Burnt Orange Report

Dallas Strong-Mayor Petition Makes the Ballot

By Andrew Dobbs

This is a story I've been meaning to write about for a while now, but keep forgetting to. Now there is a new wrinkle that makes it quite salient.

For the last month or two a petition has been going around Dallas urging people to vote for a "strong mayor" city government. Right now it is a City Manager system, and an incredibly weak one at that. Nobody has any real power- the council has very little control over how city agencies function other than their budget writing authority, the mayor is nothing more than the biggest cheerleader on the city council and the city manager is beholden to the Magic Number 8 (the number of votes needed to get anything done). Nobody has any authority and thus nobody is accountable for the screwups around City Hall. Furthermore, even if there was some "accountability", there is nothing anyone can really do without trying to get a lot of different scummy ward-heelers and right wing nut jobs all on the same page. Dallas is a dying city, and the cancer is centered at City Hall.

So first time City Council candidate Beth Ann Blackwood realized what a lot of people have- Dallas needs to scrap the City Manager system. She then realized what everybody has- that it'd be a cold day in hell before the City Council would ever get around to doing that. So Beth Ann put together the aforementioned petition and according to Channel 8 News, it made the ballot today. Great!

But there are some problems. The petition is, to say the least, radical. This isn't a "no city manager, strong mayor and council" petition. It is kind of a Reichstag fire petition.

Let me let veteran Dallas city reporter Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer explain what I mean:

I had been told the charter amendments amounted merely to crossing out all references to "city manager" and replacing them with "mayor"--a simple "search and replace."

More like "search and destroy."

Let me share. First the legalese. And this is only an example. The existing charter talks about how "all ordinances and resolutions of the city council...shall be final on the passage or adoption by the required majority of the city council."

If we vote yes on this thing next May, that language will say: "All ordinances and resolutions of the city council AND ORDERS OF THE MAYOR shall be final on the passage or adoption by EITHER THE MAYOR or the required majority of the city council."

Yeah, take a deep breath. That's what I did. Right now, the council votes on ordinances--local laws. But under the new version, the mayor could also pass laws, called "orders."

By fiat.

Are you mentally searching for a parallel in your experience as an American that might help you comprehend that? How about "martial law"?

And I still think I may be OK with it.

n the last week I have been reading political science journals (I deserve hazardous mental duty pay) dealing with forms of local government. The bottom line is that types of city government occupy a spectrum. Right now we are way over at one end--weak mayor, weak council, weak city manager. The weak, weak, weak system.

The proposal put forward by the petitions would slam us all the way over to the other extreme: no city manager or other statutory chief administrative officer at all, a crippled city council that reporters won't even bother to cover, and "The Hulk" for mayor.

This mayor would run every department of the city and have hire-and-fire authority over all non-civil service city employees and appointees. She would appoint the civil service commission. As a matter of fact, she would appoint all members of all city boards and commissions.

The mayor would hire and fire the city council's personal staff and decide what to pay them. You know those city council secretaries who campaigned against Mayor Laura Miller and then brought an ethics complaint against her? They would need to dump their stuff in boxes and run.

The mayor would hire and fire the chief of police, the city attorney, all municipal judges and court clerks. The mayor could create or kill entire city departments--any city department. The mayor would be able to create special police and detectives apart from the police department. (...)

There is a general perception in the city--a kind of reluctant recognition--that Dallas City Hall is like a human heart in fibrillation. It shakes. It jiggles. It tries so hard. But it just can't pump blood.

People have been jumping on Mayor Miller for being all over the place on this--against the Blackwood petitions, now apparently for them. But Miller is consistent on one point: She keeps telling the cameras that what we have now does not work.

She's right. So how could we possibly justify keeping it? (...)

So how could I vote for this? Not happily. I sure wish we had another choice. But this summer is when the voting public will get a chance to vote for change. The only way to put this off is by campaigning against change in May. I believe that would be the worse poison.

Do the Park Cities bubblati and their North Dallas cohort think they'll be able to capture the mayor's seat after the charter has been changed? Of course they do. There's talk now among the business moguls of being tired of Laura Miller, thinking she's a photo-op former journalist who can't run a company.

But the people I talk to who see the polls regularly tell me Laura Miller is still extremely hot with the heavy-voting middle-class base. I think the next mayor under the new system will be Laura Miller.

Then we'll see. Boy will we see.

The two biggest complaints about this proposal are that 1. it is radical and 2. it is supported by the old guard types who used their power to keep minorities and other groups from having a say in city government for decades. But I'd say that drastic times call for drastic (ballot) measures, the proposed system would be better than the one we have now- where a bunch of demagogues keep crooked, incompetent people like Terrell Bolton in power. The mayor has to build a coalition, it is not nearly as prone to pandering to extreme interest groups as the Council seats are and s/he is far more accountable to the people than the City Manager by virtue of his or her being elected. That is the position to give the power to.

And who cares who supports the thing? In case the election of a lesbian Latina as SHERIFF didn't alert you, those old mossbacks don't have a whole lot of pull any more. Sure they have the money, but R.L. Thornton couldn't get elected nowadays. People opposing the measure on these grounds are locked in a 1970 mindset that is happily promoted by the corrupt, demagogic, race-baiting South Dallas politicians that keep their constituents afraid of whitey even while they buddy up with the powerful special interests to promote their own well-being. That's not to say that all who oppose this come from those quarters, but the idea originates with those people and others who know better are swallowing the story whole.

I don't like all the powers it gives the mayor, but something's gotta give. Like I said, Dallas is a dying city. Crime is awful, anybody with any money is fleeing to the suburbs or elsewhere, there is little to know investment in large sectors of the city, infrastructure is crumbling, code enforcement is non-existant and it is just an increasingly unlivable city. The only way the dramatic changes are going to be made before the city is too far gone (if it isn't already) is to get someone with the power to make dramatic changes, a power nobody has right now. This charter change would make that possible, and that is why- warts and all- I have to support it.

But there are people smarter than me out there (hard to believe, but it's true). What do you all think?