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01/29/04  Did we vote on this?

Increasingly, the Mayor seems to be lost in the Trinity Bottoms.  Does anyone have a clue how she got so far off her promises to get City Hall back to basics?

PS -- One ner-do-well misunderstood my confusion over the Mayor's priorities as calling the Mayor a liar.  Actually, I have become convinced she has been taken over by aliens.  I don't know whether she's lying or hallucinating or truly believes all this malarkey about the Trinity Project and those string thing bridges.  So, neither DallasArena.com nor Sharon Boyd individually is calling the Mayor a liar.  That would make it too simple.

Send Me Some Money John Loza opposed 14-1 and said the city should be divided 12-4-1 with 4 geographic quadrants and 3 single member districts in each quadrant.  So, some of the council could be looking out for the "bigger picture".  Guess he knew the harm a greedy little crook could do when given exclusive authority over a council district with no other councilmember or the Mayor willing to challenge his bad decisions. 

The proponents (Lordi Palmer was one of them) said 14-1 would empower the community -- HA! HA! HA!

Lorlee Bartos's letter discussed the Mayor and Council's abuse of the process and accused the council of ignoring the wishes of her neighborhood and following the whim of Send Me Some Money John Loza.  Jim Schutze takes the discussion further in his column, Jilted Old and full of potholes, a sad city remembers its mayor-bride. 

Schutze goes further than just lamenting the experience of Owenwood (where Bartos lives).  He pulls that specific situation of misuse of limited public dollars by Loza, et al into the city's overall bleak picture and the obscenity of pouring so much money and energy into the Trinity Project and those darn string thing bridges all those Yankees at City Hall want instead of our historic viaducts.

Jilted  Old and full of potholes, a sad city remembers its mayor-bride BY JIM SCHUTZE DallasObserver.com originally published: January 29, 2004

. . . Dallas Mayor Laura Miller will be available to the media at 4:15 p.m. in the little horseshoe off Independence Avenue just inside the Rayburn Office Building in Washington, D.C. . . . up there lobbying for millions in federal money for the Fandango suspension bridge over the Trinity River.  . . .  $75 million from Congress to build a suspension bridge over a drainage ditch downtown to create a tourist attraction. . . .     The mayor, who ran for office on pothole repairs, . . .  Why do I want a make-believe suspension bridge if you can't fix my curb? . . .  Last summer the city sent out letters to people in the Owenwood Park area near southeast Dallas, just across Interstate 30 from Tenison Park, telling them the city had about $120,000 available under some new program for their little area. It could be used to improve the neighborhood in any way the neighbors saw fit.  . . .  a couple of streets in Owenwood are still really bad--jagged concrete emblems of the city's decades of "deferred maintenance" (a fancy term for urban slovenliness). . . .  Robert Ridley, head of the Owenwood Preservation Society, told me the neighborhood held a series of well-attended meetings, and the message never varied. "From our main first meeting," he said, "the concerns were our streets, our curbs and sidewalks. . . .  He said the city officials who attended the meetings told them it was up to them. "'Whatever the community wants.' We were told that at every meeting. Repeatedly it was, 'We need our streets, sidewalks and curbs fixed over here.'"    Imagine their surprise, then, when the city informed them after these months of meetings that the $120,000 would be spent on a laundry list of park repairs and "improvements," including removing basketball goals from one small park and installing a nature trail in another park the size of two house lots. . . .  none of the money will go to streets, curbs or sidewalks. . . .  John Loza, who told me very candidly that it was his decision the money should go to the parks. "I just felt that it would benefit the entire neighborhood more if it were put into those parks rather than put into one specific sidewalk," he said. . . .   park department people I spoke with gave me all this stuff about public input and how they had so many meetings and handed out so many pieces of paper and so on. But when I said, "Wasn't the actual decision made by the councilman?" they both shrugged and said, "Yeah."    Someday, somehow, someone has got to explain to City Hall that it's not "public input" if you know in advance you're going to get the political fix on things from inside City Hall and then flush all the input down the toilet. I . . . The Community Development Commission agreed with them! It said the money should be spent on what the neighborhood said it wanted--curbs and sidewalks.    Two weeks ago by unanimous vote, your city council and your mayor voted to overturn the Community Development Commission and force the neighborhood instead to spend the money on the micro-nature trail, basketball court removal and other swift ideas. That means your mayor and your council member voted not to allow these people to spend the money getting their curbs and sidewalks fixed. . . .  John Loza has his reasons for not wanting to go along with the Community Development Commission. The other council members have their little gang mentality of not contravening a member on a deal that's totally within his own turf.    But what about the mayor? Didn't she originally run for office on this stuff? Isn't she the one who said we had to eat our vegetables before we can have dessert? "First we fix our schools and roads," she said when she announced for mayor the first time. "Then we do our signature bridges." . . .

