Everything below actually happened, and every item links to its source. We just refuse to be boring about it. This edition covers August and September, and every date in it is exact — which, as regular readers know, is a promise we take more seriously than we used to.

Congratulations to Daniel Burdette, Richardson’s newest council member.POLITICAL Council appointed him unanimously to Place 3 on Sept. 28, with Dan Barrios recusing, and he took the oath the same night. The twelve-week process finished on exactly the dates the city published in April: finalists Sept. 14, one name Sept. 21, the vote and the oath Sept. 28 (Community Impact, Sept. 29).

Burdette is a 25-year Richardson resident, vice president of product development at the software company MyDirectives, a Parks and Recreation Commission member, a Wildflower! volunteer and a Leadership Richardson and Richardson CARES participant. He serves the remainder of Barrios’s term, which runs out on May 1, 2027 — roughly seven months, and then the voters get the seat back. “We had a thoughtful selection process with a number of people willing to step forward and serve,” Mayor Amir Omar said. Burdette’s own first words from the dais: “To my new colleagues on the dais, thank you for supporting me to serve in this role” (Richardson Today).

And you already voted on how this works. Under the city charter, a single council vacancy other than the mayor’s is filled by appointment on a majority vote of the remaining members. Council adopted the twelve-week process in April 2026: a public application window, interviews in open session, deliberation at regular meetings, then a vote. Thirteen residents applied by Aug. 7. On Aug. 17 council cut the field to eight, each needing at least four votes to advance. The eight sat for public interviews on Aug. 24 — three minutes of opening and closing statements, two minutes per answer. On Sept. 14 council named three finalists unanimously: Burdette, Jeffrey Alan Davis and Jordan Raymond Noret. On Sept. 21 the three got 30 minutes apiece and Burdette emerged as the lone finalist, again unanimously. That is the charter you ratified, running on time (Richardson Today).

Worth being precise about: Barrios’s July 13 resignation took effect only upon the appointment of a successor. He held the seat and voted through budget adoption on Sept. 21, then recused himself from the Sept. 28 vote on his replacement. The council operated at full strength throughout (Community Impact, July 14).

↑ Back to the top

Council adopted a $432,226,829 budget for fiscal 2026-27 on Sept. 21 and held the property tax rate at $0.54218 per $100 for the third straight year (Richardson Today, Sept. 25; Community Impact, Sept. 23). The debt service piece of that rate, $0.21779, had been adopted separately back on Aug. 17 in the state-mandated standalone motion, and it carries $0.01153 more than the minimum needed to service current debt — on purpose, to retire principal faster and keep a cushion. Every budget motion on Sept. 21 passed unanimously.

The rate held. The bill did not. The average Richardson homestead went from $411,065 to $424,062, up 3.16%, so the city’s slice of a typical tax bill rises about $70 a year. Add sewer up $75, water up $60, drainage up $12 and residential solid waste up $12, and a typical household is out about $229 more over the year. The $160,000 senior exemption stays.

The Coalition’s view is that flat was the right call here, and it is the same view we recorded last edition when this was still a proposal. Costs do not hold still because we would prefer them to. A rate cut deep enough to erase that $70 has to come out of somewhere, and the only somewheres big enough are public safety pay in a city that was sitting 10th of 13 on police compensation, or the bond program voters themselves approved in May. Holding the rate while eliminating 19 frozen positions is what containing costs actually looks like — even when the envelope in your mailbox files a dissent.

Two details in this budget deserve more attention than they got. The first: council voted to pay off $2.9 million of Series 2016B general obligation bonds early, saving $557,000 in interest. That is a city choosing to spend cash now so it stops renting money later, which almost never makes a headline and should. The second: Richardson’s business personal property exemption jumped from $860,000 to more than $280 million under a new state law, which is a structural change to the city’s tax base that nobody voted on locally and everybody will be living with. Council members talked openly about a “multiyear approach” given economic uncertainty and whatever the 2027 legislative session does next.

Pay increases inside the budget: 5.5% merit for sworn police and fire, 3.5% for civilian and general employees. More on what that buys in the public safety section. The public hearings, for the record, drew exactly one speaker on the tax rate — a resident named Kathleen Born, concerned about rising valuations — and zero on the budget itself.

