South Dallas Public Improvement District: How to Vote

Scottie Smith II wants South Dallas to get ahead of the wave before the wave gets ahead of South Dallas.

Smith, a community developer and real estate broker along the MLK corridor, is leading a petition drive to create the Sunny South Dallas Public Improvement District, a self-imposed property tax mechanism that would fund security, landscaping, street cleaning and other neighborhood upgrades in an area stretching from Al Lipscomb Way down to Robert B. Cullum Boulevard, with Fair Park sitting inside the proposed boundaries.

He’s not wrong about the timing. Development pressure along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard has been building for years, and Smith says he’s already hearing about projects that haven’t gone public yet.

“We’re at a really, really interesting point in South Dallas, and knowing the amount of development coming over here that I have wind of, coming up and down the MLK corridor, I’m afraid there’s not going to be a way for the community to benefit from that for real,” Smith said. “We’ve seen it before where development came extremely quickly, and then people started getting displaced.”

A PID is a tool Dallas knows well. Deep Ellum, Uptown, Downtown, the Arts District and Redbird all operate under similar structures, each one funded by an additional assessment that property owners within the district pay on top of standard taxes. Not charity. Not a grant. A self-imposed levy that puts neighbors in charge of a specific pot of money.

Under the Sunny South Dallas proposal, property owners inside the district would pay 15 cents per $100 of appraised value annually. A property assessed at $300,000 would add $450 a year to the fund. Smith estimates the district would generate at least $9 million over the next decade. The proposed annual budget leans hard into public safety, directing 42 percent of funds there. District beautification gets 20 percent. Business retention and recruitment draws 7 percent, and capital improvements another 7 percent.

Forest Forward, already operating at 1921 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., would manage the PID. Smith is assembling a steering committee to oversee how the money gets spent.

The City of Dallas Office of Economic Development approved his petition plan, and Smith has scheduled four community information sessions over the coming weeks to build the signature count and community support the process requires before the proposal can go to Dallas City Council.

Those sessions run as follows: Dec. 3 at 6 p.m. at Forest Forward Offices, 1921 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.; Dec. 10 at 6 p.m. at The Office of Tabitha Wheeler, 2111 S. 2nd Ave.; Dec. 13 at 11 a.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center, 2922 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.; and Dec. 17 at 6 p.m., also at the Recreation Center.

Smith also co-chaired the South Dallas Fair Park Area Plan Task Force, so he’s navigated Dallas planning bureaucracy before. He knows the signatures are the easy part. Keeping a neighborhood coalition intact through a City Council vote and the years of budget decisions that follow, that’s the harder work.

The Dallas Free Press first reported Smith’s petition effort and the proposed district boundaries.

For Preston Hollow readers who spend more time north of Northwest Highway than south of I-30, the mechanics here are worth understanding. PIDs don’t require city budget allocations or council horse-trading every fiscal year. They generate their own revenue from within the district, and the people paying the assessment have direct influence over how it gets spent. That’s the structure that cleaned up Uptown two decades ago and gave Deep Ellum its current lighting and security infrastructure.

Whether the same model translates to South Dallas depends largely on how many property owners show up to those December meetings and sign the petition. Smith’s pitch is simple enough: get organized now, before outside money decides what the neighborhood looks like. The alternative, he suggests, is watching the development happen to you rather than with you.

Worth showing up for.