Over the summer, the Dallas HERO organization successfully gathered enough signatures to put three city charter amendments before Dallas voters on Nov. 5. If passed, the proposals would separately require the city to increase police pay and hire more officers, put the city manager on performance-based pay and allow citizens to sue city officials if they don’t follow the law.
Dallas HERO is a bipartisan 501c4 organization that seeks to introduce citizen-powered amendments to the Dallas City Charter. Over 169,000 registered Dallas voters supported the amendments. Only 20,000 signatures per amendment were needed.
The Dallas City Council placed these amendments on the ballot but also introduced additional amendments, which some believe counteract Dallas HERO’s proposals.
Dallas HERO filed lawsuits against elected officials who voted in favor of the additional amendments.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office filed an amicus brief supporting Dallas HERO, stating the city’s actions contradicted established election integrity precedents.
The “citizen-led bipartisan initiative” claimed the council’s amendments were meant to nullify their proposed amendments. The court agreed, saying the propositions contradict each other and the language would “confuse and mislead voters.”
Pete Marocco, executive director of Dallas HERO, said the initiative started due to a declining number of officers in Dallas.
“t wasn’t just any one person, it was a number of people sort of crying out for saying, ‘Hey, why is our police force continuing to decline in its staffing?’ Marocco said “We were hearing this from police. We were hearing this from members of the community. We’re particularly hearing it from people in South Dallas and West Dallas.”
Marocco started looking at numbers, and found that 72% of South Dallas is in favor of that amendment that HERO is proposing, which is to keep a ratio of three officers to every 1000 citizens.
” In 2015, DPD recommended exactly this change. They said they needed to get from 3600 officers to 4000 officers, but instead they lost 600 and now we’re barely above 3000,” Marocco said. “We’re losing our police chief. When he goes we expect we’ll probably lose even more.”
Dallas HERO says they are politically agnostic, believing that the changes for which they advocate are for the benefit of everyone.
“Oak Cliff has changed a lot over the past 60 years, and when we look at lots of different parts of Dallas, there’s lots of concern,” Marocco said. “And I think a lot of people, particularly in South Dallas, feel very strongly about having an adequate police presence.”
The three amendments, propositons S, T and U, will be on the ballot this November. Below are the descriptions of each amendment.
Proposition S
This proposition would allow any Dallas resident to sue to city to require it to comply with charter provisions, ordinances and state law, and would also waive the city’s governmental immunity from suit and liabilities under the amendment.
Proposition T
If approved, the city would conduct an annual community survey to be completed by a minimum of 1,400 residents, based on their satisfaction on quality of life issues. The results of this survey could result in the city manager earning additional pay based on performance (between 0% and 100% of their annual base salary) or it could result in the firing of the city manager.
Proposition U
City Council would be compelled to appropriate at least 50% annual revenue exceeding the total annual revenue of the past year to fund the Dallas Police and Fire Pension. Any monies remaining of that 50% would be used to increase the starting compensation of the DPD and raise the number of officers by about 900 officers to at least 4,000 total.