This happens all the time.  I am still fuming about that back-zoning near Bluffview.   What is the point of having council hearings?  It is a meaningless waste of citizen time to speak to the council.  Why don't they just let each councilmember announce his or her decision up or down on each item and not waste time discussing any of it? 

The Mayor could do something about all of this if she wasn't so intent on finally winning over Don Hill and his puppets, which will never happen.  These little tyrants love their titles as Chairs and Vice Chairs.  Ron Kirk would never let one of the contrarians on his councils have a chairmanship, even if a position had to remain vacant.  She's not going to do anything like that because she would rather have the people who have supported her mad at her than the people who will never support her.  The Mayor needs to "dance with the ones who brung her".

Her strongest base of supporters were the conservatives in North Dallas, and they get the least amount of her attention.  I worked in her campaigns, and I don't remember anything about string thing bridges across the Trinity being her first priority. 

When she talked to Northwest Dallas Improvement League last Fall,  she tried to stir the crowd (couple of hundred people) up about her big plans for the Trinity and those stupid string thing bridges and got nowhere with them.  Not one response.  When she started talking about code enforcement and real life city issues, the crowd got excited and animated.

Except for possibly the Stemmons Business Corridor (if you consider office buildings and big-hair sex clubs as a neighborhood), you cannot find any neighborhood in this city where their first priority has anything to do with the Trinity River Project or those stupid string thing bridges.  Not even in Oak Cliff where they are just trying to get some retail back into their community will the average person say they want millions spent on the Trinity River Project, much less a billion or more.

So, I'm asking again.  Who decided a Calatrava String Thing Bridge was our city's top priority?  Congressman Martin Frost claims he heard it loud and clear?  Where was he standing when he heard it? 

Frost seeks $32 million for Trinity bridge; Sessions decries call to Miller to tout request as mere campaign ploy 08:53 PM CST  Wed, 01/28/04  DAVE LEVINTHAL/The Dallas Morning News

From the tone of their conversation, it appeared Mayor Laura Miller and Congressman Martin Frost were sharing a Texas Lottery jackpot, or announcing their engagement. . . . . . .  Mr. Frost told the mayor that he had requested $32 million in federal transportation funds for the $75 million Trinity River bridge project, which would replace the Interstate 30 viaduct with a soaring suspension span.    "I heard your message loud and clear," Mr. Frost said of the mayor's plea to congressional lawmakers last week for federal funding. "I know this is the city's top priority." . . .  Mr. Sessions said that the call was little more than a campaign ploy and that Mr. Frost's request is a long way from becoming reality. . . .    John Townsend, a spokesman for Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, cautioned that the funding is indeed far from a certainty. . . .   Each congressional representative may request up to $35 million for their district. . . . Mr. Frost said he has been assured by House leaders that his request will remain in the House version of the bill no matter what. He could not, however, make any promises about what would happen to the request after the Senate reviews it, he said.

After the way Pete Sessions shafted Roxan Staff with his interference in her city council race against Gary Griffith, I could not imagine ever supporting him again.  Now, Martin Frost goes and starts playing political games with public money in his race against Sessions, and I'm a 32nd District voter. 

Our Mayor actually tells people she thinks her String Thing Bridges will be tourist attractions.  I have a real tough time with that.  She is either lying or she's stupid, and I know she is not stupid.  I'm beginning to think a mutual friend is right about all this -- some aliens have invaded Our Mayor and are making her say and do things that are not Laura Miller.

If she were not the Mayor and still a journalist, Laura Miller would be having a field day with all this Trinity River malarky.  She would be picking it all to pieces and identifying the fallacies and wondering where the money was really going.

Laura Miller is not currently a journalist.  She is the Mayor of Dallas, and she got to be Mayor by promising to fix our streets, clean up our parks, get more pay for our cops and firefighters and STICK TO BASICS.

According to her two successful elections, this city's priorities are the issues she named over and over in both campaigns.  Her opponents ran on the "Big Ticket" slate and were soundly defeated.  Apparently, Mr. Frost was not paying attention last May or the year before when Dallas voters very loudly stated our priorities.

Neither the Trinity River Project nor those stupid string thing bridges were anywhere near the top of the list of voters who gave the Mayor a 56% victory over Mary Poss.

When the Trinity River Project was approved (if it actually was) in 1998, there was less than a 1% margin of victory for the proponents.  That hardly made it a top priority for 1998, and it is less popular in 2004.  We did not get to vote on those stupid string thing bridges, so no one can claim they are our number one priority. 

As a matter of fact, the bond campaign Con Jerk (Ron Kirk) fostered on unsuspecting voters was so deceptive its only connection to what is on the table now is the Trinity River itself.  Con Jerk didn't tell us we would lose our historic viaducts and have to spend hundreds of millions more on suspension bridges.  So, how can they be our number one priority?

If Martin Frost is willing to divert $35 million from truly essential needs for this area to build a tourist attraction, he has lost all sense of proportion and possibly lost his mind.