06/27/02  Most of our current problems can be laid at Belo's feet, but they are clueless!

Don't you get tired of the rah! rah!'s out there running around with one new idea after another -- big ticket, sexy, high dollar, change the landscape ideas?  I don't mean just physical or commercial stuff -- government stuff -- economic development stuff -- environmental stuff.

Let's look at three Dallas Managed News editorials from just the past few days.  The text in blue italics is my comment:

Go Dallas: Timid bond plan won't cover city's needs  06/24/02

Following the record floods last June that nearly washed away their city, Houston residents might have hunkered down while they absorbed the $5 billion in damage. But they didn't lose their will. Less than six months later, voters approved a $776 million municipal bond issue for long-term improvements. So what?  Most people don't realize how bond sales impact their property taxes.  Many renters don't understand their rent goes up when their landlord's taxes go up. Remember what your Mother said "just because Johnny will jump off the roof. . . ."   Dallas voters are facing their own economic challenges.  Company mergers and cutbacks have taken their toll on the job market here. And that in turn has led to a major decline in retail sales.  Retail sales have declined because everyone is paying so much in property and sales taxes there is little left to spend.   An $81 million drop in sales tax revenue has forced the Dallas City Council to delay a much needed bond election until next year and to consider a property tax increase and reduction in the municipal workforce.    Council members have talked about presenting a bond package to voters that is no more than $300 million. City officials fear a backlash at the polls if they ask for more. This is not bold leadership.  It is sensible leadership because even a "tiny" $300 million bond package might fail.  The recent rejection of the police/firefighters' referendum was more about no new taxes than it was against their pay raise.  Belo may not get it, but most of this council knows the mood of their constituents.   The council is badly underestimating the importance of a capital improvements program that is large enough to reflect this city's short- and long-term needs. Council members also wrongly assume that voters in Houston are willing to stand tall in times of crisis, while voters in Dallas are not. . . .   City Council member Mary Poss has been gathering information on how a bond program could be stretched out over a half-dozen years. Phasing out the sale of the general obligation bonds longer than the customary three years would allow for as much as $600 million in improvements without adding significantly to the tax rate. . . . This is typical Belo and Mayor PreTend Poss logic -- don't worry about tomorrow, someone else will pay the bill.  That's how we got in this mess -- indebting our future.   As long as Dallas persists in holding onto its limited financial strategies, there will be limited hope for building the tax base. . . . Every cockamani idea that has come down the pike in the past few years  was supposed to build our tax base while it exempted the new development from property taxes.  That's Alice in Wonderland mathematics, and Belo has backed every one of them.    But the future of the city cannot be assured by better streets alone. . . .  Well, it's a start.   Downtown improvements must be included in the bond package. One of the critical elements is the creation of a 10-acre park in the center of the city. . . . We already have a huge Downtown park that is not maintained or used -- Griggs.  All we need is to take more land off the tax rolls for park land to neglect.  We don't have the money to maintain what we have. My part of town -- Bachman/Walnut Hill -- has many more residents and businesses.  We have parks where kids have to jump ditches to get to them.  Spend the money on our parks or Bachman Lake or the zoo.     A performing arts center, which has been given a lower priority due to the current economic malaise, likewise deserves a higher priority. . . .A minor financial commitment of $10 million or less on the bond issue won't serve that purpose. . . .Then what?  We can't afford the gift of the opera house.  The Meyerson has never been profitable.  It costs us millions annually to maintain.  Let's exempt the Meyerson and the opera hall from any property taxes and just give them to the arts crowd to operate and maintain.  It would be a lot cheaper.

Having the Dallas Managed News lecture us about boldness and courage goes beyond ironic -- it's oxymoronic.  If it worked, I certainly would not oppose spending ourselves out of debt.  That strategy has not been too successful for me personally, but it might work on a city level if we are not spending ourselves out of debt with borrowed money.  

Under Ron Kirk and his Large White Shadow's regime, we gave away tax abatements like it wasn't real money those robber barons would not be paying.  Ed Oakley tried to make me see that logic -- if a tax abatement recipient (robber baron) doesn't build anything there is nothing new to tax, so tax abatements are money we would not be getting anyway.  Wrong!  Even bare land is increasing in value now.

