Sunnyvale Moving Forward with $36 Million Bond for Capital Improvements

On Tuesday, August 5th, Town Council met with staff in a special session to go over the proposed 2026 budget and the funding arrangements for several large capital improvements to the town. The budget was mainly presented by Director of Finance Miykael Reeve, who has been with the Town since April 2023.

Discussions of the town’s finances will continue during the upcoming Town Council meetings on August 11th, when the Town Council will vote an a preliminary determination of the tax rate for 2026. The preliminary budget will then be published to the town website on Friday, August 15th, and on September 8th the town will hold a public hearing on the tax rate and budget. On September 15th, Town Council will then vote to approve a $36 Million bond issuance that would fund:

• Our new animal control facility: $5 Million
• Design & land purchases for a new Town Hall and Police Station (our current Town Hall building will then become our Library/Activity Center space): $3.145 Million
• Design & development of new fields at Jobson Park: $8.3 Million
• Upgrades & redevelopment of the sports fields at Vineyard Park: $1.905 Million
• Utility work on the water line on E Tripp: $5.2 Million
• Relocation of utilities along US 80 (required by TXDOT as part of their expansion of US 80): $6.45 Million
• Upgrades to the Riverstone Pump Station: $6 Million

For the Town of Sunnyvale, it will be a large bond offering, but it’s not all being paid out of property taxes. The park improvements will be paid for by our 4B Economic Development Corporation, which is already funded by sales taxes. The water line, pump station, and utility relocation work will be paid for out of the Town’s utility fund, meaning that $8.145 Million for the animal control facility and the new town hall and police station is the remainder impacting the town’s budget (there’s another wrinkle here in that some of the animal shelter money is also coming from our Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone or “TIRZ” funds, so that number is even less).

More to come about each capital project in coming posts, but here are a couple quick takeaways:

• The parks are being funded now. I saw some emails this week relaying a rumor that the Town Council was going to kill funding for Jobson Park now that the election is over. While I attended the budget meeting August 5th, it was clear the Town Council has every intention of completing the park projects as quickly as possible. Jobson Park is 23% of the total funding of this bond offering, so I’m confident that by the time I enter a nursing home, we will have baseball fields at Jobson.
• Our Town Manager had probably miscommunicated (misconstrued?) the timeline for our park projects. Turns out you can’t start building a park until you fund that job, and it seems like the Town Council wasn’t being told that projects were going unfunded, even though work agreements had been signed! Some members of the council seemed exasperated that the project on Vineyard was still running behind, when they’d been told just two months ago that Vineyard would be done by Fall 2025 (it’s now looking like another 18 months, according to Interim Town Manager & Police Chief Bill Vegas).
• Some of these projects are a necessity due to our growth as a town and a metro area. More residents means we need to upgrade our pump station. More town services and town staff mean we need a bigger town hall building. Our utilities were laid down along US 80 decades ago, and with TXDOT expanding US 80 we have no choice but to relocate those utilities – we are in their right of way.
• Currently, the Town of Sunnyvale pays Mesquite for 911 dispatch and jail services. That contract price increases by 10% every year until it expires in 2028–and I doubt they’ll be offering us a great deal to renew that contract. If we have a proper police station, our town can get those services in-house, so it may be cheaper in the long run, although I still want to know a lot more about this project.
• The town is not raising taxes to pay for this. The tax rate is virtually unchanged at $0.4531 (versus $0.4530 currently), but the budget presented for next year is balanced. In some ways that’s great, but at the same time it’s not clear that we can sustain a flat tax rate for more than a few more years. The cost of services and maintenance keep climbing every year, and even though the city has enjoyed some very high property value appreciation and sales tax growth the past few years, property values are actually falling or stagnant in many parts of the DFW area. We currently enjoy one of the lowest city property tax rates compared to neighboring cities, so if we were compelled to raise rates from $0.4531 to our peers’ rates like $0.6897 (Garland), $0.6900 (Mesquite) or $0.7697 (Rowlett) due to budget costs or falling property values, our residents simply aren’t prepared for that.

Note: this post was edited for minor typographical errors 8/11/2025