Plano's mayor says Willow Bend is a district, not a Stars arena with parking

The easiest way to picture the Dallas Stars' possible move to Plano is a hockey arena surrounded by surface parking. Plano Mayor John Muns says that picture is wrong, and he thinks plenty of people are confused about it. "It's not a parking lot with an arena on it," he said. As he describes the Willow Bend site, it's meant to be an entertainment district, a shopping area, more housing and more office space, with the arena as one part of it.

That difference matters soon. Plano voters face a November election on a venue tax tied to the project, and the final renderings that would show them the district are still being drawn. So the city is trying to explain a development whose design isn't finished, and to explain it well enough that residents know what they're voting on.

An arena added to a plan already approved

The order of events backs up the mayor's point. According to Muns, Plano had already approved Willow Bend as a mixed-use development before the Stars came along. That plan included shopping, restaurants, housing and office space, and he says all of it is still coming. "It's just gonna add an arena to it as well," he said.

Muns also described several hotels, either next to the arena or built on top of it, and possibly another elsewhere on the site. The goal, he said, is a place people visit all year, not only on game nights. When the interviewer compared it to LA Live, the Los Angeles entertainment complex built around an arena, he agreed. "Whether it's a game or a concert there, this will also be places for people to come to and shop and live and work," he said.

This is the city's central claim about Willow Bend, and for now it's still a claim. The mixed-use base has been approved. But the arena, the hotels and how they fit together won't be visible until the renderings come out. Until then, the 365-day district is what the city intends, not something anyone can see on paper.

Why the Stars looked at Willow Bend

Muns says the talks started about two years ago. He said it was no secret that the Stars and the Dallas Mavericks were having trouble working together on one shared facility, and that both teams had talked about finding separate locations. In his telling, the Stars came to Plano with a simple argument: Willow Bend is "the bull's eye for our season ticket holders."

That fits an argument Muns makes about the whole region. He says Plano has spent years telling companies that "the center of the metroplex has moved, and it's moved a little bit north." He puts that center in Plano, not in the newer suburbs farther out where much of the residential growth is happening. For a team whose paying fans already live near the site, the location is a business decision as much as a civic one.

Plano's growth is the backdrop. Muns says his family arrived around 1970, when the city had perhaps 25,000 people and the land along Preston Road was farmland. Today, he says, Plano has more than 300,000 residents. That makes it the ninth-largest city in Texas and the fourth-largest in the metroplex, behind Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington.

Redevelopment is Plano's main tool

Willow Bend fits a pattern, because Plano has few other options. Muns says that around the time he took office in 2021, the city had wins and losses and was competing hard with Frisco, McKinney, Irving and Dallas. So it stepped back and rethought its approach. "We had very little greenfield land available, but we could certainly do redevelopment in ways that would be fantastic," he said. Plano started pushing its incentives harder and telling the real estate market it was willing to rebuild sites people assumed were off the table because a campus already stood there.

The best-known example is AT&T's new global headquarters. Muns says the city worked on the deal for two years. AT&T looked at several communities and kept changing which sites it wanted to see. In the end it chose the original EDS campus, which Muns calls the first big company to come to Plano, back in the 1980s. That campus has been demolished because AT&T wanted a horizontal campus instead of a vertical one.

The Kintetsu group's Miyako Hotel is following the same pattern on the old JCPenney campus, and Muns says it should open around this time next year. Willow Bend applies that approach to entertainment instead of offices: take land that already has a use and build something denser on it. Muns's timeline includes demolition, so the site has to be cleared before anything new goes up.

Muns says companies weighing Plano ask about the same three things wherever he meets them: public safety, good schools for employees' children, and a qualified workforce. He didn't tie Willow Bend to any of those directly. The district would add to the list of reasons to live near where people work, but the three pillars are still what the corporate pitch rests on.

What happens before November

Muns hedged the schedule. Architectural work got going in earnest around August. If everything goes to plan, demolition would start around the beginning of next year, with construction starting in June or July. The city is pushing the architects to finish renderings so residents can see more of the plan before the vote.

The city's stated goal for the next few months is explaining, not selling. "What we're trying to do is get a lot of people's questions answered by November, at least to a certain degree, so they'll understand what they're voting on," he said.

Why momentum isn't enough

Plano is on a run. Muns points to Toyota's 2014 decision to move its North American headquarters from Torrance, California, which he says made companies in Japan start paying attention to North Texas. He also lists JPMorgan Chase's campus, NTT Data, AT&T, Samsung's decision to move the rest of its corporate staff from New Jersey to join the roughly 3,000 employees it already has in Plano, and Fisher Investments' move from Washington state. He calls it a Pied Piper effect, and he says he doesn't count on it.

"We have to be legit to whoever is interested in coming," he said. Even when a company decides to move on its own, as Samsung and Fisher did, the city still has to find it the right space and keep up with its growth. That goes for Willow Bend too. A pro team choosing Plano makes a big announcement, but the district only works if people show up on all the days without a game.

The Kintetsu deal shows how long that kind of trust takes. Muns says the company needed about six months to commit after a hard meeting through interpreters in Osaka, and when he went back three years later, the relationship looked completely different. Willow Bend is earlier in that process. The approval, the team's interest and a timeline are in place. Next comes the November vote, and before it, the renderings that should show whether the district matches the mayor's description.