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David Tuthill
Darryl Baker
David Tuthill
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6/21/7 First things,
first.
Well, we have a new mayor, and everyone is making
nice, but it's budget time. Stuff we need gets cut, but there's still
money for tax abatements.
In
New Day!, I mentioned a
KLIF debate between Tom Leppert and Ed Oakley that convinced me Ed knew the
party was over. When Tom said we need more 200 new police officers on the
street, Ed said Tom would have to raise taxes because there's no room in the
budget for more than 50 new hires. The moderator asked Tom where he would
get the money without raising taxes. Tom mentioned the tax abatement the
council gave Harlan Crow last week for renovation of the old Parkland Hospital
(Woodlawn) located on the corner of Oak Lawn and Maple Avenue. If you
haven't been in my old neighborhood in a few years, you would not know it.
Lots of developers wanted that old hospital/jail, long before the County put it
on the market. It's prime real estate with a perfect location. There
was no need to give Harlan Crow a tax abatement because he was already half
finished with the renovation project. That money could have been better
used by the Police Department.
Now, some at City Hall are floating a big bag of nonsense that to have more police,
there must be cuts in park maintenance and code enforcement. I consider
Mary Suhm a friend, but if that high-handed trade off came from her, I am
disappointed. There is so much waste in our budget.
Here's a perfect example. See Jim Schutze's
Getting Racked By City Hall
from DallasObserver.com. The council approved creating a new department to
manage and supervise newspaper racks. It's going to cost us $1.2 million
to implement something nobody knew we needed. Why? Somebody doesn't
like a bunch of newspaper boxes on the street and wants them all in homogenous
containers owned by the city. Aesthetics over public safety?
What we need are more cops and more code enforcement inspectors, not fancy
newspaper racks!
The last week of the runoff campaign, I was still calling voters in my
precinct and a large precinct just north of us. Each night as I
finished my calls, I delivered yard signs to those requesting them.
My neighborhood is nice and homey and still affordable, although a house
just sold a few weeks ago for $195K. The neighborhood due north of
us across Walnut Hill up to Royal Lane is much nicer, much less
affordable. Beautiful houses, beautiful yards. |
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6/21 Stan
Aten:
Paving over of yards is taking
place all over the city. It is especially prevalent in Oak Cliff.
The solution is to limit single family homes to single
families. The house next to me usually has several families living
there. At one time, there were as many as 5 vehicles at the house,
6+ adults and at least 6 kids. It was like living next to a hotel.
You never knew who belonged there. They were parking in the yard
until I called Code Enforcement daily for weeks. Now, they paved
over enough of the yard to park 4 vehicles,
and they cut down their shade tree. Of course, this would not be
such a problem if the Fed Gov had secured our
borders.
As for the flooding in
Gainesville, it would have been much worse if those 8 to 12 inches
of rain had fallen on Dallas. Oak Lawn and
Uptown in particular would have faced serious flooding problems.
Have you noticed how Turtle Creek makes the news every
time it rains now because of the high water?
There are solutions to the problem;
however, the city is not quite ready to deal with the issue. It may
take a killer flood to wake up city officials. Other cities are
already building rain water gardens and roof gardens to divert water
from the storm drain system. With the onset of global warming,
when it rains the storms will be much more intense and the rainfall
heavier. My advice, make sure the storm drains in your neighborhood
are cleaned every spring and you don't live near a creek.
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As I drove down one street, my husband almost
got a
whiplash when I slammed on the brakes in front of a house where the front yard
is concrete from the curb to the house.
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These pictures were taken Wednesday, June
20th. The first time we saw it, there was a huge panel truck right
up against the house on the cement slab there by the left hand side
window. It was parallel to the house. The windows were not
visible.
Note the bars on the windows and the door. Really nice touch.
What do you think the house is really used for?
A neighbor said they use to have armed guards standing outside the front
door. They still have the mandatory pit bulls. |
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This shot is from the west of the house.
