2025 Dallas program agenda

From biking The Loop to birding at the Trinity River Audubon Center, Dallasites are increasingly enjoying the outdoors. However, at the same time, we’re still experiencing unacceptable levels of pollution.

Dallas is in severe non-attainment for ground level ozone and soot pollution, White Rock Lake and the Trinity aren’t safe to swim in, and summers are just getting longer and hotter due to climate change.

We see the solutions to all of these problems all around us: renewable energy, electrification of homes and vehicles, investments in wastewater infrastructure, green infrastructure, and so on. Many of these solutions are in the city’s Comprehensive Environment and Climate Action Plan (CECAP), but progress has been slow since the plan’s passage. We have prepared the following recommendations for the City of Dallas to take in 2025.

Clean Energy

Thousands of Dallasites have made the switch to clean solar power, and that’s good news! It’s helping residents both save money and reduce pollution.

The CECAP sets a goal that rooftops in Dallas will produce as much solar energy as would power 730,000 homes and that the city be carbon neutral by 2050. To meet that goal, Environment Texas urges the City to:

• Adopt the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s SolarAPP+ to streamline the permitting process for residential solar
• Install new solar panels and repair older solar panels on city property
• Make it easier for residents and businesses to install rooftop solar panels by meeting the SolSmart Silver designation’s planning, zoning, and permitting best practices or better by the end of 2025

Clean Air and Clean Water

Dallas is failing to meet federal standards for smog and soot, putting residents at increased risk of respiratory problems and even premature death. Climate change will make this problem even worse as rising temperatures speed smog formation. Dallas’s CECAP goal is to meet federal air quality standards for smog by 2030, but air quality has only deteriorated since 2020. We need to take action now if we’re going to turn this around.

It is also unsafe to swim in the Trinity River, White Rock Lake, and Bachman Lake due to high levels of pollution. Our 2020 report Texas Stormwater Scorecard gave the city a grade of just 56% for its efforts to fight stormwater pollution. In addition, carcinogenic PFAS “forever chemicals” pose a major risk to public health. The CECAP’s goal is to eliminate polluted waterways by 2050.

To meet these goals, Environment Texas urges the City to:

• Update the city’s greenhouse gas inventory to track the city’s progress on emissions since 2019
• Add green stormwater infrastructure to the city’s drainage manual and provide incentives for developers and property owners to build and maintain green stormwater infrastructure
• Switch to PFAS-free firefighting foam and firefighting gear
• Transition city owned lawn equipment to all electric models and promote electric incentives for both residents and commercial lawn care companies

Wildlife and Open Spaces

Dallas parks and recreation facilities are often outdated and insufficient, hundreds of migratory birds die in Dallas every year due to building strikes, and key pollinator insects are dying off en masse across North Texas. Environment Texas urges the City to:

• Take the opportunity to replace the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center’s glass with bird-friendly glass during its renovation. Surveys show that the convention center is the most deadly building for birds in Dallas, due to window impacts
• Implement the 2024 parks and recreation bond to invest $345 million in parks and trails
• Landscape city-owned properties with native plants and establish a program to maintain and expand city-owned pollinator prairies

Transportation and Land Use

Giving Texans the freedom to live in neighborhoods where they can walk, bike or take transit to where they need to go helps all of us by reducing sprawl, traffic and air pollution. The CECAP’s goal is to reduce single occupant vehicle travel from 88% today to 62% by 2050. To meet that goal, Environment Texas urges the city to:

• Expand the use of electric vehicles, including in the city fleet, buses for DART and local school districts, and for the general public
• Continue to fully fund DART and encourage the development of neighborhoods that are bikeable, walkable, and integrated with transit
• Fully fund the Dallas Bike Plan, create a bicycle advisory committee, and streamline the building of bike infrastructure in the city
• Remove parking minimums, allow residential uses in commercial areas by-right and reduce minimum lot sizes to avoid sprawling development and its associated environmental impacts