The Dallas Wings’ practice facility at Joey Georgusis Park in west Oak Cliff is on its way to construction.
Dallas promised the team a practice facility, and it should deliver. But what a wasted opportunity to build a site from scratch in an industrial district near the edge of Dallas instead of reviving an existing location closer to the city core.
A few days ago, the Dallas City Council voted to approve a roughly $3.3 million supplemental agreement with McKissack & McKissack, the project management firm tapped to oversee the completion of the practice facility. That practice facility was supposed to be built in the Dallas Wings’ new home base at the Dallas Memorial Auditorium downtown. But the auditorium is part of the sprawling convention center redevelopment, and delays with that project forced the city to look for other options.
The total cost of the practice facility is estimated at $48.6 million, down slightly from the $55 million figure presented earlier this summer. That’s welcome news in a tight budget year.
Opinion
However, we renew the concerns we voiced earlier. The Wings were brought to Dallas with the promise of helping revive downtown and drawing more visitors, but their practice space will sit eight miles from the city center.
While the allure of a new professional sports venue is understandable, Dallas already has several underutilized spaces closer to downtown, including Fair Park’s landmark buildings, for example, that could be given a new purpose.
In a June memo, city staff told council members that they had reviewed privately owned buildings as possibilities, but that ceiling heights and zoning were impediments. The city said it had also considered the Coliseum at Fair Park but decided against it because of conflicting dates with a tenant and complications with modifying the building to meet WNBA specifications.
We wonder, though, how deeply the city studied Fair Park as an option. What about a new training facility somewhere else on the grounds? Was that feasible?
Retrofitting an older structure or building a new one at Fair Park might have entailed additional expense. But Fair Park is a historical asset that sorely needs the investment. Making the complex a year-round attraction has been a perpetual problem, as we are exploring in our series The Future of Fair Park.
After a failed privatization deal, City Hall is back in charge at the park. A practice facility for the Wings could have been a golden opportunity for the site, one we wish the council had seriously discussed in public meetings.
The signing of additional project management contracts is a disappointing reminder that costs are already stacking up elsewhere, just as construction gets underway in west Oak Cliff.
We want the Wings to succeed. Their sellout season tickets and No. 1 draft pick this year show women’s basketball is thriving. But City Hall could have been smarter about aligning the Wings’ need for a practice facility with its own need to fix up and reinvigorate its real estate, whether Fair Park or another site, to the benefit of surrounding neighborhoods and Dallas taxpayers.