What’s happening to City Hall? And did alley trash ever really get figured out? Are the Dallas Stars leaving us to go north? What are we doing with the Neiman Marcus Downtown? Why can’t we stay on budget?
Dallas isn’t quite good at definitive decisions.
And now there’s been talk of closures, regions, flagships, naming rights, coffee shops and passport offices. We don’t know what to do about our libraries.
There have been three options that have been discussed to mitigate funding issues, one of which includes branch closures. City council members and some residents hope to keep all branches open, but there has not been a resolution to keep all libraries open permanently. The current budget problems don’t make things clearer.
It all started with the City of Dallas’ Fiscal Year 2025-26 Budget. City leaders did not include funds to keep the Skillman Southwestern Library open. It also stated that the Dallas Public Library was tasked with “reimagining services through the creation of a library regional model,” which would utilize flagship locations with extended services and identify up to four branches for potential closure in the FY 2026-27.
This was approved on Sept. 18, 2025. After outrage, a few last-ditch saving efforts and a tug-of-war, Skillman Southwestern Library closed Sept. 27, 2025.
“No one wants to close libraries, but my predecessor was put in a position, just like I am being now, with significant budget pressures,” says Manya Shorr, Dallas Public Library director. “And she looked at a map and saw that there were a number of very close libraries to Skillman Southwestern and made the best recommendation she could at the time.”
At the beginning of the year, Shorr presented a regional model plan to the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee, which would create five flagship libraries that provide extended hours and expanded programming and services to offset the closure of the branches.
The selected flagships, Fretz Park, Vickery Park, Pleasant Grove, Hampton-Illinois and Bachman Lake, were chosen based on proximity to major intersections and public transit. Additionally, two more flagships are planned to be selected for the Southwest and East regions, depending on the 2027-28 FY development.
To address a $2.6 million budget reduction requirement for the next fiscal year, Oak Lawn, Skyline, Renner Frankford and Arcadia Park branches were slated to close to provide general fund savings. Since Arcadia Park is maintained in partnership with Dallas ISD, there’s a potential for the district to take over the management of the branch.
The recommendations for the closures were selected based on three elements: community need (median household income, population of high school completion, population under 5 years old), library usage (checkouts, computer sessions, programs, program attendance) and library coverage (reachability within a 15-minute drive for residents, square footage of the branch).
“So when we learned the names of the libraries, of course, and we wanted to make sure that none of the libraries were closed. That’s when we all came out, people who lived in those areas, as well as just library lovers in general, saying, ‘This is silly,’” says Denise McGovern, executive director of the Friends of the Dallas Public Library.
At the conclusion of the January committee meeting, council members urged Shorr to return with a proposal to keep all branches open, evaluate the proximity of branches to similar City facilities (such as community, recreation and cultural centers), expand information on community access, additional features to consider (such as voting and other external services), and revenue considerations.
Following the presentation of the regional model, a survey commissioned by the Friends of the Dallas Public Library was conducted from Feb. 13-26.
In the survey, 97% of respondents supported that funding should be maintained or increased. Majorities opposed closing four branch libraries in exchange for expanded hours at five others (73%), opposed the regional/flagship model in general (72%) and opposed the closing of some libraries even to avoid reductions in hours, staffing and services at remaining libraries (53%).
“The survey … is just one data point that we used to make updated recommendations to the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee because it’s not statistically significant,” Shorr says. “It was just an open survey, and granted, 4,000 people filled it out in two weeks, which is amazing, but it did not necessarily represent the entire city.”
Outrage against the library closures seems to be more conceptual than personal. Forty-seven percent of respondents said closures wouldn’t affect them or declined to answer.
When asked about their preferences on how to solve the funding issue, the majority of respondents thought the City should increase funding toward libraries. If unable to do so, the majority thought libraries should keep all branches open and reduce hours citywide. Closing some branches to utilize the flagship model was the third choice for most respondents.
Willingness to travel to a library if their library was closed was about 50-50.
