Can this South Dallas improvement district help security and beautification efforts? Here’s how you can decide its fate.

Scottie Smith II, who co-chaired the South Dallas Fair Park Area Plan Task Force, is leading a petition process to create a new Sunny South Dallas Public Improvement District, or PID.

A PID is a self-imposed property tax to provide an area with specific services, such as providing security, landscaping, street cleaning and recreational improvements.

PIDs currently exist in Deep Ellum, Downtown Dallas, the Arts District, Redbird, Uptown and more.

Smith, also a community developer and real estate broker in South Dallas, believes a PID is a tool to benefit the people who have businesses and live in South Dallas right now.

“We’re at a really, really interesting point in South Dallas, and knowing the amount of development coming over here that I have wind of, coming up and down the MLK corridor, I’m afraid there’s not going to be a way for the community to benefit from that for real,” Smith says. “We’ve seen it before where development came extremely quickly, and then people started getting displaced.”

Smith says the City of Dallas Office of Economic Development approved his petition plan last week, and he has scheduled a series of community information sessions to garner the needed signatures and support required.

How would the Sunny South Dallas PID work?

If the petition moves forward and Dallas City Council approves the PID, everyone who owns property within the district would pay an additional annual assessment of 15 cents per $100 of property value. For example, a property appraised at $300,000 would pay an additional $450 into the PID annually.

A map shows the proposed PID encompassing stretches of Al Lipscomb Way, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., S Fitzhugh Ave. and Robert B Cullum Blvd. It also shows Fair Park as part of the PID.

Smith estimates the PID would generate at least $9 million over the next decade. A proposed annual budget of the PID lists its funding priorities: public safety (using 42% of the budget), district beautification (20%), business retention and recruitment (7%), and capital improvements (7%).

The PID would be managed by Forest Forward, and Smith is recruiting people to a steering committee to oversee the funds.

City Council could consider approving the Sunny South Dallas PID as early as May 2026, and the PID would be operational by January 2027.

A rocky history with PIDs in South Dallas

South Dallas property owners previously approved a PID in 2016 to focus on public safety, but its original fund managers, Hip Hop Government, disappeared along with the money.

In 2018, the South Side Quarter Development Corporation—which manages the South Side PID in the Cedars neighborhood—took over the fund’s management, but neighbors successfully shut down the PID in 2023 through an effort led by Hank Lawson and the then-Pointe South Revitalization Committee.

They called the PID “taxation without representation,” arguing that neighbors just trying to make ends meet were carrying an extra financial burden that neither benefited nor involved them.

Smith pitched his Sunny South Dallas PID at Pointe South’s October meeting, with Lawson and others continuing to stand firm against a PID, even one with new boundaries.

Smith says he is telling those in opposition, “Even if you’re not in support of it, I need your help getting people to the meetings so they can learn about it.”

David Silva Ramirez contributed to this report.