Had we not let Hicks and Perot take Intervests' condominium project land through our eminent domain rights, their project would have been on-line 3 years ago and generating substantial property taxes instead of the land being off the tax rolls now.  The fallacy of tax abatements is that they generate development where it would not occur.  Maybe that's because the market is not there.  Giving Broadcast.com/Yahoo.com $4 million in tax abatements did not generate any new jobs as promised -- they laid people off.

Ed Oakley also told me the people in the Decorative Center area (Oak Lawn West of I-35/Stemmons) think the arena has been good for them.  Their property values have increased.  Here's a clue -- so has everyone else's.  That does not mean there is a market for their property at the inflated valuation -- just that they get to pay more property taxes.  If that makes them happy, they are more altruistic than me.

Where's the benefit we were promised from the arena?  Our convention business is off -- our sales taxes are down by millions -- a bunch of stage hand professionals who once had jobs at Reunion now do not.  Well?

The youth vote: The next generation is yawning at elections .06/27/2002

For all the contributions that young people make to our society, and there are plenty – from fighting our wars to teaching our children to caring for our needy as volunteers at hospitals – there is one important arena of civic participation in which they do not pull their load. People between the ages of 18 and 24 are not voting in the percentage they should be. . . .  So what?  Do you really want people voting who don't care or don't know the issues?  Would you not rather wait until they are motivated to participate rather than stirred up by some slick campaign flyer produced by the likes of Ron Kirk and his Large White Shadow?   But the young people of today are not voting as often as did young people 30 years ago. . . .So says new research by the Center for Information and Research on Civil Learning and Engagement, which is affiliated with the University of Maryland. According to the study, 42 percent of those young people who were eligible voted in the excruciatingly close 2000 election. That is a 13 point drop from the 1972 presidential election. It's also 24 points lower than the rate of participation among all eligible voters. Among the least likely to vote were Hispanics, the ethnic group now poised to become the nation's largest minority. Voter participation among young eligible Hispanics lagged 12 points behind African-Americans and whites in the same age group.  Young people are not voting for the same reason that mature people are not voting -- they think the fix is in -- their vote does not count and politicians will forget them and the promises made to them once they are elected.

Jim Schutze talks about it some in his June 27th Dallas Observer article which is covered below.  Young African-American and Hispanics are shut out of the political process by the Black and Hispanic leadership.  At any meeting, you see the same old faces -- whether redistricting, townhall or candidate forums.  No one is grooming young Hispanics for positions of leadership.  Look at John Loza's committee appointments -- many of them don't even live in District 2, much less are Hispanic.  As mad as I am at Ed Oakley, he has reached out and does have as community base.  Angela Marshall, his appointee to the Plan Commission, is a smart, African-American nurse who lives in District 6 (under old lines).  Loza's appointee to the Plan Commission is White and does not live in District 2. 

When Kathlyn Gillium was on the School Board, she never got a young person prepared to step in -- she wanted to hang on to her seat and the power for herself.  Look at Al Lipscomb and how long he hung on to his seat!  

Without Dwaine Caraway behind her, Barbara Mallory Caraway would have never broke through that Black establishment barricade.  Good, bad or otherwise!  Like Don Hicks and other African-American council members -- once elected, Caraway turned to relatives (mostly Husband Dwaine) for all board and commission appointments rather than create opportunities for new people to participate.  We had to revise the Ethics Code to prohibit council members from naming their spouses and immediate family members to boards.  What chance does a young person have of rising to a leadership position when the geezers won't let them participate at any meaningful level?  

Why should a young person bother to vote when the election has already been decided by forged votes?  In the DISD District 8 race, even 71 year old Pete Vaca knows that Joe May has hundreds of mail-in ballots that his vote harvester thugs will deliver in the District 8 School Board race.  Joe May has no business running for public office -- particularly the school board.  Alex Ramos has worked with hundreds of young Hispanic men through his Boy Scout efforts in East Dallas.  He speaks with pride of the college students and graduates who went through the scouting program he organized.  Joe May organizes vote harvesters.  Mike Martinez has a Masters in  Education and taught elementary school for 3 years.  Joe May can count census tracts. 

WorldCom: It's time to fix the moral compass  06/27/2002.

