What happens when a city leaves DART

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Coppell and Flower Mound faced that same decision in 1989. Their experience since offers context Addison voters may want to consider.

Addison is one of three cities still holding withdrawal elections after a dramatic months-long standoff between DART and nearly half of its 13 member cities. Plano, Irving and Farmers Branch all scheduled withdrawal elections last fall but canceled in February after striking a reform deal with the agency. Addison, along with Highland Park and University Park, chose to keep the question on the ballot.

The tension boiled down to a fundamental dispute over fairness. In 2023, Addison, with about 17,000 residents, contributed $16.3 million to DART and received $9.5 million in services, per an EY study. City leaders bristled at what they viewed as a one-sided arrangement.

"The way the original interlocal agreement with DART was written, we were not in agreement because we didn't believe it was right that if we held an election and voted to stay in DART, the General Mobility Program funds would not be available to us," Addison Mayor Bruce Arfsten told the Branch Herald. "For that to be held over our head just seemed kind of heavy-handed."

As part of negotiations, DART agreed to return a portion of collected sales tax revenue to member cities, totaling $360 million over six years through a General Mobility Program for local transportation projects, and to restructure its board so each member city has a representative, reducing the voting power of Dallas. Addison's share would have been $8 million. The council voted in January to put the election on the ballot, then voted again in February, 5-2, to keep it there despite a reform deal that prompted Plano, Irving and Farmers Branch to cancel their own elections, with supporters arguing that regardless of the outcome, residents deserved the right to decide.

Arfsten said the mood in the community suggests residents may want to stay. "The overall temperature that I'm sensing is that folks, even people that don't use DART, they see the value of it and they're willing to vote to keep it," he said. "But I'm certainly not talking to everybody, so it's just anecdotal."

The city is not waiting idly. Arfsten confirmed the council recently approved a contract with Via, a microtransit company, as a transit alternative should voters choose to leave. Microtransit operates on-demand within city limits only and cannot cross into neighboring cities the way DART rail and bus does, a limitation critics say makes it an inadequate replacement. If Addison voters withdraw, DART would stop all services the day after the election is canvassed, including rail, bus, GoLink and Americans with Disabilities Act paratransit, along with service at Addison's newly opened Silver Line station, the city's first light rail stop connecting residents to Plano and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

Coppell and Flower Mound offer the only real-world test case for what suburban life looks like after leaving DART. Both were founding members of the agency in 1983 and both voted to withdraw in 1989, driven by a loss of confidence in DART management after voters rejected a 1988 ballot measure allowing the agency to take on long-term debt.

The DART those cities left, however, was a fundamentally different system. In 1989, DART operated primarily bus service. Light rail did not arrive until 1996, followed by decades of expansion now encompassing 93 miles of track, the Silver Line and GoLink on-demand microtransit.

"We can't really compare voters in a city opting to leave the DART system in 1989 to today," a DART spokesperson said. "When you consider how robust the DART system has become with the addition of light rail, microtransit, the Silver Line and more, the value of our system is in the regionalism it provides. DART today connects North Texas in a way that was a hope forty years ago."

Flower Mound Mayor Cheryl Moore agreed the comparison is complicated. "It definitely is apples to oranges," she said. "Back then it was more of a bus situation. That is not something I feel people would want to approve of in our town."

What Flower Mound's experience illustrates is how permanent that 1989 decision turned out to be. Now home to more than 81,000 residents, the town has no fixed-route bus service, no light rail and no realistic path back into any regional transit system. Flower Mound is ineligible to rejoin DART because it no longer borders any member city, and voters also rejected joining the Denton County Transportation Authority in 2003. Its only transit option today is SPAN of Denton County, a door-to-door service limited to seniors and residents with verifiable disabilities, requiring two days advance notice and running Monday through Friday only.

None of the cities currently weighing a DART exit reached out to Flower Mound to ask what life without regional transit looks like. "No, they have not reached out to me or any of our council or our town manager that I'm aware of," Mayor Moore said.

Arfsten said the topic has not come up in his conversations with Coppell's mayor either, despite the two cities sharing a joint police and fire dispatch arrangement. "I think they've been satisfied with that decision," he said. "I never hear anybody saying, 'I wish we were in DART.'"

What happens May 2 will shape how Addison residents, including seniors, people with disabilities and workers without cars, move through one of North Texas's most transit-dependent communities for years to come. Flower Mound made its choice in 1989 and has lived with it ever since. Addison now makes its own.

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