↑ Back to the top

The $8 monthly base charge for water and wastewater has not moved since June 2012. It moves now. The new rates took effect Oct. 1 and land on your November 2026 bill: $8.00 to $9.60 for a standard 3/4-inch meter, with the phase-in reaching $20 by 2030. A 1-inch meter goes to $13.08. Seniors 65 and up on 3/4-inch and 1-inch meters keep the $8 base charge, though their volume rates move with everyone else’s (city water rate change page; Richardson Today). Water volume rates rise 4% this year, sewer 12%.

We would rather see this done in the open than absorbed quietly out of another fund. North Texas Municipal Water District’s wholesale water cost is $4.14 per thousand gallons today and is projected to reach $8.05 by 2036 — roughly double — and Richardson has utility systems past 40 years old that need $83.89 million of capital work over five years. A water fund quietly running at a loss is just a tax nobody voted on.

The piece genuinely worth noticing is the meter equivalency: until now, a business pulling water through a 10-inch line paid the same $8 base fee as a house with a 3/4-inch meter. By 2030 that 10-inch commercial meter pays $1,533.40 a month. Charging by the size of the straw is not a rate hike; it is arithmetic finally reporting for duty.

One mechanical change that will quietly matter to somebody’s bill: residential wastewater averaging now uses only the previous year’s November-through-February water usage, and throws out the highest of those months, instead of a three-year average. If you had one bad February with a running toilet, that February no longer follows you around.

↑ Back to the top

On Aug. 10 the police department brought its license-plate reader program to council and answered questions for a long time, which is more than most departments volunteer.OUR VIEW The numbers, as presented: 20 city-contracted stationary cameras at 14 major intersections, capturing the rear of vehicles only — no faces, no owner data. Roughly 30 more privately owned Flock cameras operate in Richardson outside the city’s contract. Images are deleted after 30 days unless attached to an active investigation; fewer than 1% are retained. Officers must enter an offense type, a reason and a case number for every search, and dual authentication was switched on in August. 146 outside law enforcement agencies across about 15 DFW-area counties have access; federal access is limited to the FBI, U.S. Postal Inspectors and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and outside agencies cannot re-share Richardson’s data. Supervisors audit by random sampling monthly, an AI flags odd search patterns for weekly review, and the department counts more than 26,000 alerts since March 2024 and 180 documented cases over two and a half years involving charges, arrests or missing-person recoveries. Payments to date: $210,900. The contract comes up for renewal in December 2027 (Community Impact, Aug. 11).

Residents pushed back, at that meeting and again on Aug. 24, on warrantless searching and on attribute-based queries. Councilman Barrios said he regretted his earlier vote to approve the system and opposed expanding it. Councilman Joe Corcoran asked for an established audit sampling standard. Councilwoman Jennifer Justice asked for the access and use policies to be published online.

On Aug. 10 council directed staff to publish the outside-agency roster, the audit policy and the audit reports, to set an audit sampling standard, and to obtain written confirmation from Flock on 30-day deletion. The Coalition’s recorded position is that the readers are a legitimate public-safety tool and that the policy governing them belongs in public, in writing. Four things, specifically — how long data is kept, who inside the department may query it, which outside agencies get access and on what basis, and how misuse is caught and reported. The department already logs every user search, which is most of the work; saying so in public costs nothing and buys the benefit of the doubt the next time somebody asks a hard question.

↑ Back to the top

Last edition we called police compensation the quietest line in the whole budget. This one answers it. The FY27 budget carries a 5.5% merit increase for sworn police and fire and 3.5% for civilian and general staff. Richardson went into the year 10th of 13 comparable area cities on police pay and 9th of 13 on firefighter pay. Staff projected that after the increase the city ranks first and second respectively in October 2026, then settles to third and fourth by June 2027 as the rest of the region catches up (Richardson Review recap of the Aug. 3-4 budget workshop).

The staffing picture underneath it is the part that explains why: a police vacancy rate around 7.5%, 10 open officer positions and five dispatcher vacancies. 41% of Richardson police officers have five years of service or less, and 25% are eligible to retire right now. On the fire side, 41% are at five years or less and 17% can retire. A Class 1 rating gets earned by people, and people compare paychecks — but they also compare benches, and a department where a quarter of the officers could leave tomorrow is a department buying time as much as talent.

