Using frivolous lawsuits to stifle free speech is also against the law in Texas, inci- dentally, even in Wilmer. “It’s the Devil’s Den,” Hefner says of the city council. “We got the devil up there on the podium.” J oe Aldrich says Wilmer is “about 15 miles from the big city but 50 years away from it,” where good old-fash- ioned cronyism and small-town attitudes “are not up to contemporary standards.” For example, Aldrich says if you pay your water bill for the year in advance, as he had done, you’ll still get charged a late fee for not paying monthly. Wilmer didn’t have much of a tax base, which former Mayor Don Hudson says made it difficult to get through the year. Hudson, now in his late 70s, moved to Wilmer in the 1960s after meeting and mar- rying a girl who grew up there. “There are good people in Wilmer, and there are some who like to keep things stirred up,” he says. Hudson, who lived next door to Aldrich, claims the city spent years fighting Dallas County over control of the city’s extraterri- torial jurisdiction, a defined buffer zone just outside a city’s borders that cities are quickly losing influence over. Then, Dallas developer Mike Rader came to town with a 360-acre high-tech intermo- dal terminal — that’s a regional railcar load center — for the Union Pacific Railroad. It eventually became part of the inland port on 7,500 acres between Wilmer and Hutchins. He’d been working on the project with Union Pacific since the late 1990s, in the be- lief that it would set the stage for growth in the region, according to an Oct. 5, 2018, D Magazine profile. “It took me seven years of persistence to convince the largest railroad in the United States to locate in Southern Dallas County,” Rader told D Magazine. “... This South Dal- las growth has been the biggest accomplish- ment in my career. I’m excited to see the opportunity for more diverse growth, into technology and office, increasing the eco- nomic well-being of the area.” In 2005, Union Pacific’s $70 million fa- cility became the catalyst that Radar needed. It was expected to bring 30,000 jobs and mil- lions in prop- erty taxes to the area. If it brought jobs, most workers live outside Wilmer, and the city’s prop- erty tax reve- nue increased from $1.5 mil- lion in 2015 to $3 million in 2023, according to the city’s budgets. The total tax levy on all properties in 2023 was $7.3 million. Rader’s catalyst wouldn’t have been pos- sible without city and county officials, real estate brokers and the railroad, with whom, D Magazine reported, Rader had established working relationships, increasing his land holdings and influence in the area. Rader couldn’t be reached for comment. As Jim Schutze reported for the Observer in November 2008, the inland port went through years of permitting, planning and politics to bring “a combination of gigantic railyards wedded to huge trucking centers tied to warehouses the size of small cities. Some of it is on the ground already, spread over thousands of acres of old goat pasture.” And while then-Dallas Mayor Tom Lep- pert was pushing “governmental hamstrings on the inland port,” city leaders in Wilmer and in nearby Hutchins were “saying they and the developers are getting along grandly, and they don’t want to risk killing the golden goose,” Schutze wrote. Hudson says that he had a good relation- ship with Rader, who he says was “doing his best to bring jobs to Wilmer that a lot of people wanted to help the town grow and prosper.” “There was a time when I voted against Mike Rader,” Hudson says. “I thought the world of Mike. He was an ex- cellent busi- nessman.” Hudson’s re- lationship was so grand with Rader and other developers that, Aldrich says, he ignored advisors and implemented a 10- year tax abatement at 85% instead of 50% for the warehouses if they were inside city limits. “That’s a lie,” Hudson says. “Joe had to stir up shit in order to get people to read his blog and didn’t have a clue of what was go- ing on.” Hudson doesn’t remember what the abatement percentage was then but does re- call the 10-year period. In 2019, the abatement percentage was based on total appraised/assessed value, ranging from 25% abatement up to seven years to 70% abatement up to 10 years, ac- cording to the city’s abatement guide. Hudson sold his 10-acre property with two trailer houses and two barns to Rader in 2006 for about $700,000 because Aldrich says the developer needed the property to complete his Sunridge Business Park, a 500- acre location for high-flow distribution cen- ters. It’s a similar claim other property owners made to the Observer. Hudson’s and Aldrich’s properties were down the street from Hefner’s, off North Goode Road, and the only two in that area located inside the city, Aldrich says. Hudson says there was another property on the other side of him. In 2008, Hudson voted on the first invol- untary annexations of properties along Belt Line Road that drew a lawsuit from a prop- erty owner. A general-law city like Wilmer has never had the authority to annex prop- erties over the objections of owners. Larger so-called home-rule cities like Dallas could involuntarily annex until the Legislature reined in the practice in 2017 and 2019 be- cause of public outcry, according to a March 2023 report by Texas Public Policy Founda- tion. “Cities were using involuntary annexa- tion to enhance revenues and conscripting people in the ETJ [Extra-Territorial Juris- diction] and would unilaterally annex peo- ple,” says James Quintero, the director of the Center for Local Governance at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Now [the state Legislature has] shifted gears and is looking at ETJ abolishment and also balanc- ing the scales with disannexation. The ETJ concept is unhelpful.” But Wilmer was using a section of the state’s local government code governing smaller cities to “declare” property as part of the city if there were records to show it had been treated as such for 20 years and Mark Graham Wilmer is offering sweet deals to companies to build warehouses in town. Unfair Park from p4 >> p8 “Wilmer is about ‘15 miles from the big city but 50 years away from it.’” -Joe Aldrich
