|
Avi Adelman
Dylan Cave
Ralph Goin
| |
06/07/04 Councilwoman Miller
might shoot Mayor Miller
DallasArena.com has been hitting Our Mayor pretty hard the past several
weeks, but nothing seems to getting through to her. Since she only values
the counsel of her Gorgeous Guru, her husband and herself, why not let Councilwoman and/or Candidate Laura Miller lecture Mayor Miller herself via several campaign pieces
she mailed in
her first Mayoral race?
| After we compare Candidate Miller's campaign promises to the reality of Mayor
Miller, there's that 2001 Texas
Monthly article she wrote about her
transition from journalist to politician. Even
watching her metamorphosis up close, it's hard to believe anyone could
change so dramatically in 3 years. Dave Capps will certainly attest that
it's possible. |
|
|
James Northrup:
Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but in
Miller's case, a little went a long way. |
|
Before we go to her mailed campaign pieces, let's look at what Laura Miller's
website "LauraMiller.com" still says as of 6/5/04:
| |
|
|
| |
March 19, 2003 Dear Neighbor,
Last year, caring citizens like you fueled
our positive, back-to-basics campaign to clean up City Hall. Together we
said: Dallas is an upbeat, businesslike, get-it-done city that has proven it
can build the big-ticket projects like great airports, a world-class
symphony center and sports arenas. Now it?s time to focus on basics for
people in our neighborhoods . . . and real ethics reform at City Hall.
Roads. Parks. Schools. Police. Code
enforcement. Improving basics for homeowners and businesses. Restoring
ethics and integrity in city government. That?s how we make Dallas once
again The City That Works . . . and works for all of us.
... Will you
please join our campaign today? Together, we can win a big victory for
Dallas, for taxpayers and for the future of our great city.
Sincerely,
Laura Miller
www.lauramiller.com/html/home.shtml |
|
| |
|
|
Not a word about Signature
Bridges or Football Stadiums or Homeless Shelters.
From Mayoral Candidate Miller's first happy piece titled "Laura
Miller has a big vision of the little things for Dallas.",
 |
|
Do you see anything in this
statement about the Trinity Project or her String Thing Bridges being her
priorities as Mayor?
Candidate Miller was dismissive of signature bridges in almost every
piece she mailed. |
Now it's
time to take care of the people who are already here. I have a big vision
of the little things that make a big difference in people's lives. ...
signature schools matter more than signature bridges. ... Paying our police
officers and firefighters what they deserve ...
 |
|
The people who supported Candidate Miller actually believed she meant what
she was saying in every mailer, in every speech, in every debate.
There's the option that she was only talking about having the "finest,
smoothest, safest streets, sidewalks and alleys" Downtown, and we missed the
disclaimer. Nah!
Had Mayor Miller just done what she promised in her campaign brochures, she
would be a big success.
"Some people say focusing on the basics is trivial. That just shows
how out of touch they are with our neighborhoods."
Apparently, Mayor Miller is now in that group of "Some people" because she
is not remotely interested in the basics of improving the quality of life
for the people who are already here.
Existing businesses don't get our Mayor's attention either, unless they are
sponsoring some photo-op for her. |
 |
| ... |
 |
Mayor Miller is now ready to
hit Dallas citizens with a hidden tax on our electric bills to pay for hiding
utility lines in the Trinity Corridor at a cost in excess of $100 million:
 |
Council's $100 million dream: providing
electricity without view
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
By EMILY RAMSHAW / The Dallas Morning News |
When Dallas Mayor Laura Miller
envisions the future Trinity River project, she sees scenic parks, busy
sidewalk cafes and sold-out luxury condos.
... In the next three years, council members hope
to free up the Trinity River by consolidating existing lines from the East
Levee onto Irving Boulevard and converting aerial lines near the future
Woodall Rodgers Signature Bridge to underground lines. These projects would
cost a combined $24.6 million.
And by 2010, the mayor said, she
hopes to bury the power lines along both levees ? at an estimated additional
cost of $60 million.
... The central business district has its power
lines buried underground, she said, so the Trinity River Corridor should,
too.
"Why would you
build the [Woodall Rodgers Signature] bridge and have it obscured?" Ms.
Miller said. "If we have to pay to put them underground, that's what we're
going to do." |
The question should be "Why
would you build a String Thing Bridge" across the Trinity?
In 2002, Candidate Miller
thought:
 |
|
Does anyone know exactly when
those Calatraba String Thing Bridges began to "matter" to Mayor Miller?
The person I thought we were supporting was focused on the basics and not on
"big projects downtown". You would be hard pressed to find any
neighborhood issue that is on Our Mayor's front burner.
If Dallas were not ranked #1 in crime in the nation, she would be keeping
clear from police matters. |
"... the Boeings of the world
care more about signature schools than they do about signature bridges."