Worth noting for completeness: Richardson’s Incident Support Task Force deployed to the Central Texas floods in July, and the Aug. 10 meeting included an Emergency Management presentation for National Preparedness Month. The fire department turned 100 in June — 179 fire personnel and five civilian staff, ISO Class 1 since 2014.

↑ Back to the top

The Burlington at 300 S. Plano Road is getting smaller on purpose, and the rest of the building is going up for grabs. Zoning File 26-15, filed as “Richland Village,” rezones about 6.7 acres from Local Retail with special conditions to a Planned Development, and Burlington shrinks from 73,725 square feet to roughly 34,000, freeing about 38,974 square feet for other tenants. The City Plan Commission recommended it unanimously on Aug. 6 and council approved it unanimously on Aug. 17 (Community Impact).

The newly permitted uses read like a list of things that are not impulse retail: health club, bowling alley, movie theater, martial arts school, fine arts studio, print shop, pet sales and grooming, veterinary office. Expressly prohibited: car wash, child-care center, convenience store, motor vehicle repair, smoking establishment. The applicant’s zoning consultant argued the building is “obscured from the intersection by other developments,” which makes destination tenants a better fit than the kind of store you pull into because you saw it. Several gyms have reportedly already asked.

The neighborhood details are the ones worth reading, because somebody clearly asked for them. 379 parking spaces, 7.1% landscape coverage with four new islands and canopy trees, the existing eight-foot masonry screening wall maintained, a 165-foot setback from the adjacent residential neighborhood, and a new light pole at the southwest corner added at the neighborhood’s request. That last item is a small thing and also the entire point of a public hearing.

Also in the window: Zoning File 26-14 at 200 S. Cottonwood, approved unanimously by council on Aug. 10, adds retail, bakery and barber/beauty salon uses to an existing office building. Meanwhile the Interurban Design District‘s six-building commercial project (ZF 26-12, developer Stephen Graham of Simple Development Partners) had cleared council on July 27, just before this window opened, so it has moved from napkin sketch to approved buildings to merely waiting.

And the 1956 zoning ordinance starts getting replaced this month.

Richardson’s comprehensive zoning ordinance dates to 1956, and since 2023 council has granted 69 special zoning variances — which officials themselves have described as the sound of an ordinance that no longer fits the city. The replacement is a Unified Development Code merging the zoning ordinance, the subdivision and development regulations and the sign code into one document. Council approved the phase plan May 18: Phase 0 consultant selection through September 2026, Phase 1 diagnostic assessment October through December 2026, drafting in 2027-28, adoption targeted for early 2029. Cost: $900,000 to $1.1 million, from special project reserves rather than the general fund (Community Impact, May 21; Richardson Today). Whether a consultant was actually selected before Phase 0 closed on Sept. 30 is unconfirmed as of this writing.

Where the Coalition stands: not yet. This is the biggest rewrite of the city’s rules in seventy years, and we would rather watch the diagnostic do its work than take a position on a code that does not exist yet. We are paying close attention, and we expect to have something to say once there is a draft on the table. In the meantime, the box below is the part that matters most.

↑ Back to the top

The good news first, because the other one deserves its own paragraph. On Sept. 17 the city announced support for an AT&T expansion at the Lakeside campus: an additional 190,000 square feet at 2201 and 2221 Lakeside Boulevard on a 12-year lease, with landlord Provident Corp. putting in roughly $11.5 million of building and tenant improvements. The city’s piece is a grant of up to $4 million in two installments, plus a possible $500,000 bonus — the first installment tied to AT&T’s lease commitments, parking acquisition and signage visible from US 75, the second contingent on a future tenant taking about 175,000 square feet at 2201 Lakeside. AT&T has to keep operating there to keep it. “AT&T’s decision to expand its presence at Lakeside is a significant investment in Richardson,” City Manager Don Magner said (Richardson Economic Development Partnership). We could not confirm which council meeting authorized the grant agreement; the September recaps do not show it.

