Visit Dallas Sucks Another Five Years From City of Dallas

Visit Dallas wins. Taxpayers Lose. City Council Surrenders.

Dallas City Council by a vote of 14-1 voted to continue the Visit Dallas contract without putting it out to bid or serious structural reforms.

In January 2019, Visit Dallas was the subject of an audit showing six figure executives salaries and money spent on benefactors neices and nephews as city ambassadors while studying abroad. The audit found Visit Dallas did not demonstrate how it had spent $ 30M in Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) revenue and Dallas tourism public improvement district cash. It also had not made payments to the city for improvements to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.

Currently multiple members of the Dallas City Council are calling on the City Manager to Defund Dallas Police, yet only one, Cara Mendelsohn, had the backbone to vote to Defund Visit Dallas. Mendelsohn was the only Council Member voting against this contract with a negative Return on Investment for the City of Dallas.

Visit Dallas Operations

The operations of this group are easily called into question, but worse, they openly advertise things to do in other parts of the Metroplex. Currently their website advertised hotels in Denton and Frisco, i.e. City of Dallas taxpayers are subsidizing tourism to assist other cities’ tax base.

According to one email that made the rounds of several Facebook groups including our page, Other Side Dallas, VisitDallas, the DBA for the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau, has a long history of misusing taxpayer funds, creating misleading reports, promoting tourisms for cities other than Dallas, and has always been incompetently led under previous leaders who were all forced to resign due to financial irregularities and whose current CEO faced similar issues in Pittsburgh.”

None of these issues were addressed.