Adam Medrano

Councilman says he has worked with neighborhoods to take care of local needs

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

As Adam Medrano runs for what would be his fourth and final term on the Dallas City Council, he said he’s thinking about what he’d like to accomplish before leaving office and about plans for life after the council.

Before leaving the council, he said he’d like to complete some projects he started, including bond projects for complete streets, alley and street repair, “spraygrounds” and, of course, the long-promised redo of Cedar Springs Road including markers on both ends of The Strip, landscaping and more.

The new start date for the Cedar Springs project is the end of July, according to Medrano. Final plans should be released before that. Bids would have to go out by June for the council to approve a bid in July so that work could begin by the end of that month.

And spraygrounds? Two parks — Grauwyler Park along Harry Hines Boulevard and K.B. Polk Park off Lemmon Avenue near the Frontiers of Flight Museum — will get this water feature with fountains that spray from ground level that children — well, mostly children — play in. Medrano said the sprayground at Klyde Warren Park is one of the most popular attractions in that park.

“I’ve worked with each neighborhood to see what they want,” Medrano said.

His district, which includes downtown and parts of Oak Lawn, is the most densely-populated area in the city. Traffic has become more and more of a problem, Medrano said, so transportation policy is something he said he would continue to address in his final term.

City-wide issues on his agenda are affordable housing, paid sick leave and economic development. Because both Congress and the Texas Legislature have failed to address the problem of paid sick leave, cities have begun tackling the issue themselves. San Antonio enacted a paid sick leave ordinance last August.
In an interview with Dallas Voice, Medrano said he would bring the issue before the council if he were to win a fourth term, but just days after the interview, the council considered and passed a paid sick leave ordinance.

Medrano has chaired the Mayor’s LGBT Task Force since he was first elected to the council in 2013. Among the accomplishments he said he’s most proud is bringing the city attorney and city manager together with the task force to rewrite or update ordinances to include both sexual orientation and gender identity and get those modifications passed.

Reviewing city ordinances and passing them through council took several years, but wherever there are nondiscrimination protections in city code, the entire LGBT community is now included.

In addition, Medrano introduced and passed transgender health benefits and moved nondiscrimination protections from being an ordinance to being part of the city charter through an election in whiche 76 percent of voters approved the measure.

That happened the same day Houston voted to repeal its nondiscrimination law.

For his final term, Medrano said his passion would be tackling LGBT youth homelessness. He’d like to see a youth drop-in center and transitional housing.

“I’m disappointed the homeless shelter isn’t done,” he said, adding that hhe knows it may not be completed before he eventually leaves office. But he does expect plans for it to be in the works before he leaves the council.

“We need someone to partner with us,” Medrano said. Those partners could include Promise House, Dallas Hope Charities or Outlast Youth, all of which that have experience providing services, including housing, to homeless LGBT youth.

Medrano describes his style as being constituent-focused. A current example, he said, are five newly-designated ride-share pick-up and drop-off locations in Deep Ellum. He said the police department came to him asking for help, noting that officers patrolling that area wouldn’t be able to respond to problems there quickly because of crowded streets, with Uber and Lyft drivers creating a large part of the congestion. So, Medrano brought together police and ride-share representatives, and “we sat in a room and figured it out,” he said.

Signs went up around the core area of Deep Ellum last week, and ride-share vehicles now have staging areas under the highway and five locations to pick up or drop off passengers in an area that’s approximately three blocks by four blocks.

Medrano has lived in District 2 his entire life. That’s why, he said, he cares about the neighborhood so much and hopes voters give him a fourth term on the council.

During his first three terms, Medrano has worked as a city councilman and, during his current term, as deputy mayor pro tem full time. He said it would be odd to return to his previous city job with the Park and Recreation Department, so he’s beginning to think about what will come next.

For this election, Medrano said he is proud that he has endorsements from Dallas Police, Dallas Fire and Rescue and even the Dallas Morning News as well as Stonewall Democrats, DGLA PAC and the LGBT Victory Fund.

He does have one additional goal for his final term: “I want to be grand marshal of the Pride parade,” he said.