|
Chris Heinbaugh
| |
07/17/06 Who's going to
turn out the lights?
This week one of my neighbors called to say he has
put a contract on a house in Carrollton and will have his current home on the
market soon. If you have ever been involved in homeowner groups or
neighborhood preservation, you know there are usually 6 or 7 people out of 600
or 700 who do most of the work. My neighbor who is giving up on Dallas has
been one of those 6 or 7 stalwarts who not only steps up to the plate, he does
more than his share.
He waters the bushes and plantings on the edge of the school across the street
from his home. Of course, it's self-preservation to camouflage the awful
portable buildings that take up almost as much of the school property as the
school building itself. Why don't they just build a new wing to the school
rather than erect and maintain those ugly portable buildings? Each
building has its own air conditioner and heater. Talk about an energy
waste, not to mention DISD taxpayers' money.
But, about my neighbor. He has a beautiful home that unfortunately is
located on the south edge of our neighborhood, across the street from horrible
apartments and across the alley from townhouses mostly occupied by tenants, not
homeowners. He has had his fence and garage door vandalized with graffiti.
He walks out his door to find people sleeping off a drunk or worse in cars
parked in front of his home. Code enforcement is non-existent on his
block, with one house visibly collapsing in on itself.
The apartments across the street allow their tenants to hold weekly flea markets
(can't call them garage sales). When he called the weekend code
enforcement guy for our area, the guy called later in the evening and said he
had been by the site around 5 pm and there was no sale going on on. Well,
duh!
My neighbor told the same guy about a house on Webb Chapel that has been selling
mattresses on their front yard every weekend for a month. The code guy
said "Yeah, I've seen them, but I haven't issued a citation, yet." Well,
why not?
Do you know what we have in Dallas? Chaos. Chaos caused by 14-1 and
its related ward politics.
|
I'm not including Mitch Rasansky or my councilman, Steve Salazar, in the chaos.
Northwest Dallas has benefited from having Councilman Salazar representing us.
He may have disappointed some when he represented District 1, but he has been
very helpful to us in District 6. The last time council members were able
to designate bond money for special projects in their district, Ed Oakley
diverted most of District 6's money to his new District 3. An area that
was never in District 6 got a sound wall, when Northwest Dallas had two major
streets with open ditches and no sidewalks for kids to use to get to school.
Councilman Salazar has included those two streets (Community and Brockbank) for
street improvements, gutters and sidewalks, and a pedestrian bridge over
Northwest Highway to Bachman Lake Park. All of those items have been
requested needs for over twenty years. |
|
|
07/17/06 Michael Davis:
I don?t think abandoning 14-1 is going to make
the problems all go away. At the end of
the day, too many districts are decided with low turnout. It?s also
the quality of the people running. The map does
sucks, but we?re stuck with it for now.
Pleasant Grove gets jerked in a major way with the current map
and should have its own district.
It?s going to take new voter
turnout to make change. They depend on the same people voting, and
ONLY those people casting ballots. Most of these districts are won
with an embarrassingly low 20-25%% turnout or
less.
The chiselers are going to
unleash all the money they have to make sure they have enough
walking around dollars for shady
operatives and precinct chairs.
There?s a strategy to
knocking out the current regime in the Southern Sector. You need an
army of poll watchers and a lot of video cameras so you can bust
illegal tactics like ripping down signs. The whole city is going to
have to fund anti-establishment candidates in the Southern Sector.
In other cities, that?s the only way change occurs.
If we
end up with Maxine?s endorsed do-nothing and Chaney?s pick as
successor, the entire City can forget it.
Look for a list from me of
precincts and precinct chairs that need to be watched.
|
|
Prior to the last redistricting, the Northwest Highway/Bachman/Walnut Hill area
was divided between 3 council districts and didn't make up enough votes in any
of the districts to get much attention from anyone at City Hall. Now we
are mostly in one district and make up a sizeable block of votes in Councilman
Salazar's District 6, which gives us some clout.
It's not due to 14-1 that Northwest Dallas is getting attention from City Hall.
It's despite 14-1.
We are increasingly living in a city of the haves and have nots -- the have
somes are leaving for the suburbs. No matter how much is spent to create
"job opportunities" in the Southern Sector, it's not going to happen so long as
they keep electing crooks down there.