The results of the survey were included in an April update to the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee. Shorr presented the three options. One, the regional model with four closures and five flagships, originally presented Jan. 20, 2026. A second option with flagships and no branch closures. Lastly, keeping everything the same, no closures and no flagships option.
The second flagship model where all branches stay open, was the most well-received by the committee.
“That’s wonderful, except that still doesn’t solve the issue of the $2.6 million in the budget,” McGovern says. “And so if the money continues to be cut, the entire system is still intact and has a lot of opportunity, but still doesn’t have the funding.”
To address the funding issue for the flagship model, Shorr presented options to help raise revenue in the branches. Proposals included increased room rental costs, incorporating paid parking to the central library and seeking to add passport offices to libraries in areas that could use that service.
Around the horseshoe, District 7 Council member Adam Bazaldua suggested additional revenue options such as sponsorship and naming-rights opportunities or leasing options for coffee shops.
“I think the problem is the public library is not designed to be a revenue-driving department,” Shorr says, adding that to make it so, the library system’s mission of being “free and open to the public” would need to change. “We don’t have a model that supports raising that kind of revenue that would offset our budget. So I can’t imagine we would ever make up enough money … to fill a $2.6 million budget shortfall.”
In a similar vein, McGovern is wary about how operations could be affected if all 29 libraries remain open without the $2.6 million in funding to the library system.
“The biggest part of it is getting the funding back so that it doesn’t have an impact that causes loss of hours or personnel,” McGovern says. “I mean, it’s a lot of money, but not a lot of money in the giant pot of the budget.”
But it’s quite expensive to run buildings, and reductions would have to be more extensive if the flagship model was implemented. Shorr says one of the ways to find budget dollars is by substantially reducing staff positions and hours.
It’s not like the City just needs to scale back $2.6 million. Currently, the City has an expected $34 million shortfall and has a spending and hiring freeze. This means we’re not over budget yet, but we’re likely not going to stay in line with the biggest budget that Dallas has ever seen at $5.2 billion. The bulk of the deficit is public safety overtime and increased medical claims out of the self-insured employee health fund. But decreased revenue streams like property and sales taxes, while infrastructure needs continue to surge, aren’t helping either.
On May 3, Mayor Eric Johnson released a statement condemning council members for speaking out against closing libraries after approving a budget last year that recommended the potential closure of up to four library branches.
“Fiscal responsibility is a year-round, full-time job. If your elected officials talk about it 11 months of the year but refuse to support spending reductions when voting on the budget — or if they vote in favor of budget reductions only to fight against their implementation — Dallas’ budget will never be fixed,” he said.
Dallasites are expected to get a more definitive plan when the city manager releases her proposed budget in mid-August, Shorr says.
“I would say that no library director wants to close branches, least of all me,” Shorr says. “I’ve been in public libraries for 30 years. It’s gut wrenching to think about closing library locations, but the City of Dallas has not adequately funded the Dallas Public Library for 25 years, and we’ve really reached a tipping point where our budget does not support the number of locations that we have, and so the goal in recommending the regional model with the closures was really to rightsize our budget so that we could create sustainability in service to our community going forward.”
Budgets for libraries are tight nationwide, but Dallas’ issue is also “not the norm,” Shorr says.
She pointed to a chart in the regional model presentation from January that compares Dallas to other cities of similar populations, which seems to show that Dallas’ library system is underfunded.
Despite this, Shorr wants libraries to offer more services to Dallasites, not less. But the City may have to think outside the box to accomplish that goal.
“No matter what happens, we will still be exploring creative and innovative ways to offer more library services in the future,” Shorr says. “They’re going to look different than what Dallas is used to right now, which is just standalone libraries. But I’ve been talking about this for a year, the idea that we have more libraries in retail areas, whether strip malls or malls, that we have more partnership opportunities, that we have smaller footprint libraries that don’t cost as much. That, along with the flagships, is the future of the Dallas Public Library and how we’re going to offer more to people in the future.”
Which plan will the City ultimately go with? That’s unclear, and nothing is off the table yet.