Can you believe the entire yard is paved except for the parkway which is
city right of way?
You must be thinking what a shabby neighborhood this has to be for
someone to do this in Dallas. You would be thinking wrong.
This is an upper middle class community, and the other homes on the
street are beautiful.
The neighbors are rightfully afraid of the inhabitants and owners of
this house. Even the Police Department has refused to help them,
much less Code Enforcement. |
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This home is just west of the barred house.
Note the white fence. If you lived in or owned this house, would
you want to be living next to a concrete front yard with pickup trucks
and panel trucks parked up against the house? This nice house is
typical of homes on the street.
You can see the concrete slab is causing problems for the lawn next to
it. Between the chemicals leaching out of the concrete and the
heat it generates, it makes maintaining a nice lawn next to it
difficult. |
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This is the view just east of the barred
house. Look at the trees, shrubs, yard. Like the rest of the
yards on the street, well maintained.
The little bit of grass left in front of the barred house needs serious
mowing. |
I had to be at City Hall the
day after first seeing this disaster. I just knew we could get immediate
action on this. Surely, it cannot be legal to pave over your entire front
yard and use it for a parking lot. Are you sitting down? You better
be because I'm here to tell you that your next door neighbor can do this to you,
too -- unless you live in a planned development district or a conservation or
historic district. Don't feel dumb because you didn't know. Most
council members didn't know it could happen either. There are no
restrictions on how much of your or your neighbor's yard can be covered with
solid surface. Darryl Baker, former city planner
has furnished some pertinent information. See
Darryl Baker.
I'm not going into the illegal activity that has happened in this house, as
reported by the neighbors up and down the street. Hopefully, a reporter
with more resources will follow up on that angle. I'm just focused on the
visual and physical impact on a neighborhood when something like this happens to
it.
Until recently, the block I live on has not been overwhelmed with excessive
parking like some others in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, the heirs of a
senior couple leased their parents' home to tenants who are only slightly more
irresponsible than their landlords. On a given day, there are 6 trucks in
the driveway, and two or three in front of the house on the street. That's
bad enough, but another house on the opposite side of the street now has a
driveway full of trucks from the curb to the alley and 3 or 4 in front that
never move. So, ingress and egress on my street from the west is getting
difficult. Lord knows what will happen if a fire truck has to get through.
These houses are clearly occupied by more than one family. On the
weekends, even more cars and trucks show up. The party starts Friday night
and only slows down when there's no more beer on Sunday night. People
cannot get out of their driveways because of the illegally parked cars.
When we call the police for relief, we are way down their list of priorities.
It's understandable that robbery and physical danger take precedence over
illegally parked trucks and excessive occupancy of single family homes.
So, why can't Code Enforcement be available from 911? On the weekend or in
the evening?
Do you understand why the concrete front yard scares me to death? Some of
the real trouble makers in my neighborhood are construction workers.
Several men living in one house. I don't know why they need so many trucks
when they all leave in one vehicle in the morning, but that's another matter.
Digging up a front yard and pouring concrete is not rocket science stuff.
They could get it done on a Friday and be parking up against their houses on
Monday.
It's not just an aesthetic issue. Our drought is obviously over, and we
are experiencing flash flooding all over North Texas. One reason for the
flooding is that we have paved over our prairie. There's no arable land
surface to absorb the rain water, at least there is not sufficient arable land
surface. Water has to go somewhere. It can't get to the
Trinity or other natural water routes because we have erected levees that force
the water back into our neighborhoods. With all the concrete, there's
nothing to absorb the water so it floods our homes and businesses.
Just last week, most of the council voted to let Trammel Crow Company fill in a
beautiful natural creek near the soon to be gone Timbercreek apartments.
Another Bill Blaydes disaster. Gary Griffith let it happen in his
district, but it was absolutely the doings of Bill Blaydes. Councilwoman
Angela Hunt correctly noted we are about to spend millions undoing the same kind
of wrong thinking that caused Mill Creek to be paved over in East Dallas.
