There are more people living in poverty in Dallas than there are residents of Plano.

That statistic, put simply and starkly, comes directly from Theresa O'Donnell, Dallas' first-ever chief resilience officer. She helped compile and author the latest report from the mayor's 2-year-old Task Force on Poverty: "Reducing the Epidemic of Poverty and Ending the Opportunity Gap." On Wednesday, after the City Council was briefed on that report, she slipped me a hand-written note that says there are about 285,000 people living in Plano and 294,650 people living in Dallas who barely make enough to eat, keep cool, stay warm, survive.

And that includes kids, about 50,000 of whom live in "extreme poverty" in the city limits.

"It's crisis proportions," O'Donnell said while I'm pretty sure I stared blankly at that piece of paper. "How much worse does it have to get?"

Actually ...?

The city could start putting a stop to this right now. Could and should. Because of course it should.

That's what O'Donnell says. So does Regina Montoya, who co-chairs Mayor Mike Rawlings' Poverty Task Force, and Mark Clayton, the council's liaison to the task force. And here I was all prepared to write about how solving poverty is Dallas' great existential crisis.

That doesn't have to be the case.

It absolutely seems insurmountable when you listen to the Dallas City Council talk about solving poverty. They go round and round and round, pointing fingers — at DART, for making it hard for workers to get to their jobs, or at the Dallas Independent School District, for failing its most at-risk students — while proposing vague solutions.

The report that went to the council Wednesday, delivered by Montoya and Clayton, reiterated horror stories told before, this time illustrated with poverty maps they had to make themselves because no one at City Hall actually does that. It's full of grim statistics and dire pronouncements so unfathomable they're almost incomprehensible, such as "Dallas has the highest neighborhood inequity of any city in the U.S. larger than 250,000."

Since Rawlings made fighting poverty a priority two years ago, we've known there are tens of thousands of children who can barely read or speak English going to school starving and coming home to empty apartments because Mom and Dad — though, usually, just Mom, single and struggling — are out working two jobs just to make a barely livable wage.

But they're not exactly hiding.

Clayton and I jumped in his Jeep Wrangler on Tuesday and drove to the apartments around Bachman Lake, an area marked in darkest red on the poverty maps shown to council the next day. Took us all of 10 minutes to find the living statistic: a 27-year-old single mom of four young children, three in a DISD elementary, living in an apartment complex along Community Drive where seven mattresses were chucked by the dumpster because they were infested with bedbugs.

The mother, who gave us only her first name, Marisol, said she came to Dallas from Mexico 13 years ago. Until recently she'd worked for five years as a housekeeper, but a kidney ailment has sidelined her. Without a car she walks to the Carnival around the corner for groceries and takes the bus to Parkland Memorial Hospital for occasional treatments.

The kids said the air conditioning in the apartment barely works; they bake in the front room hit by mid-afternoon in the summer. The landlord seldom comes around, they said, except to drop off cans of pesticide to kill the bedbugs.

This is poverty in Dallas. In every council district, north to south. You don't need a damned briefing.

Before we drove out, Clayton said he was concerned poverty was going to become City Hall's crisis du jour.

"For however long I'm here," said the freshman council member, "I'm going to push this agenda."

When the childhood poverty issue was raised two years ago, "people were shocked," Montoya told me. "They wondered: 'When did this happen?' And they didn't keep their eye on the ball."

Yet, two years after Rawlings started lamenting the city's "barbell economy," all we have to show for our hand-wringing is a poverty task force, because that's the one thing Dallas City Hall does well. See: domestic violence, education, homelessness, Fair Park. And in the end, they'll propose a proposal, even if peer cities across the country found a solution to what ails us years ago. It's the arrogance of the so-called world-class city: Thanks, but we'll do it our way.

Or in the case of the loose-dog crisis, we get outside consultants to tell us what everybody knew all along: Overhaul the department that's supposed to round up loose dogs.

Both O'Donnell and Montoya propose creating something like New York City's decade-old, much-celebrated Center for Economic Opportunity, established by then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg after a blue-ribbon commission proposed tangible, readily adoptable ways to lift the working poor and their children out of poverty. Funded with $100 million in philanthropic and public dollars, the center rolls all of its anti-poverty efforts — some entrepreneurial, some educational, even more experimental — into a single collaborative office that serves as a clearing house.

Do that, Montoya and O'Donnell said when we talked yesterday. Just do that.

"Dallas has identified its problems, " Montoya said. "But we haven't been dedicated enough to say these are the solutions and this is how it's going to be."

Which isn't to accuse Dallas of shrugging off its poverty problem. The council was told more than a year ago that Neighborhood Plus would staunch the middle-class bleeding and turn around impoverished neighborhoods. The NeighborUp program, a GrowSouth initiative, is intended to economically develop three southern Dallas neighborhoods. Council member Scott Griggs' housing committee is finishing its comprehensive housing policy.

The Office of Economic Development has workforce programs that offer GED prep and job training. And the city's in the midst of overhauling city code in an effort to remedy the miserable living circumstances of Dallas' low-income renters sharing poorly air-conditioned units with pestilence.

Bring all that into one office, Montoya said. Then bring in DART and DISD and nonprofits and universities.

"It will be hard and expensive," she said.

But "if no one's in charge of it," O'Donnell said, "nothing gets done."

That can't be an option for Dallas anymore.