DALLAS — The city of Dallas is officially on notice.
The organization Dallas HERO told officials it will sue if the city doesn’t start enforcing a camping ban on public property within 60 days, which is required by state law.
Dallas businessman Monty Bennett, the GOP megadonor behind the Dallas HERO Initiative, told us matter-of-factly that if the city doesn’t follow the law, whether it be local, state or federal, it is vulnerable to a number of potential lawsuits.
“The city’s got to follow the law, it’s that simple. What’s interesting is how dramatic people act about it. I’ve followed the law my whole life and somehow I’m still here standing. I don’t know why there’s so much drama around the city following the law,” Bennett said on Inside Texas Politics.
The threat of these lawsuits became possible after Dallas voters approved Proposition S on November 5. That proposition eliminated the city’s governmental immunity, allowing any resident to sue for ignoring city, state or federal laws.
Dallas HERO is the group behind that Proposition and homeless encampments are their first targets.
Bennett says all you have to do is visit Dallas’ hospital district, Stemmons corridor, or even downtown to see the years-long problem firsthand.
“People are camping all over. There are hundreds of locations around town. Certain parts of the city are particularly bad,” he told us.
Bennett says they’re not looking for any specific number of homeless encampments to be shut down immediately, nor are they looking to file a lawsuit in the first place.
He says they just want a plan to address the problem.
“I would imagine that if the city came back with a plan, and said look, here’s how we’ll clean it up over the next, you know, 120, 180 days, that the group would be very amendable to something like that. They’re not looking for a fight, they just want a clean city,” said Bennett.
If you’re interested in what a solution might look like, Bennett says Haven for Hope in San Antonio is a good place to start. Haven for Hope is an entire campus dedicated to supporting all aspects of a person’s journey from the streets back to independence.
Here in Dallas, Bennett says a number of folks are working on a similar concept known as the Refuge for Renewal.
“The problem is the city just has other priorities. They want to spend $6 million on a study to count trees and kiosks downtown and other things. And they need to do the basics first,” argued Bennett.