The Republican National Committee's midterm convention at the American Airlines Center last month cost city departments a combined $804,229.46, according to a final accounting prepared for the City Council's Committee on Finance, which meets Monday at 1 p.m.
The two-day convention ran Sept. 9 and 10. A memo dated Oct. 26 from Kevin Oden, director of the Office of Emergency Management and Crisis Response, breaks the total down by department:
- Dallas Police Department: $661,335.11
- Dallas Fire-Rescue: $119,634.13
- Transportation and Public Works: $16,625.00
- Emergency Management and Crisis Response: $6,635.22
Police accounted for roughly 82 cents of every dollar.
The memo says the final figure came in "substantially lower" than the preliminary planning estimates staff discussed with the committee in August. It does not restate those estimates. An Aug. 24 memo from Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland shows Oden was scheduled to brief the committee verbally that day on the event and the city's role; that memo itself contains no cost figures.
According to Oden's memo, the "overwhelming majority" of the spending was pay for employees who were already on duty, costs already accounted for in the departments' adopted budgets, rather than additional spending that had not been budgeted.
