The past couple of months have not been kind to Mayor Park Cities. First, one of Dallas’ leading movers and shakers put together a referendum to prevent the city from owning and building the convention center hotel, which the mayor says is crucial to Dallas’ future. Then, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the Trinity River levees weren’t safe enough to build the Trinity toll road, which the mayor says is crucial to Dallas’ future.
Finally, his plan to take over the DISD seems to have died stillborn, and Leppert’s performance in defending it was surprisingly uninspired — kind of like the explanation the kid gives his Mom after she catches him with a copy of Playboy.
How did this happen? Sixteen months ago, after Leppert’s side won the Trinity referendum, the mayor seemed unstoppable. He had the council firmly in his grasp, the business community lined up behind him, and the bureaucrats at City Hall doing his bidding. No matter what Leppert did, he could not fail.
Which, I think, is the cause of all that has happened since. Tom Leppert believed he was unstoppable, and that makes anyone — and especially politicians — do things they shouldn’t. Call it what you will: hubris, pride, self-importance. In the end, the result is what has happened to Leppert since November 2007.
In this, Leppert, to be fair, is not all that different from so many of the people we elect to office around here. They have very little perspective. They see Dallas, and figure it’s the center of the universe. Nothing that happens elsewhere matters much. This is a peculiarly Texas frame of mind, and it’s one of the first things that those of us who are from elsewhere notice. Texas truly is the only state that used to be its own country.
And, despite all of the social, economic and political changes that have taken place in the United States over the past decade, Leppert seems to have had a difficult time understanding not only what has happened, but that these changes are significant. In many ways, he still wants to party like it’s 1999 — Bill Clinton is president and the role of government should be mostly benign neglect. Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina, federal budget deficits and the collapse of the banking system are things that happened to someone else.
I don’t know if this is denial or the aforementioned lack of perspective or nothing more complicated than an inability to see things as they are instead of as we want them to be. But I was struck by a comment Leppert made last month when the city manager said she might have to cut spending by 5 percent for the rest of the year. Briefly, the recession has steeply curtailed city revenue, and it looks like budget projections are way off.
The mayor seemed stunned by all of this, as if he was not around when the council debated the budget in August. He was quoted as saying: “When that budget was passed to right now is almost a different world.”
Yet, by the time the council passed the budget, Bear Stearns had already collapsed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government mortgage companies, were on the verge of collapse, and the International Monetary Fund had said the sub-prime home lending mess had turned into “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression” — and that there was a one-in-four chance of a big-time global recession in the next year.
That sounds like a crisis in the making to me. But Leppert never saw it, just like he didn’t see the convention center hotel opposition, the Corps’ Trinity decision and the reaction to his DISD proposal.
And, frankly, if he continues to not see what’s going on around him, he will have more messes to salvage. That’s bad enough. What worse is that the taxpayer will have to foot the bill for his mistakes.
