8 November 6 - 12, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents only about how a team looks in the stand- ings. The renovation proposal that would’ve kept the Stars in the AAC for another 30 years would have allowed the Mavericks to construct a basketball-specific arena else- where, like, perhaps, the site of where the very much in need of renovations City Hall currently sits. Following a recent report that the I.M. Pei building could need more than $300 mil- lion in repairs and updates, the city council has begun the already contentious discus- sions on how to move forward. Selling the property to the Mavericks for a new stadium has already been introduced and has gotten the attention of council members. The idea of the Mavericks having their own arena has been getting more attention recently, although former majority owner Mark Cuban has been discussing the idea for many years. But now that resort and ca- sino magnate Miriam Adelson controls the team following her 2023 purchase of a ma- jority share in the club, a basketball-specific arena paired with a gambling resort, possi- bly in another city, has made headlines. Cohabitating Combatants P ro sports teams entering into legal battles with outside parties, such as the cities they reside in, or even the league they participate in, isn’t a new con- cept by any stretch, but two American pro teams going at it in court against one an- other while they share an arena home seems to be more than rare. Even in a country where NBA and NHL teams in major cities have commonly shared an arena for many decades, we can’t find any other examples of this sort of litigation, at least not of this vari- ety. In this century alone, hockey and basket- ball teams in Brooklyn, Boston, Philadel- phia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Denver, to name a few, have cohabitated season after season and have not duked it out in court to the extent the two Dallas clubs are doing now. Why Now and How Much Exactly? T he element of the Mavericks’ suit get- ting arguably the most attention on- line is that the Mavericks say the Stars violated their arena agreement when the hockey team moved its headquarters to Frisco. This is interesting for a few reasons. The Stars relocated their headquarters up north in 2003, so this isn’t exactly a recent development. And even back then, the team wasn’t headquartered in Big D but in Ir- ving’s Valley Ranch. According to the filing, the Stars were to have their HQ in Dallas; therefore, this alleged breach of contract triggered a clause that enabled the Mavericks to pur- chase the Stars’ share of the AAC and its related entities for, get this, only $110. In an interview with the Dallas Morning News, Stars CEO Brad Alberts says his club opened a Dallas office after the Mav- ericks informed the Stars about their in- tention to buy them out of the AAC in 2024, but that was not enough to keep his team’s arena mates from lobbing this week’s legal bomb. ▼ TRANSPORTATION LESS TRANSIT 3 NORTH TEXAS CITIES DISCUSS ENDING DART RELATIONSHIP. BY ALYSSA FIELDS I t’s been a tough year for the Dallas Area Rapid Transit service (DART). Although the service spent the summer altering its budget in a months-long hearing series mired in controversy to reach a truce with a handful of dissatisfied member cities, it was not enough, and the battle for member cities to reduce their contributions or end deals with DART completely has begun again. The city of Plano announced that it would call a special session this week to dis- cuss adding a ballot measure to allow voters to decide whether the city should sever its ties with DART in the May election. High- land Park and Farmers Branch are also hold- ing special sessions to discuss their dealings with the service. “For years, the City of Plano has worked to hold DART accountable for the hundreds of millions of tax dollars contributed by our residents,” reads the release from the city announcing the special session. “... Despite Plano’s repeated efforts to address this im- balance, DART has maintained that it re- quires every dollar it receives… Given these circumstances, city leaders believe it is time to ask residents directly: should DART con- tinue to operate in the City of Plano?” The announcement from Plano is not en- tirely unexpected. Years ago, the city indi- cated that it would vote to leave DART if it could, and the city’s House Rep., Matt Sha- heen, has filed legislation that would allow the city to significantly reduce its contribu- tions to the service several times. Plano is one of the largest contributors among all member cities, and if it were to withdraw, not only would services end and millions of dollars in infrastructure investment be wasted, but DART’s total yearly budget would decrease by millions, impacting the entire system and every rider. “Obviously, there is a financial impact to DART as a whole,” DART CEO Nadine Lee said at a press conference last week. “We ob- viously would