At long last, confirmation: The Dallas Mavericks and city officials are officially discussing – maybe at this very moment – a deal that could plant the team’s...
Dallas Mavericks CEO Rick Welts, left, chats with Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson during a second-half timeout in the Sacramento Kings game at the American Airlines Center on Feb. 10, 2025.At long last, confirmation: The Dallas Mavericks and city officials are officially discussing a deal that could plant the team’s next arena where Dallas City Hall stands.
This is not exactly what Rick Welts, the Mavs’ CEO, said over lunch earlier this week. And City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert still won’t give a straight answer to straight questions about how the land beneath Dallas City Hall became a jump ball.But we’re all grown-ups here. So when Welts says, “Based on the City Council vote, we now have the opportunity to talk to the city about the structure of a deal, and that’s new for us,” we all know what he’s talking about.that directed Tolbert to further study repairing City Hall and to “explore options for the disposition of the City Hall site.” In case anyone walked away from that 16-hour meeting on March 4 thinking that momentum for razing and replacing I.M. Pei’s City Hall with a new arena had slowed just because a lot of people opposed to tearing it down spoke into an open mic.That’s especially true given the Mavericks’ timeline that ends with a July decision about where the team will build a new arena and some 50 acres’ worth of amenities that Welts said will include a practice facility, hotels, apartments, retail, restaurants, a medical facility and a Live Nation-controlled music venue. The Mavericks have already pushed past their original March deadline, with no wiggle room left if the team is to meet its deadline of playing in a new arena come the start of the 2031-32 season. So it’s now or never if the city hopes to keep the Mavericks downtown. Dallas Mavericks CEO Rick Welts has been far more visible and far more vocal about the team's future home than city officials.for one more NBA team. And he said a lot when we sat down this week, as he’s wont to do of late over the increasingly loud sound of the ticking clock City Hall has told us to ignore.The city manager, on the other hand, sent only a brief statement dispatched by a spokesman, which concluded: “It is our practice not to negotiate in the media.” It’s also city leadership’s practice not to talk to the media nor, by extension, the residents of this city. We’re just told, if we’re told anything at all:. Which is increasingly impossible to believe when there’s no vision, no plan, no leadership, just a bunch of people fighting for their scraps of downtown. We’re told, over and over, to stop talking, stop asking, stop looking at the mess of their own making. So let’s look no further than the, which the council this week stuck with building their $81 million practice facility on public parkland because the city fouled up construction cost by $27 million. The WNBA team will also have to wait two more years before it can move into downtown’s Memorial Auditorium – which may very well sit next to whatever the Mavs hope to build on Marilla Street. A Mavericks spokesperson confirmed this week what we’ve suspected all long: Welts and ownership didn’t look at City Hall and say, “Yeah, let’s do it there.” The official word is that the team “did not originate the conversation with the city of Dallas regarding a downtown venue.”Welts gave more detail Friday morning during a Sports Economics panel hosted by the Greater Dallas Planning Council, when he revealed that Tolbert first approached the Mavericks “over a year ago” about 1500 Marilla. “City Manager Tolbert came to us and said, ‘Look, I’ve got to move out of City Hall. I can’t afford to operate what we do in that building going forward for the taxpayers,’” Welts said, according to audio captured by our senior sports business reporter Eric Prisbell. “And we said, ‘OK, you know that doesn’t have anything to do with us, but at some point in time, you’ll tell us what’s available, and then we can sit down and have a conversation about it.’” Dallas City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert and Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson during the open-mic portion of the City Council meeting that began March 4 and ended the morning of March 5. At the end of 16 hours, nine members of the council approving resolution that directed Tolbert, in part, to "explore options for the disposition of the City Hall site."Earlier this week, I asked Tolbert how 1500 Marilla became the downtown go-to. This is what she said. “Since being named Interim Dallas City Manager and subsequently appointed to the permanent role, I have met with representatives of the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars regarding their futures in Dallas,” she said in that statement. “These discussions have included the teams’ need for a modern fan-friendly arena experience. Regarding discussions about the future of City Hall, the Dallas City Council directed me to explore options, including the disposition of the City Hall site.”That’s the extent of her statement. A city spokesman also attached that March 4 council resolution, which, Welts said, made it possible for the team and city to officially begin those discussions Tolbert won’t discuss. “Up until this point, we’ve not been able to have any discussions with the city manager’s office about any sort of specifics about what a deal could look like,” he said. “But now I’m told by the city manager that that 9-6 vote allows us to sit down and start to talk about the parameters of the deal.” The Dallas Mavericks want to pick a site for a new arena by no later than July. Dallas City Hall appears to be standing in the way.Welts said earlier this week those discussions were “imminent.” A source confirmed they met Thursday afternoon. “Up until now, the level of conversation has not been specific at all,” he said. “Now we can start to explore if we can find the parameters of a deal that’s good for Dallas and good for the Mavericks.”. He confirmed that yes, of course, absolutely, “we have been having periodic meetings with the city to discuss sites and talk in generalities about what this could be.” But only now, he said, would there be “a series of meetings that will be talking about what a deal structure could possibly look like.”At which point I reminded him: That 9-6 vote to which he’d referred wasn’t about “downtown.” The vague, amorphous“When you talk about downtown,” I told him, “people will read that and say, ‘Well, he’s not being specific about what we all know he’s being specific about.’” To which he responded, “Well, City Hall is not available today, so we can’t make a deal on a site that’s not available.”But it’s now a few tomorrows later. And before you know it, those tomorrows will flip the calendar to July. It’s clear the Mavericks are getting antsy. I asked Welts if he was relieved he could finally talk to City Hall about … OK, fine,“Yeah,” he said. “It has been frustrating for the Mavericks, and I think maybe it has been frustrating for the city, as well. But it was very clear to us that until the council gave permission to the city manager’s office to have those discussions, those discussions were not going to happen.” I wrote about how then-Mayor Mike Rawlings was all-in on then-owner Mark Cuban’s plans for a new Mavericks arena At the time, the AAC was just 15 years old. But as Rawlings said then, “The what-if is always out there for sports owners and developers, and hopefully we have a city that’s willing to explore that.”The case for Cooper Flagg: Why Mavs’ phenom should win Rookie of Year over Kon Knueppel
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