Where the Coalition comes down on this one: we support it, with conditions, and the conditions are the point. Businesses carry more than half of Richardson’s property tax base (city budget work sessions), and a strong business community has always been a big part of what keeps Richardson vibrant. Recruiting new employers matters. Keeping the ones already here matters just as much, and a 12-year commitment from one of the largest is worth paying for. The Coalition’s view is that the right way to pay for it is exactly how this deal is built: pay for performance, with no money changing hands until the conditions the city set have actually been met. And because it is public money, the terms belong out in the open where residents can read them. Pay on results, show the work, and we are for it.

And then there is Sept. 4, which was a bad Friday on Telecom Parkway. Layoffs at id Software — the Richardson studio that made Doom and Quake, owned by ZeniMax Media, owned in turn by Microsoft — took effect that day. 136 Richardson-based employees: 96 in-office and 40 remote, out of 158 across Texas. The WARN notice had been filed with the Texas Workforce Commission on July 6. Roughly 146 of the 158 affected workers are represented by the Communications Workers of America, with some termination dates to be set through effects bargaining. The roles cut were programmers, developers, producers, designers, artists and engineers — which is to say most of what a game studio is (KEDT / Texas Newsroom). It was not a Richardson decision and there was no Richardson lever to pull, but 136 households in and around this city had a September that the budget numbers above do not capture, and a report about Richardson should say so plainly rather than file it under business briefs.

For the record, and it is a small mercy: no new WARN notice was filed for any Richardson employer in August or September 2026. The id Software filing is the only Richardson notice of the year.

Elsewhere in the ledger: council put $5 million into the Sherrill Park Golf Course maintenance barn and training center on Aug. 17, on top of $700,000 approved in April, for $5.7 million total; construction started in September and is due by March 2027 (Community Impact, Aug. 18). The Titleist Fitting Center there broke ground Sept. 19 — 2,650 square feet, two hitting bays, TrackMan, and the first municipal fitting center in North Texas, which is a sentence Richardson gets to say and Plano does not. Council also approved a $415,000 Service Center roof renovation and a $134,000 annual creek maintenance contract on Aug. 17. And the Richardson Chamber of Commerce named Tony Moline president and CEO on Aug. 6; he started in September and was introduced to council on Sept. 14.

↑ Back to the top

Eleven storefronts opened in Richardson across August and September, and three closed. The headline act is Truck Yard, which opened Sept. 1 at 740 S. Central Expressway in the Richardson Restaurant Park — food trucks, a kitchen, a bar, daily live music, and a city press release describing the site as “previously underutilized,” which is municipal for “a lot” (Richardson Today).

And the ones that turned the lights off. Thai Soon closed in late August after 25 years in Richardson and nearly 40 years in business, which is longer than most restaurants get and still not long enough for the people who ate there every week. Halal Munchies closed its location at 2000 N. Plano Rd., and Only Deals — the overstock store — shut down in August. Reasons were not disclosed in any of the three cases (Community Impact business roundup, Sept. 26).

Two housing numbers that do not agree with each other, offered here with the disagreement intact rather than resolved: Community Impact reported Richardson’s median home price up $27,500 year over year in July, then down $24,800 year over year in August. Both are single-month comparisons against a single prior month, which is how you get a market that appears to change its mind every four weeks.

↑ Back to the top

The temporary library at 2360 Campbell Creek Blvd. closes Oct. 11 at 6 p.m. The renovated building at 421 W. Arapaho Rd. is expected to reopen later this fall, and the city says a specific grand opening date will be announced in the coming weeks. The earlier target had been September (Richardson Today).

What you still get during the gap: the myRPL digital library stays up — e-books, audiobooks, databases, language learning — phone service continues during normal hours, staff answer AskRichardsonLibrary@cor.gov, and the monthly book clubs plus the Halloween “Spookilicious” program relocate to City Hall. Interlibrary loan items are due back by Oct. 2. Bring them back. They are not going to forget.

What you get when it opens: the building goes from 71,583 to 83,576 square feet, with a relocated main entrance at the southeast corner and a drop-off lane, a glass-enclosed staircase, a large event space, a test kitchen, a makerspace, expanded youth services across two floors, two teen study rooms with monitors and whiteboards, and — the detail that will decide whether your children ever leave — a bean bag pit and a wall-size Scrabble board (Community Impact, Sept. 16). The project carried a $31.4 million guaranteed maximum price against a $48.1 million total allocation, funded from $36.1 million of the 2021 bond program plus $12 million in certificates of obligation council approved in January 2023.

