Todd Bensman
Michael Davis
Gary Turner
John Willis
                             

12/02/04  City Hall puts a damper on the holidays!

Right off the top, I celebrate Christmas -- not Winter Solstice or Seasons Greetings -- but Christmas!  You can celebrate whatever you want this time of the year, but my heritage and faith is Christian and this is the Christmas season for me. 

It is appropriate at this time of gift-giving to look at some of our gift horses in the mouth.  We have had a bunch of Trojan Horses left at our municipal gates, and we can't afford to take care of them, much less pick up the mess they leave behind.

I have posted commentaries from three Dallas guys who view the city from different stages of despair and hope.  Like me, you can probably identify with each position because on a given day things can look pretty bleak for our city's future, and then the next day fate and outside forces seem to intervene to save us from ourselves or the whims of our elected officials or the people who control them (Our Downtown Betters, the ODB).

As bad as things can get, we still get to live in Dallas where we have 2 or 3 weeks of Winter and then things are blooming and it's Spring, and then things are getting fried and it's Summer, and then between Thanksgiving and Christmas it sleets and it's Winter.  If you are a Fall person, Dallas is not the place for you, unless you are happy with the trees changing colors while you are dealing with 90? temperatures one day and 40? the next. 

I love our Dallas weather.  I love our city.  I don't love the way it is being mismanaged and neglected by our elected officials while they chase monument projects to bolster their political r?um?.  Some council members are desperate to have tunnels from Downtown to DFW and Love, while our surface streets look like the terrorists have already hit us.  It's ironic that we could have those tunnels if all of our bond money were not tied up playing tinker toy games with the Trinity Trough.  That's exactly what all those architects and planners are doing -- building erector kits that look very clever and win design awards but don't do anything anyone needs to be done.

It's been almost 7 years since voters "approved" the Ron Kirk sales tax for the Hicks/Perot Arena and the Trinity Bondoogle by the narrowest of fraudulent votes.  We have spent millions already on the Trinity Project, and have nothing to show for it but stalled projects that developers are reluctant to proceed with because they don't know what's going to happen.  We have lost millions in property tax revenue for the land under and around the Hicks/Perot Arena, and we have nothing significant to show for it.  We even lost ground with the NW DART line because the Robber Barons forced council crooks to change a 15 year planned alignment of light rail away from the residents and businesses of Uptown and Oak Lawn and even away from the West End.

Northwest Dallas desperately needs the line to get up to us so all the slum apartment owners will finally be able to sell their properties for redevelopment.  There are so many commercial properties that are just being warehoused until the NW Highway and Walnut Hill stations are opened.  Rather than wanting to stimulate permanent redevelopment and new property tax revenue that will benefit Dallas homeowners and businesses, our council is fixated on accommodating the "tourists".

Our libraries had leaking roofs and were understaffed, but our council thought expanding the convention center was more important because we needed to accommodate the "tourists".  Now, we have a big, mostly underused convention center that is not drawing conventions, much less tourists.

Building String Thing Bridges will not draw tourists to Dallas.  Neither will spending millions to house an art collection.

Weren't we supposed to see millions in tourism revenue once the Nasher Collection was installed at the DMA?  Didn't we spend millions on the infrastructure around the DMA to make it attractive for those hundreds of thousands of tourists (the intellectual set)?  Where are they?  Where's that revenue?  The Nasher collection is a gift that keeps on taking.

You know what the entire Nasher Collection deal was and is about?  We created a place for Ray Nasher to keep his art collection together, where he could go and touch his stuff and rearrange it and control it, but gets the art out of his estate and protects his daughters from paying millions and millions to the IRS for inheritance taxes.  It's typical of a Limousine Liberal like Nasher who believes in redistributing the wealth of little guys like you and me (and keeping us in our place) to pull off a huge inheritance tax protection scheme like this, so that his daughters and grandkids don't pay taxes. 

No one in D.C. fights repeal of inheritance taxes like the liberals, because they have all their stuff in shelters or deals like Nasher's arrangement with City Hall.  The whole idea of inheritance taxes was to re-distribute the wealth to keep America from having the social stratas of Europe, where the wealth stays with one class and the rest of us pay the bills.  The "connected class" get to keep their stuff.

There I go -- expanding the topic, but there is a pattern to all this. 

The Nasher collection cost and still costs Dallas taxpayers a bundle and was sold to us a something that would be good for the city, reinvigorate Downtown and attract tourists.  It was a gift to the city, but you and I have to pay for it -- not the tourists.

The Trinity Bondoogle is supposed to reinvigorate Downtown, stimulate new development and be a tourist draw. 

The Hicks/Perot Arena was supposed to reinvigorate Downtown, create new development and be a tourist draw.  Hicks and Perot were going to give the city so much, but you and I have to pay for it -- not the tourists.

The taxpayers in Arlington are about to experience the joy of accepting gifts from Robber Barons.

For this particular Christmas season, I am asking Santa Claus to make those rich people and developers and council crooks stop giving us gifts that we have to pay for even if we don't want them and can't afford them.

Bah! Humbug!

sb