We have the potential of having Councilman Don Hill announcing as a mayoral
candidate. Jim Schutze of The Dallas
Observer has accurately dubbed
Hill as a convicted wife-ditcher. So, as of today, that is Don Hill's
official DallasArena.com nickname - Convicted Wife-Ditcher Hill (or sometimes
CWD Hill for DallasArena.com insiders).
 |
|
Bill Blaydes is expected to announce for
mayor, rather than his council seat, when he returns from his
China trip. |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Ed Oakley may announce for mayor, rather than
his current council seat, when he returns from his China trip. |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Ron Natinsky is rumored to be interested in
the mayor's race, but he won't make a decision until he returns from his
China trip. |
Yes, all of them are on the
same China trip. Their mayoral aspirations may make for interesting dinner
and travel conversations.
|
|
|
Then there's former TXU CEO Earl Nye, who is
also considering throwing his hat in the mayoral race. Guess he
wants to do to Dallas what he did to TXU. |
| |
|
|
 |
Old School;
DISD trustee Ron Price does
everything you expect from a
politician. These days that's a
problem.
By Matt Pulle -
Article Published Thursday,
July 13
|
|
|
...
Over the last few weeks, Price has vacillated about
whether he'd run for the South Dallas council seat of Leo
Chaney, who is being term-limited out of office. The ambitious
Price explains that relocating from DISD to City Hall is a mere
lateral move. But with last week's announcement that Mayor Laura
Miller is dropping out of the race, the
veteran school board member now says he's considering a run for
the top spot, reporting that he'll be meeting with
business leaders, with whom he has very close ties, to discuss a
possible candidacy. Of course, Price is not exactly zeroing in
on the cutting-edge issues of the moment. ...
|
Is that great? Think
about it. A convicted wife beater
might be challenging a convicted wife ditcher,
and they both will need every Black vote in Dallas to even have a shot at a
runoff spot. Of course, neither is going to have much traction in South
Dallas. Convicted Wife Ditcher Hill is in hot water with African-American
women in South Dallas, particularly church-going African-American women in South
Dallas. It is very un-cool to dump your wife for your hussy girlfriend.
It didn't help matters that he made his old wife move out, and moved his new
wife into the family home. CWD Hill knows he's in the dog house in his
community. He must think they will forget by May, 2007.
Amazingly, Ron Price thinks he can win a council seat with his sordid record as
an untrustworthy School Board Trustee. He has misused DISD funds and
bullied those who challenged his lapse in ethics. What am I thinking?
With his sordid record, Price is probably a shoe-in to replace Shakedown Leo
Chaney.
You can't lay all the city's problems on 14-1. Had the district lines been
drawn fairly with neighborhoods kept together, rather than drawn solely on
racial and personality issues. The first redistricting under 14-1 left us
with bizarre districts that cut through Old East Dallas, split up Pleasant Grove
and snaked from Oak Cliff up to Northwest Dallas. The second redistricting
left us with even more convoluted districts, with the Southern Sector districts
running from East to West.
No one is looking out for the whole city, except the Mayor, and she often can't
get 7 votes to win important cases.
We need to go back to having at least 2 at large council members, besides the
mayor. Divide the city up in 12 single member districts. Have the 3
mayoral candidates who receive the most votes be the mayor, the mayor pro tem
and the deputy mayor pro tem, respectively, according to the number of votes
they get. Of course, each of the top 3 mayoral candidates might have some
allegiance to the area of the city where they got the most votes, but that would
be a much larger area than a single member district.
I don't want Mitch Rasansky to run for mayor because we desperately need him to
remain on the city council. He's the only one who actually crunches the
numbers and challenges staff's pipe dreams. I doubt he can win citywide,
although he will do well in his District 13, which votes heavy.
We have to do something different.
Just this weekend, we had gang bangers murdering people in Downtown Dallas.
A Dallas Cowboy football player was shot on LBJ in a suspected car
jacking attempt. That doesn't usually happen when you are driving on a
freeway, but the Cowboys don't want any new scandals. If you want to steal
a fancy car, you are not going to shoot it up. Call me a cynic, and, of
course, this football player's problems had to have happened in Northwest
Dallas. The last time he got shot was outside a sex club in Northwest
Dallas. I can't wait until the Dallas Cowthugs take their team to
Arlington, so we can have some peace and quiet on Northwest Dallas streets,
highways and freeways.
It's too late to make enough changes to keep my Northwest Dallas neighbor from
leaving Dallas, or the people who have left your neighborhood for suburban
paradise. It may be too late to get anything right, but hope springs
eternal.
I for one hope we get rid of 14-1, as soon as possible.
sb
| |
|