And New City Hall is still slated for move-in in early 2027; live construction cameras run at cor.net/NewCityHall.

↑ Back to the top

On Sept. 30 UT Dallas announced its endowment had crossed $1 billion — $1.06 billion as of Aug. 31 — after growing roughly 120% in under a decade. The New Dimensions campaign has raised $619 million against a $750 million goal, including nearly $140 million in new endowed gifts and 447 new endowed funds. The endowment now underwrites 161 faculty positions and about $8.5 million a year in student support. It is the second-largest endowment among UT System academic institutions (UT Dallas).

The campus kept growing too. The Naveen Jindal School of Management’s third building — 132,000 square feet, with an AI lab, a 40-seat boardroom and, critically, a second campus Starbucks — opened Aug. 24. Still coming in spring 2027: the O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum’s music building (66,900 sq ft, roughly 680-seat performance hall) and a 360,000-square-foot Student Success Center with a 14,000-square-foot ballroom, dining for 700 and a 400-seat lecture-in-the-round (UTD campus transformation update, Aug. 21).

The rankings came in on Sept. 22 and they were good. Forbes put UTD #1 in North Texas, #31 among U.S. public universities and #92 overall. U.S. News has it in the top 60 publics for the fourth straight year and #3 in Texas, with Information Systems #12 among publics and Business Analytics #8. A new bachelor’s in Materials Science and Engineering launched this fall in the Jonsson School, aimed squarely at the semiconductor industry that happens to be headquartered down the road. And the Texas Instruments Alumni Association gave $200,000 on Aug. 26 to establish a student support fund at the Center for Vital Longevity, honoring the legacy of Max Post.

↑ Back to the top

The Richardson ISD board adopted a 2026 tax rate of $1.1319 per $100 on Sept. 17, by a 6-0 vote. The maintenance-and-operations piece came down 1.33 cents to $0.7419 — the district says that is its lowest M&O rate in 42 years. The interest-and-sinking piece went up four cents to $0.3900, carrying the debt from the 2025 bond election. Net change: up 2.67 cents (RISD board recap).

Behind the rate: certified taxable value of $35.56 billion across 65,526 parcels, split almost evenly between residential at 50.6% and commercial at 49.4%, with a 73.7% reappraisal rate. 29% of residential accounts qualify for the over-65 levy freeze. The district also approved its inaugural Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee to watch the $1.4 billion Bond 2025 program — which is the right instinct, and roughly twenty times easier to set up before the money moves than after.

On the facilities side, the Bond 2025 Career and Technical Education Center — going on district land next to the Operations Center on Greenville Avenue — starts planning in October 2026, design in February 2027, construction in fall 2028, and opens August 2030. The Environmental Science Center gets a renovated existing building in fall 2027 and a new one on the Big Springs site after that, out of the floodplain this time (RISD, Aug. 7).

Separately, on Sept. 21 the Richardson City Council passed a proclamation recognizing RISD Superintendent Tabitha Branum for more than 29 years in Texas public education. A city council proclamation is the municipal equivalent of a standing ovation that gets minuted.

↑ Back to the top

As of Oct. 1, money starts coming back. Under the General Mobility Program agreement member cities approved in February, DART returns roughly $26 million to Richardson over six years, with the annual distribution landing each Oct. 1. The funds must go to projects that benefit DART’s system or provide complementary services — so it is restricted money, not a rebate check. The same deal restructured the DART board from 15 members to 22, guaranteed every member city at least one seat, and cut Dallas’s voting share to 45%, ending its majority (Community Impact). Richardson’s specific project list for the first allocation is not in the public record we can reach; we are not going to name streets we cannot source.

The Silver Line’s Milestone 8 slid to the end of the year. DART’s board approved a contract modification extending the deadline from Aug. 31 to Dec. 31, 2026, at no additional cost against the project’s authorized $1,560,737,685. A schedule extension with no change order attached is the rarest document in public infrastructure and deserves to be noted as such.