Here's a bit from another mailer titled, "Laura
Miller, A big vision of the little things that make a big difference."
Wow! Don't you want a
Mayor who believes this stuff?
|
Now we need to take better care of the people who are
already here. |
|
Instead of future idiots who
might someday buy a high rise condo on the shores of the Stinky Trinity? |
| |
|
|
|
She's the right Mayor to fix the potholes, rebuild our
parks and rec centers, and pay our police what they deserve. |
|
She's the same Mayor who after
winning office with the help cops and firefighters campaigned against their
pay raise. Mayor Miller must believe "our police" deserve less pay
than their colleagues in Grand Prairie. |
| |
|
|
|
Quality public education matters more
to our city's success than big projects downtown. |
|
That may have been what
Candidate Miller believed, but it certainly is not what Mayor Miller says
these days. |
Here's another flyer that will
probably cause retching among all public safety officers reading DallasArena.com,
Laura Miller. Endorsed
by the Dallas Police
& Firefighters Associations.
"Laura
puts basic priorities like police, fire ... ahead of the big-ticket projects
downtown. She was the first to propose a pay hike for the men and women in
uniform who keep our families safe."
Well, that sure sounded great,
but Laura headed up the
campaign to deny our police and firefighters a raise that would have just
got them up to the top 1/3rd among police departments in Dallas County.
Here are two excerpts from
Laura Miller. Fighting
Hard to clean up City Hall.
 |
|
The Dunning campaign was
vicious, but it was run by Ron Kirk's Large White Shadow.
Still, Candidate Miller's priorities of "smooth
roads, green parks and well-paid police ... rather than million-dollar
consultant studies and big-ticket projects downtown"
would certainly be a welcomed change to Mayor Miller's agenda. |
In the same piece, she's again
dismissive toward her now prioritized String Thing Bridges:
The deception did not just
start with her mayoral race. Another former supporter who also once
considered Laura Miller a close friend says:
| She's an actress,
merely playing a part in different plays. She can be very persuasive
and passionate because it's all temporary. Like any good actress, when
she's playing a part, she believes it and makes others believe in her. |
Another former Miller supporter
remembered the story she wrote for Texas
Monthly about her experience as a
Councilwoman after abandoning Journalism. Here are some telling excerpts:
 |
|
A hard-charging city hall
reporter wins a seat on the Dallas City Council, takes a hard look at her
old profession, takes an even harder look at her new one.
by Laura Miller
I remember the day I went from being the hunter to the hunted. It was
a Tuesday afternoon in April 1998, and I was flying down the freeway toward
home in my white station wagon. All day I had been envisioning the scene at
Dallas City Hall, where TV and print reporters had been summoned for a press
conference. One of them had called the day before?to warn and to inquire:
"Your opponent says he's going to drop a bombshell about you that will ruin
your campaign. Do you have any idea what he's going to say?"...
Until just recently, I had also been a reporter?a city hall piranha
too, prowling for scandal. But in mid-December, after twenty years as a
reporter, I had abruptly announced that I was leaving my latest job, as a
columnist at the alternative weekly Dallas
Observer, to run for the city council.
... I had taken a year-long sabbatical from
writing in 1997. But that respite was ending, and I had to decide whether to
go back to a job that I loved but did too intensely or quit altogether and
indulge my fantasy of going to movies on weekday afternoons.
Okay, I'm definitely quitting, I told Steve one evening. But
a few days later our Oak Cliff councilman told us he was resigning halfway
through his third term, and I found myself suddenly smitten with the idea of
trying my hand at a job I'd been obsessed with as a columnist for years.
... I wrote in my good-bye column in the
Observer. My epiphany had come, I wrote,
at a city council meetingHow I Learned in which the council barely
scrutinized the seriously lopsided terms of a $125 million tax subsidy for
the owners of a new sports arena. "
... The irony of the situation did not escape me. As I chewed on my
fingernails, imagining the worst, I couldn't help but think, "How many times
in the past two decades had I ruined people's days like this: dozens?
hundreds? thousands?" It was too irresistible not to get off the highway and
head toward city hall. I had no intention of going inside?of giving my
opponent the satisfaction of seeing me in this state?but, on the other hand,
I wanted to be close by in case the revelation was somehow, inexplicably,
huge and in need of a response. The reporters had my cell phone and beeper
numbers. I just had to wait. After some period of time, the phone rang. I
held my breath.
... I had voted in local elections 30 times over the past ten years.
But my opponent had voted 32 times. I had missed the previous year's city
council election and maybe one or two others. What exactly did I have to say
for myself?
... My husband would tell you that one of the things that irritated
him about my column writing was that, in his opinion, I saw things only as
black and white, never gray. I used to wince at that remark, but it's hard
to say it wasn't true. My columns were built on an
unshakable bedrock of deeply felt personal precepts: Bad legislation
should be killed. Good legislation should be passed.