American financial markets are considered the world's most transparent, providing investors a glimpse into capitalism's inner workings. On the premise that openness promotes accountability, a vast amount of corporate financial information is publicly available.   But all this assumes that financial reports accurately and fairly represent a company's condition, and that the intent is to inform, not deceive. . . . This is hypocritical coming from Belo which has backed such deceptive campaigns as the arena sales tax and the Trinity Bond-doogle.  Both of those campaigns were deceptive and dishonest and probably happened with illegal votes.  You would think our only daily would strive to "inform, not deceive", but that is not the case.  We don't call it The Dallas Managed News for nothing.   The latest shock comes from WorldCom, which reports hiding expenses and inflating cash flow a massive $3.8 billion. The company now is on the brink of bankruptcy. Securities regulators cite the disclosures as "accounting improprieties of unprecedented magnitude." . . . What about promising Dallas voters that there would be sail boats on the Trinity?   Rebuilding the world's sagging confidence in the integrity of U.S. capital markets must be this nation's highest economic priority. . . . Rebuilding Dallas taxpayers' confidence in the integrity of city hall and our own daily would also be nice.  Thank goodness, we have an honest mayor.  Think where we would be if Ron Kirk were still Mayor.  Anyone who questioned the $81 million shortfall and the reasons behind it would be branded a racist.   The recovery of the economy and the stock market depends on business finding its moral compass.  They better not start looking for it in Dallas.

Schutze goes way out on a limb in his 6/27/02 story.  He actually says that there are some crooked Black politicians who want to promote only rich Blacks and want the working class Blacks to stay in their place and not challenge their social standing.  But, he inadvertently misses a major point as he goes through his and Larry Duncan's take on the local political scene.  14-1 has not been good for Dallas. 

Schutze  06/27/02 They get elected with stolen votes, and then they start divvying up the goodies