North Texas Municipal Water District adopted a $978.4 million budget on Sept. 24, up about 8% from $902.4 million, with $555.4 million of that in capital spending and $1.6 billion in capital projects planned for the coming year. Over five years: $3.4 billion for the water system, $1.2 billion for wastewater, $50 million for solid waste, financed through bonds and the Texas Water Development Board (Community Impact, Sept. 30). Richardson is a member city, which is the direct line from that budget to the base charge on your November bill.

Four road projects are currently inconveniencing you on purpose, all funded by the 2021 bond program (Community Impact, Sept. 18):

Also: the two 400-foot steel arches over the US 75 DART bridge went up over the summer, spanning as much as 80 feet across the highway, with blue and white accent lighting expected within about two months of installation. Mobility program manager Daniel Herrig called them a “visual gateway” into the city (Community Impact, Aug. 4). Whether the lighting finished by Sept. 30 we cannot confirm, so drive by and judge for yourself. And underground sewer rehabilitation work is running near the Promenade shopping center and the Berkner Park neighborhood, with no published completion date.

↑ Back to the top

Everything above already happened. This is what has not — the items still headed to a vote, a date or a decision, where a phone call or ten minutes at a podium still counts for something. This is also where the Coalition weighs in, because a position on a finished vote is just commentary.

The 2026 bond program starts spending. Year 1 of the voter-approved $223.4 million program runs in this new fiscal year with $36.94 million to be issued, and the bonds sell in phases over six years. Year 1 work: design for six street segments, concrete panel replacement, alley construction, signal equipment, school zone design; a new apparatus building behind Fire Station 5 and additions to Fire Station 6; design for Canyon Creek Pool renovations and the Breckinridge pedestrian bridge and trail connection; playground improvements at Huffhines Woods, Creekhollow and Richland parks; residential sidewalks; an erosion control project; and design for Lois Branch flood prevention (Richardson Today). No sale date has been announced.

The Unified Development Code diagnostic opens this month — October through December. See the zoning section for why this is the most consequential thing on this list and the easiest to miss. The Coalition has not taken a position yet and is watching it closely.

The library’s grand opening date. “Later this fall,” announced “in the coming weeks.” The temporary branch closes Oct. 11 at 6 p.m. regardless, so there will be a gap.

Flock camera policy. Six items were asked for on Aug. 10 with no deadline attached. The contract itself does not come up until December 2027, which means the next year is the policy conversation, not the procurement one. The Coalition’s recorded position stands: keep the readers, publish the policy.

Short-term rentals. The ordinance took effect Aug. 25 — 500-foot spacing between rentals, existing registrations grandfathered on the city attorney’s advice to avoid court challenges, and a higher annual registration fee. Registrations run by calendar year, so the next renewal cycle opens Jan. 1, 2027. As of July there were 170 short-term rentals identified citywide, 111 registered and 59 not, spread across 29 neighborhoods. No enforcement action and no litigation has surfaced since the rules took effect. The Coalition has no position here and that remains deliberate; we said last edition we would revisit if enforcement or a suit actually landed, and neither has.

Three zoning cases are in the public-notice phase: Twilight Plaza at 508 Twilight Trail, Apollo Middle School at 1600 Apollo Rd., and Richardson North Middle School at 1820 N. Floyd Rd. Hearing dates are not posted yet.

The May 1, 2027 city election is seven months out, and it is going to be a big one. Place 3 goes back to the voters when Burdette’s appointed term ends that day. Councilman Joe Corcoran has said he will not return after the 2027 election, and he intends to serve out his term through it. That is at minimum two seats in play, and at least one Richardson observer expects contested races across most of the dais. The city secretary’s office confirms the date; the candidate filing period has not been posted yet (city secretary elections page). Seven months is enough time to think about running, and the single most useful thing a resident can do between now and January is decide whether the person they wish were running is themselves.

A standing note on the podium.OUR VIEW Council chambers continue to draw public comment on national and international matters outside the city’s jurisdiction. The Coalition’s view is that council time is finite and belongs to the items council can act on: the budget, the water system, the streets, the cameras and the code.

↑ Back to the top

↑ Back to the top