Rich guys shouldn't get handouts from the government. The government should
focus on delivering basic services, especially to those who foot the bill.
Public officials should never personally benefit from, nor should
they abuse, their positions. People who help the less fortunate are saintly.
People who tell lies are evil. Evilness should
always be exposed, preferably in one of my columns.
... Wick Allison, the publisher of D
Magazine (which I used to freelance for), disagreed completely. "Can
she be effective? Probably not," he wrote in a column during my candidacy to
fill the unexpired term of my predecessor. "Soloists are notoriously bad
choir members. Miller doesn't know how to cut deals, and she won't want to
learn; she'll only slice up anyone who tries. Remember, she's always on the
right side, and she stands on the moral high ground. The resulting corollary
is that everybody else is on the wrong side and on morally lower ground.
This will make for limited conversational opportunities with fellow council
members."
... I had a ridiculously simplistic view of my job
change: I was merely going from being a journalistic watchdog of the people
to being an elected watchdog of the people.
...
In June 1998, the first month I was
on the council, then-city manager John Ware put an innocuous-looking item at
the tail end of a 143-item voting agenda. We were being asked, for no
apparent reason, to put some vacant city-owned land up for sale for a
minimum bid of $2,000. It was 1.4 acres of property just off a major
downtown highway, and I remember wondering how it could possibly be worth
only $2,000. But I was new on the council, and that morning I'd already lost
a bloody battle over giving the city's precious power of eminent domain to
Ross Perot, Jr., so I said nothing. ... Ray
Hunt wanted the land so he could expand his Hyatt Regency Hotel.
... But thanks to a previous (bad) deal that the
city had cut back in 1974, Hunt had one-hundred-year leases on numerous
parcels of city-owned land around his hotel (25 acres in all), many of which
he leased for $100 a year, including the parcel that was for sale. Since the
land that Hunt now wanted to buy was encumbered by that lease, the city
staff had decided that it was worth only $2,000.
Why would intelligent city
bureaucrats, who are paid big salaries by the taxpayers to protect their
interests, forgo $1.7 million? Government Lesson Number One: The
council-manager form of government is designed to get "politics" out of
"government" and let management professionals run the city in a businesslike
way?but all too often, the business community is the bureaucrats' real
constituency, not the council or the taxpayers. ...
Surely, I thought, the council would cry foul once they were aware of
the facts. ... the city needed some of
Hunt's land (in that same area) for a future convention center expansion?why
not view this as an opportunity to renegotiate the 1974 deal and do a land
swap?
Only one council member agreed
with me: Donna Blumer. A veteran of eight years and my one true council
ally, Blumer represents the wealthiest part of North Dallas, and despite her
tony constituents, she is a tigress about government giveaways and waste,
beholden to no one and intimidated by nothing.
...As a
reporter, i spent years observing city council meetings, during which I
usually ended up asking myself, What are these people
doing? Why don't they just do the right
thing? Why is my version of the "right thing" so different from their
version of the "right thing"? Why don't they just do
what the citizens who elected them want them to do instead of doing what the
city's business leaders want them to do? Worse, why do they always
insist on doing it in the name of "doing what's best for Dallas?"Now I am
finishing my second term on the council, and I still don't know the answers.
... Government Lesson Number Three: Just about
everybody in politics thinks that they are doing the right thing. But why
would elected officials think that rubber stamping a $4.6 million gift to an
exceedingly prosperous oilman like Hunt?in his twenty-fifth year of
uninterrupted city subsidy, in a time of unprecedented prosperity for
everyone in Dallas except the lowly taxpayers?is the right thing? Government
Lesson Number Four: Because this is Dallas. Every city
has its rich and powerful business leaders who want city hall to make them
richer, but only in Dallas is the view so widely held that, yes, of course,
the city should do it.
... I just can't get rid of the attitudes I developed as a
reporter, especially my belief that the City of Dallas gives away far too
much taxpayer money to those who need it the least. Then, to add insult to
injury, we turn around, lament
the fact that we don't have enough money, and deliver mediocre city services
to the average, working-class citizens who never get any tax breaks and
would never even think to ask for any.
... But
when I was first running for office, I seriously worried that if I actually
won, I would wake up the morning after the election and be a totally
different person. Somehow, the mere mantle of the job would automatically
transform me into an agonizer and a compromiser who would never again make a
spontaneous, nakedly honest statement about anything.
After all, as a reporter, I'd seen plenty of candidates go from being
passionate populists on the campaign trail to indistinguishable pulp in
office. "Just shoot me when it happens," I told people, who promised to do
just that.