When we have excessive or even minimal rain, people in the Swiss Avenue/Baylor
Hospital area move their stuff to the second floor. It's very likely they
will have flooding until Mill Creek is restored to its natural state.
There's an awful lot of new paving and ground covering going on East Dallas.
What if every slumlord in town crams his rent houses full of people and paves
over every square inch of arable earth for parking trucks and cars? What
if your next door neighbor does it tomorrow?
I am cautiously optimistic that our new mayor is a multi-tasker who can see more
than one issue and solution at a time. He seems to be able to look at
neighborhoods and the big picture simultaneously. I don't want him solving
international problems or focused on state wide matters. I want our Mayor
to direct his considerable energies and smarts to making Dallas more livable.
Tom Leppert's right that the mayor can have an impact on the DISD. The
lack of enthusiasm for his assistance from the DISD brass and school board is
only to be expected. Those losers know almost any idea from anybody or any
source will be better than what they've come up with in the past several years.
I want a new Superintendent, someone who is not an educator. Just like the
city needs an outsider to come in with a new perspective, the DISD needs a
non-educator to administer that study in chaos.
Tom Leppert's right that we need more cops on the street, right now! We
can't wait.
There are lots of places to find the funding. We need to make the county
provide the social services that City Hall has been dabbling in since the days
of Annette Strauss and Lordi Palmer. Dallas taxpayers are funding programs
that should be shared by all county cities and towns. They certainly
benefit from our social services. Build some jails in the suburbs, and let
Dallas get that land back on our municipal tax rolls.
All of those are long term possibilities, but we are in an immediate crisis.
We can give billionaires and wannabe billionaires millions in tax relief, but we
are told we will have to curtail park maintenance and code enforcement to find
the money for more police officers. That is crazy.
We are building more parks Downtown to provide ambience for Ray Hunt's new
building, for which Ed Oakley and Bill Blaydes led the parade to give him a $6.2
million tax abatement. Your neighborhood park or swimming pool will not
get adequate maintenance or staffing, but there's money to put a lid on Woodall
Rogers for a park with water fountains. There will be no lifeguards at
your recreation center pool, so it will be closed, but we are building new parks
Downtown?
I don't think Tom Leppert is going to accept the status quo. Lucky for us,
there are some other new faces on this council who also have new ways of
thinking.
Dave Neumann is a hands on guy, a high energy hands on guy. Until he took
over as Chair of the Stemmons Business Corridor Association, we could never get
that group of business people to admit there was a problem with Northwest Dallas
becoming saturated with sexually oriented businesses. It was absolutely
"hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil". Dave not only faced the facts
of a serious problem, he took a proactive role in turning things around.
Dwaine Caraway is not going to let our parks deteriorate. He was a real
mover and shaker as Vice Chair of the Park Board. Neither is Dwaine going
to let Code Enforcement be under-funded. He and his associates have worked
too hard to get problem businesses (hot sheet motels) closed down in the
Southern Sector.
Mitch Rasansky will continue to watch out for Dallas taxpayers. Now, we
will have other successful businessmen on the council. Instead of having
Bill Blaydes and Ed Oakley ridiculing him when he points out waste and excessive
costs, Mitch will have allies who understand about better allocation of our tax
dollars.
Still, everything goes back to the "broken window" philosophy of local
government. If we let neighborhoods deteriorate through lack of code
enforcement, adequate police protection or common sense, this city will not
attract new companies or investments. For too long, Dallas leaders have
stressed style over substance.
It's time for the council to serve us a more balanced meal with lots of
vegetables that are more nourishing for the entire city and less high-dollar
deserts that have caused decay and blight.
It's time for Dallas taxpayers to get a bigger bang for our buck.
It just may be that we have a mayor who can get us back on track.
sb
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