Call it grace under pressure. Call it chutzpah. Call it naivety. But whatever you call it, last month’s request by several city councilmen for a salary increase and for doubling the length of their terms is at best worth a giggle. At worst, it shows just how out of touch the council is with what’s going on in Dallas.
Do not get me wrong. I prefer a strong mayor/council form of government, and have pushed for it since I started writing this column. This is the ninth-largest city in the country, and serving on the council should be more than a part-time job. I also believe that if you pay part-time wages, you’ll get part-time employees. Councilmen should be paid a wage commensurate with their abilities.
Which, of course, is the catch. This council has done nothing in the last three years to show that its members are worth what we pay them now, let alone give them a raise:
• They slept while the budget burned. Yes, I know everyone is tired of hearing me bellyache about this, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. If you had an employee who kept spending money while your company’s sales shrank, would you give him or her a raise?
• Too many of them don’t do the little things that go with the job, like holding committee meetings. The council’s Trinity River committee, chaired by Oak Cliff’s Dave Neumann, has canceled more public meetings than it has held during the last year. Best yet, Neumann refused to answer questions from the media about why the meetings were canceled. Instead, he issued a statement that said the meetings were canceled because there was nothing to discuss. I wonder: Is Neumann talking about the same Trinity River, with the unsafe levees, as the rest of us?
• Some of them have been less than completely honest, as a recent federal court jury noted. Is it fair to tar the council with the Don Hill bribery conviction? Hill thought so, since his defense was that he didn’t do anything that wasn’t common practice at City Hall.
• The Caesar Chavez-Industrial Boulevard naming fiasco. First we had a poll that wasn’t poll, and then we had a council vote that wasn’t a council vote, and then Industrial was renamed Riverfront because it was so scenic. Honestly, would something like that happen in a city with a real government?
Steve Salazar and Tennell Atkins are the councilmen quoted as pushing for changes in the city charter that would triple their salaries and give them four-year terms; they’re hoping for a 2011 vote. They probably don’t think they’re asking for anything unusual, and can’t imagine why voters might object.
In this, they’re wonderful examples of the entitlement mentality displayed by so many of our elected officials. They seem to think they’re indispensable, and that government will collapse without them. Take their argument for longer terms, which is that it’s too difficult to run for re-election every two years. This overlooks the fact, of course, that the U.S. House of Representatives has had two-year elections for 223 years, and it was good enough for Gerald Ford, Sam Rayburn and Wright Patman. But not good enough for Atkins and Salazar?
One final piece of advice for the council: Your colleagues on the DISD board had the same thoughts about being indispensable when they voted to delay school board elections last year in the wake of yet another school funding scandal. The incumbents who voted for the delay and had to stand in the postponed election? They were thrown out of office.
It’s funny how democracy works, isn’t it?
