1) Municipalities aren't allowed to run budget deficits, so whenever there is any sort of economic downturn and revenues are short of what they projected, maintenance is often the first thing to get cut. They call it "deferred maintenance" but in practice it's just a disguised form of borrowing because you need to do it eventually and it's only going to get more expensive, which is effectively a different kind of interest. In contrast, whenever revenues exceed projections, there is tremendous pressure to just cut taxes rather than build up any kind of rainy day fund.
2) The existence of cities like Highland Park and University Park. These are entirely contained with Dallas city boundaries, small, and near the city center. They seem to exist for the sole purpose of taking all the largest and most expensive mansions and a few associated shops and public services, and walling them off from the rest of the city to make sure the wealthiest people don't see any of their tax revenue going to benefit anyone except themselves.
We're not dysfunctional (yet?) like parent described so I'm not sure every problem in Texas can be attributed to bureaucracy.
So now that you make me think of it, we might actually be as dysfunctional as Texas but we just have better weather so it's not apparent as much.
Don't overestimate Dallas. I can't speak to what the heck we're doing with actual tax revenue, but the city services and infrastructure are terrible. I actually don't have many complaints about the police, but it's not like my information is rooted in research and statistics. I've just lived downtown for a while and seen quite a few interactions between homeless and police and they seem unusually good at de-escalation and not just rushing in and beating people up as seems common in other big cities.
But ... our infrastructure is terrible. A quarter-inch of rain and over half the street lights in the city stop working. Any bit of wind knocks out power lines constantly, and it's pretty windy. Partly because they're all above ground, partly because the poles are old and falling over, partly because the city doesn't trim trees nor force property owners to do it, so branches are constantly overhanging and destroying things.
We had a somewhat notorious incident a few years ago where someone managed to set off all the tornado alarms citywide for a full day. They managed to do this because the control system was just radio. Not encrypted, not authenticated. Just direct the right channel at the right receiver and you could set off all of the city's tornado alarms.
City infrastructure here is an absolute mess, and if they cut costs on everything else by buying crap and not performing any maintenance, it doesn't surprise me one bit they do exactly the same thing with IT infrastructure.