Voters have now approved bond money for Dallas police academies four times in the past four decades, a WFAA review of previous reporting revealed.
DALLAS — Dallas voters approved the city’s bond plan to pay for a new police training center, but a new academy was never built.
The year was 1985. It happened again in 2003 and again in 2006.
Now there are concerns the latest voter-approved proposal for a police academy may fail to materialize once again, repeating a pattern that has plagued the city for decades.
“Now that it’s within our grasp and we can finally see and believe that we’re actually going to have an academy, it just all goes up in smoke,” said Dallas Police Association President Jaime Castro. “This has been decades in the making.”
Dallas city leaders are now returning to the drawing board once again — after acknowledging the proposal advertised to voters before last year’s election would not work, and after drawing heavy criticism from councilmembers last week on a plan some said had the appearance of a “bait and switch.”
“We are committed to providing the promised law enforcement training at UNT – Dallas that the voters approved in the 2024 Bond Program,” wrote city leaders in a memo to councilmembers Friday.
Voters have now approved bond money for Dallas police academies four times in the past four decades, a WFAA review of previous reporting revealed.
In 1985, voters approved $1.8 million in the bond program to purchase more than 100 acres of land at the northwest corner of Interstates 45 and 20 off JJ Lemmon Road north of Hutchins. The city purchased the land for $1.65 million in May 1988, according to an article in the Dallas Morning News from the time.
The newspaper reported in September 1989 that the city delayed its plans to build the academy there to avoid having to ask voters to approve a $40 million bond sale for construction.
As of Monday, it appeared the land was still vacant nearly 40 years later — and no trespassing signs indicated it was still owned by the city of Dallas.
Then, in May 2003, the city once again asked voters for money for a bond to finance a new police academy. Voters obliged, authorizing $7.9 million of general obligation bonds to build in the Cadillac Heights neighborhood, a city briefing from 2005 showed.
The city used the bulk of the money to buy the homes of the people who lived in the flood-prone neighborhood, the briefing showed. Although the cost began to increase beyond the initial budget, the briefing indicated.
The city returned to voters in 2006, once again asking them for money to buy land in Cadillac Heights for “future location of city facilities.” It passed with 57 percent of the vote, records show.
A report to councilmembers last fall showed only half the $22.5 million voters authorized for the Cadillac Heights property had been spent. The city now plans to build a public park on the land.
In the 2024 bond, voters authorized $50 million toward a police training academy, initially advertised at UNT-D.
But instead of a training facility for new recruits on the campus, the city’s revised proposal unveiled Wednesday called for an in-service training facility on campus for mostly existing officers. A separate facility for fresh recruits would be built at a location yet to be determined and on a timeline that lacked definition.
Councilmembers questioned the wisdom of further delaying the replacement of the outdated and foul-smelling existing recruit training center. Former DPD Chief Eddie Garcia also triumphed the initial UNT Dallas plan as a major recruiting tool as the city looks to hire additional officers, which would be a more difficult sell if the existing facility remained in place indefinitely.
“We need this academy to be successful, we cannot have this be a debacle,” said DPA President Castro. “I’m hoping that times have changed.”
The Friday memo implies new recruits will have “classroom training” at UNT-D under the revised plan city officials plan to unveil in April. “We are committed to creating a plan that will break ground in summer of 2026,” the memo from Friday said.
Before the memo, City Manager Kim Tolbert said Wednesday the city was considering various other city-owned properties to build the second training academy for new officers.
One of the locations she mentioned was off JJ Lemmon Road — the same location the city initially bought for a police academy nearly 40 years prior.