... As
a columnist, I had made unflattering comments about a number of council
members, particularly Mayor Ron Kirk. ... In the
council-manager system of government, the mayor and the council have little
real power. But make no mistake, Ron Kirk is a
powerful mayor. Government Lesson Number Five: Personality and popularity
matter more than the limitations of position. The business community
relies on Kirk to keep all bad things from happening, which he usually does,
and to be the chief salesman for their projects?in particular, a new sports
arena (51 percent of the voters agreed to levy car rental and hotel room
taxes to generate the city's $125 million share) and the Trinity River
Corridor Project (51.6 percent voted to spend $246 million in bond money to
build a tollway, a lake, and some parks and levees in the river bottoms).
... Fear of Kirk?of having him publicly humiliate
you, privately revile you, gleefully strip you of any leadership post he
bestows upon you?is one of the most prevalent themes on the council.
Kirk gets a large helping hand
with damage control from the Dallas Morning
News (for which I wrote from 1983 to 1986). The News not only embraces
everything the business establishment pushes as "good for Dallas," but, in
those rare instances when a reporter digs up an embarrassing fact that can't
be easily ignored, it may appear as a one-day story that is barely mentioned
later?
... When Kirk appointed his council committee
chairs in 1999, I swallowed my pride and asked him to make me chair of the
Housing and Neighborhood Development Committee, which handles
all of the meat-and-potatoes issues that I care about.
... He scoffed: "You're not on the team. People
who aren't on the team don't get chairmanships."
...
What if, in our discussion of the team, Kirk had said to me, "If I make you
the chairman of Housing, will you shut up about the arena and fully support
the Dallas 2012 Olympic bid?" I wonder what I would have said. "Fine"? Or
"Don't pull any quid pro quo with me"? Would I have felt like a sellout? Or
a really smart pol? Would the chance to make an impact on the so-called
little issues be worth going along on the big ones?especially since I
typically lost the votes on those anyway? I simply don't know.
In the wake of Kirk's successes
on the arena and Trinity projects, he admitted in his annual State of the
City address that the quality of city services had declined.
... "Problems facing code enforcement,
housing, and city streets are realities that can no longer be ignored."
... a
mere three weeks later, Kirk announced that he was backing the Dallas
business community's grandiose plan to lure the 2012 Olympic Games to town.
The business leaders promised to fund the $5 million bid and the $2.2
billion Games with private money, but Blumer and I were skeptical: If they
wouldn't build their own arenas or pay their own property taxes on their
projects, why would they pony up hundreds of millions to build athletic
facilities, housing, media centers, and transportation systems that they
ultimately wouldn't own or control? ... |
It would be great fun to
comment on every cite, but it was written in March 2001 when Laura Miller was
playing the role of Populist Councilwoman who put quality of life issues for Joe
Taxpayer before the wants of Our Downtown Betters and other Robber Baron
Billionaires.
Ron Kirk was a powerful mayor because he was the same con artist and jerk as a
mayor as he had been while a City of Dallas lobbyist in Austin where he got to smooze and
groove with the rich and powerful on our dime. He didn't have to
reinvent himself. He has been carrying water for the rich and powerful
most of his post-Law School life.
The switch from muckraking journalist to populist politician and councilwoman
for
the little people of Oak Cliff and West Dallas was not a hard adjustment for
Laura Miller, just a sequel.
However, the play "Laura Miller Mayor" was a whole new story and required an
entirely new role. It was expected there would be a major transition from Councilwoman Laura Miller to Mayoral Candidate
Laura Miller. Friends and supporters ran her
council races. For a mayoral race, she wanted big time coaching and turned
herself over to be reprogrammed by her Gorgeous Guru. He and Belo's
Decherd and various ODB types she used to abhor now pull her strings.
The Laura Miller who wrote the March, 2001 story in Texas
Monthly is not the woman we call Mayor
Laura Miller. No one who knew Journalist Laura Miller or Councilwoman
Laura Miller can say they know Mayor Laura Miller because this is a new play and
she's a completely different character.
As a councilwoman and author of the Texas
Monthly article, Miller saw herself as the
voice of the "average,
working-class citizens who never get any tax breaks and would never even think
to ask for any".
As Mayor of Dallas, Miller has little or no time for the little people and sees
herself as a player with Belo and the ODB.
As Candidate Miller, she put quality of life issues before big-ticket projects
and "signature bridges". As Mayor Miller, she campaigned against
raises for police and firefighters that her campaign flyers said were needed.
As Mayor Miller, she dismisses the concerns of Northwest Dallas neighborhoods
opposed to a homeless shelter near our homes with a snip that "neighborhood
opposition has never bothered" her.
Despite what Councilwoman Laura Miller said in March 2001:
After all, as a reporter, I'd seen plenty of candidates go from being
passionate populists on the campaign trail to indistinguishable pulp in office.
"Just shoot me when it happens," ...
Mayor Laura Miller is just not
worth shooting.
sb
| |
|