be very concerned about the impact it would have across our entire net- work of services for our riders, and so the thing to remember is that the riders will be impacted by any action that is going to be made.” Lee was joined by the brand new chair of the DART Board of Directors, Randall Bry- ant, who may be having the worst first week on the job of anyone in history. Bryant’s in- duction ceremony was the night before Plano made their announcement. “Honestly, [I am] 24 hours into this new role of mine, and I said here last night, I asked for unity, I asked for a way to expand new cities, I asked for a solution, and this was not the news that I thought I’d hear to- day,” he said. The move comes just days after the grand opening of the DART Silver Line, which runs directly from Plano to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a project that took years to build and faced several delays. It was one of the few wins for the service this year. If Plano and other cities decide to withdraw from DART, that line, and all other services, would halt completely and immediately, according to Lee. “I think the timing is extraordinarily un- fortunate,” she said. “I think we had a lot of really positive feelings about DART, coming out with the Silver Line opening. I think it’s just really heartbreaking. I’m really heart- broken, mostly for the riders, because I think the riders who are impacted, I don’t believe, have a voice in this right now.” Rider Rights T yler Wright is a public transportation fanatic. The vice president of the Dal- las Area Transit Alliance often rides the bus to work in Plano, usually several times a week. He enjoys the ride, but more so, he needs it as part of a single-vehicle household. There are countless other people like him who dart in and out of the 13-mem- ber cities via public transportation. It’s those people, people who live outside of the cities wanting to leave but rely on DART to get into them, that Lee says will be most impacted, and it’s those people who don’t have a choice in the matter. “I’m an Addison resident,” said Wright. “So I can’t vote. I have no way to officially make my voice heard outside of council meetings.” Wright has been following the Plano se- cession conversation since it began, watch- ing the last session on the edge of his seat as Shaheen’s bill to reduce contributions made it farther than it ever had before. By now, Wright has little expectation for Plano and its elected officials, and thinks the city has been plotting for a while and will continue to do so until it gets what it wants. “Valid measures like this or consider- ations to pull out of a mass transit system probably take months of internal conversa- tion,” he said. “It is disappointing from Plano.” In their press release, Plano affirmed their commitment to providing a “micro- transit solution” within city limits if constit- uents elected to leave DART. But Wright says the interconnectedness of DART is the crux of its value. “The need for transit is there regardless of our feelings for DART,” he said. “I don’t know how they’ll meet that need for people who work in Plano but live outside of Plano. I don’t know how they’ll meet that need for paratransit users, or seniors or people who need healthcare.” It’s All About the Money I n their release, Plano cited an inequitable return on service for their contributions, a conclusion drawn from a well-circu- lated third-party financial audit analyzing the 2023 fiscal year. The report found that Plano paid more than $109.6 million but received only $44.6 million in return for services. Compared to Dallas, which contributed $407.8 million, the total service offerings received were $690.5 million. The press release also noted more than $800,000 in executive bonuses as a reason for their desire to leave. However, Lee says the financial audit is misleading and that DART’s budget is easily accessible online. “It pretty much takes us an entire year to prepare our budget for the next year,” she said. “We do it in a very transparent way… We had a very extensive community en- gagement process this past year, particu- larly because of the potential impacts to our service based on our current budget revenues. And so I believe that those accu- sations are unfounded, and I think we are quite transparent.” ▼ LGBTQ MAYBE LOVE HASN’T WON TEXAS JUDGES CAN NOW REFUSE TO MARRY GAY COUPLES. BY ALYSSA FIELDS T he Texas Supreme Court has ruled that state judges are not required to marry same-sex couples on the basis of preserving their own religious beliefs, as reported by KERA. A recent ruling adds a new line to Canon 4 of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct. The amendment was signed by all nine of the courts’ Republican judges and went into effect immediately. The formal decision comes after a 2019 Dallas Area Rapid Transit Randall Bryant is sworn in as the new chair of the board of directors for the Dallas Area Rapid Transit service. Unfair Park from p6
