The City Plan Commission could vote Thursday on an amendment to the Dallas Development Code that could eliminate Dallas residents’ right to petition for a hearing to close businesses that are proven to be harmful to the community.
The City Plan Commission meets at 9 a.m. and is expected to vote on code amendments aligning the city of Dallas with the Texas Local Government Code. This follows the state’s adoption last year of SB 929, which changed how cities can process the closure of nonconforming businesses, also known as “amortization.”
In the past, amortization has resulted, for example, in the shuttering of a car wash where attempts to curb drug crimes had repeatedly failed. Amortization has also shut down a small auto repair business that had been at its location for years, but when city planners rezoned the area, the business was forced to close.
A business can be found to be “nonconforming” when its operations harm residents’ well-being, such as generating pollution or exposing residents to crime.
Dallas activists and residents say the amendment proposed by the city’s attorney’s office is going too far to prevent residents from having a hearing.
“This is a terrible policy idea. If the city is trying to prioritize which nonconforming uses to put out of business first, they probably need some kind of process that determines how harmful they are,” said Jim Schermbeck, director of Downwinders At Risk, a grassroots environmental group.
“There is no opportunity for the residents to force a hearing on those health harms,” he said.
For more than 30 years, Downwinders At Risk has advocated for clean air in underserved communities. The group has been involved in the efforts to rezone neighborhoods in industrial zones to prevent what it sees as environmental injustices.
“We have no comment,” said Ariel Wallace, a public information officer with the city of Dallas, responding via email when The News reached out to speak with the city’s attorney’s office. She referred a reporter to the City Plan Commission’s agenda.
The city attorney’s office is proposing to create a “nonconforming fund,” a fund to initiate the process of closing a business.
This fund would cover the amount of money that the city would pay to a business to stop operating. According to SB 929, cities have to pay the costs incurred by the owner that are directly attributable to closing the business.
The money for the “nonconforming fund” can be allocated from the city’s general budget, according to the attorney’s recommendations. But the proposal did not specify how much should be allocated annually or how else money could be raised for the fund.
The amendment proposes that if the “nonconforming fund” has insufficient money, the application shall be deemed incomplete. If sufficient funds are available, the board shall hold a public hearing to determine whether the continued operation of the business will hurt nearby properties.
A dozen residents and local environmental groups wrote a joint letter to the City Plan commissioners urging them to reject the attorney’s office’s recommendations. In the letter, they condemned the linking of a resident’s right to apply for this process to available funding.
“What this proposal says is that unless you have enough money in the bank today to put a nonconforming business out of business, you don’t even get to look, you don’t even get to have a theory on whether it’s causing public health harms or not,” said Schermbeck.
In the letter, the groups recommended that the city make an inventory of all businesses that might be harmful to the community and rank them based on adverse impact, and determine the cost of compliance for all as the basis for the tax needed to be imposed to cover expenses if the business selected the payment option.
Since October 2023, Janie Cisneros, leader of Singleton United/Unidos, a neighborhood group in West Dallas, has tried to initiate the closure process against the GAF, a shingle company in her neighborhood. But without a law in place, her petition has not been accepted.
In December, Cisneros filed a $250,000 lawsuit against the city and the Board of Adjustment, the quasi-judicial body that reviews petitions filed by a resident or a council member that claims they cannot or do not want to comply with the provisions of the Dallas Development Code.
A new hearing date for Cisnero’s lawsuit is scheduled for June 25, after it was postponed in April.
The Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee met and discussed the proposed amendment on Oct. 3 and recommended the item move forward to the City Plan Commission on Nov. 14, 2023. On Feb. 15, 2024, the city attorney’s office briefed the City Plan Commission.
If the staff recommendation is approved on Thursday, the item will be placed on the City Council agenda for a final vote.
