AT&T CEO Privately Raised Dallas Crime Concerns Before Plano Headquarters Move

City of Dallas records reveal that AT&T CEO John Stankey privately raised concerns about persistent public safety and governance challenges in downtown Dallas during email exchanges with City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert in 2025, months before the company publicly announced plans to relocate its global headquarters to Plano.

The correspondence, obtained through a public records request filed in September 2025 and fulfilled on March 10, 2026, traces back to at least May 7, 2025, when Tolbert reached out to Stankey following a meeting the two held to discuss issues affecting downtown Dallas. The roughly ten pages of documents show Stankey raised concerns about crime, safety, and governance well before AT&T finalized its decision to leave the city's central business district. The City of Dallas did not release the records until after they had already been provided to another outlet that subsequently published a story; it remains unclear when that outlet filed its own request.

When AT&T publicly announced the move in early January 2026, Stankey did not cite crime as a reason. Instead, the company framed the relocation as a consolidation of three North Texas locations onto a new 54-acre campus along Legacy Drive in Plano. AT&T is scheduled to vacate Whitacre Tower and the Discovery District within two years. Analysts and local reporters have flagged the departure as a shift likely to reshape downtown Dallas's street-level economy and potentially depress property values in the urban core.

The gap between Stankey's private warnings and AT&T's public explanation drew immediate reaction from Texas officials. Speaking at a law enforcement event in Fort Worth, Gov. Greg Abbott blamed Dallas leaders directly, pointing to what he called the city's failure to fully fund and staff its police department and to "contain a homeless problem" downtown. Abbott made the remarks while responding to a question about a charter amendment requiring cities to boost police staffing and warned that the state would review whether Dallas's police funding decisions comply with a 2021 law restricting cuts to police budgets.

Dallas City Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn, who chairs the city's committees on public safety and homeless solutions, pushed back on that framing while acknowledging room for improvement. "You've seen a steadfast commitment to increasing pay for officers, hiring more officers. We've got the academy. We've bought lots of equipment and updated our technology. So he's right. We should have public safety as number one. And when you start looking at the numbers for Dallas, we have more officers. We have a larger share of our budget going to public safety as well," she said. Mendelsohn also pointed to statistics showing violent crime in Dallas has dropped for four consecutive years.

On homelessness, the city and private partners closed downtown encampments and housed more than 250 people, according to Housing Forward, the region's lead agency serving unhoused residents. The city separately allocated $10 million in additional funding toward homeless response efforts in the weeks surrounding the AT&T announcement.

Whether Stankey's private concerns influenced AT&T's internal decision-making remains unconfirmed. The company's public statements have held consistently to the consolidation rationale, and no verbatim text from the emails has been released publicly. What the records establish is that Dallas's top city official was in direct contact with AT&T's chief executive about downtown's challenges months before the announcement that will reshape the city's corporate landscape for years to come.