Think about every single thing you've seen the Dallas City Council do in the last year: • Defy the mayor and give away tens of millions in tax money to two billionaires who didn't need it for a sports-cum-lingerie mall on a toxic waste dump outside of downtown. • Run City Hall into the financial ditch. • Make plans to fire scads of city employees and then cut the pay of the remaining ones in order to totally demoralize the city work force. • And the very council members who pushed the giveaway to the billionaires--in part because they were promised contracts for their friends and grants for their own districts--are already floating the idea of fixing everything by socking it to North Dallas homeowners with a major tax hike.     . . . .What if you found out that the current make-up of the Dallas City Council is based on vote fraud and that the people who would have taken office in legitimate fair elections would not have voted the way this council has voted?  Don't forget the close margins in both the arena sales tax and the Trinity Bond-doogle races were probably decided by illegal mail-in ballot harvesting done under Kathy Nealy's supervision. . . .  But now at last we have the smoking gun in the Maxine Thornton-Reese case. . . .  Now a state district judge, backed by the 5th Court of Appeals, has ruled that Thornton-Reese's supposed victory was based on forgery and illegal vote-brokering practices. . . .  This is about forgery. It's about stealing votes. It's about arrogance--paid hacks bundling and massing brokered votes in precisely the way state law forbids.  . . .  The bad ballots in the Thornton-Reese case were handled by Charlotte Ragsdale, sister of former council member Diane Ragsdale, and by Virgin Couriers (see "The Case of the Virgin Couriers," May 2). Both Ragsdale and an official for Virgin testified, however, that they were more involved in the 2001 campaign of South Dallas council member Leo Chaney than in Thornton-Reese's race. But no one sued Chaney over his election, so there has been no investigation of fraud there.  What about his shakedown of Smirnoff that John Wiley Price called "blood money"? . . . "She [Thornton-Reese] wanted to chop up specific neighborhoods to make the seat safer for her personally. These are the people who are saying that stealing votes is a racial issue, and yet they are the ones that are giving away clearly identified African-American issues."  Duncan's good buddy Maxine Aaronson was part of the neighborhood chop-ups on the Redistricting Commission, as was Joe May.  Aaronson did it for Veletta Lill and May did it for John Loza.  The map that Randy Staff offered was particularly careful of maintaining neighborhoods whole in one district, but people like Thornton-Reese and Joe May see neighborhoods as threats to their power bases.   That particular charge--that Thornton-Reese is part of a bourgeois black leadership selling out its own constituency for personal gain--is old and bitter and cuts to the quick. . . .   But I spent a long time talking to her lead lawyer, Donald Hicks, a former council member and one of the proprietors of the city's most influential African-American political action committee. . . . The goal he sees as paramount for the black community in Dallas is the long-overdue development of a prosperous and influential middle class. Toward that end he believes it is entirely legitimate to use politics as the lever for prying loose some of the same financial action that wealthy white people divvy up at the country club.   "I'm shut out of the country club," he said.  Hey, moron, so are 98% of the people in Dallas County.   It galls Hicks, as it has always galled the city's middle-class black leadership, that Larry Duncan's more grassroots street-level politics earns him a following among certain black voters, whom Hicks and company believe should not be voting for a white man. . . . Hicks, et al, do not understand the concept of an earnest living, but the average Black Dallas citizen does.  Our local African-American politicians are not representative of our local African-American population, who are mostly trying to make a living, raise their kids and be good people -- like Angela Marshall (Oakley's CPC appointee).  She is not an exception; Angela is typical of local African-American residents.    But Duncan, like Mike Jung, has history going for him. As leaders of the '80s neighborhood movement, they held out stoutly for the true single-member district council system we have today, while many middle-class black leaders were willing to cut deals with the white leadership downtown. Those deals would have produced a hybrid system designed to preserve the overall dominance of white North Dallas. John Loza proposed the best solution pre-10-4-1 and 14-1.  He suggested 12-4-1, with 4 geographic super districts so that low populated areas like West Dallas and South East Dallas would actually have more influence than their population numbers would actually justify under single member.  That would should be 2 more council member than we have currently, but citizens would have another voice and no single member district reps could do the shakedown and control tactics they use now.  North Dallas residents warned that 14-1 would lead to ward politics and corruption.   Duncan says people in his district do remember things like that, and their resulting lack of faith in middle-class leaders like Thornton-Reese is why those leaders have to cheat to win elections.   "I won four elections in succession in District 4 by ever-increasing margins. . . .   "Duncan doesn't see a random pattern here. He sees a plan. He believes that powerful people in Dallas wink at vote fraud because it is part of a mechanism. He drew me a verbal picture of rotating seats on the city council, the airport board, the school board, the DART board and elsewhere, in which a small coterie of players are able to control the distribution of contracts and other tribute.  . . .  It is much cheaper for the ODB to control a few districts with crooked puppets like Fantroy, Hill, Thornton-Reese and Chaney than to finance city wide elections.  When we vote citywide, we elect Laura Miller.  When we vote in gerrymandered single member districts that dismantle neighborhoods, we elect John Loza.    "It is no coincidence that the people who fought against increasing voter rights in Dallas during the '80s and early '90s, who fought against 14-1 and single-member districts, now are the ones who are ripping off the system and hiding behind it."  The ODB supported 14-1, North Dallas residents did not.

Dallas voters supported 10-4-1 by a large margin.  Judge Buchmeyer, who hates democracy with all its messy involvement of thinking people, overturned 10-4-1 and imposed 14-1 on Dallas.  There was so much dirty stuff going on during that first redistricting the 5th Circuit in New Orleans overturned the plan and said do it again.  I reluctantly supported 14-1 when Comrade Buchmeyer forced it on us, but I was worried control freaks like Lord Lori Palmer would become petty despots.  I really did not anticipate the corruption that happened so quickly.  

Larry Duncan was part of the movement that overthrew 10-4-1 for 14-1.  He must have thought he could control it, but he and all the rest of the city are paying the price for assuming one particular form of government would fix our problems.  It's not the form of government -- it's the people who control government that are the problem.

That's why I am pretty sure we should not change to a strong mayor system.  Changing our form of government because we have an incompetent city manager is not the answer.  Get rid of the incompetent.

As long as the majority of the council are the likes of Mary Poss and Alan Walne, et al, it does not matter what form of government we have.  Change the people in power.  

Anyone will be better than Poss.  Bill Blaydes is likely to run for Walne's vacant seat.  Blaydes is a tough talking, straight shooter who will more often than not do the right thing or at least give you a valid reason for his position.  Walne will give you a valid reason for doing one thing and then vote the other way.

We don't need to distracted with a commission determining how to revamp the power structure at city hall.  We need to figure out a way to trim the fat and pay our bills and make Dallas a more livable city.

In the interim, just keep dividing all DMN editorials by 8 when you try to weigh their validity.