The upcoming City Council and mayoral elections are in danger of becoming extremely silly.
How else to explain what has happened in the past month? That’s when a group of North Dallas candidates, potential candidates and former candidates managed to find an issue that put Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper, Councilman Donna Halstead of Lake Highlands and your resident curmudgeon on the same side of the same issue.
This is not an easy thing to accomplish. In fact, reasonable observers would have thought it was all but impossible. Although Halstead and I have found common ground in the past, and she has even found something in common with DODN (despite its insistence that Lake Highlands doesn’t exist, but is part of something called northeast Dallas), regular readers of this space know that the only thing that DODN is good for is Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics.
Yet there we are, all pitching in to save the inner city in this spring’s elections.
That’s because the aforementioned North Dallas delegation has decided that the two most important issues facing us when we go to the polls are DART and Love Field.
Seems like something out of Monty Python, doesn’t it?
I could have sworn that the most important issues facing us in the May elections were crime, tax relief and neighborhood development (which is the fancy way of saying we need to get all those potholes filled). That’s what Halstead and DODN say, too.
But I guess if you live in North Dallas, you don’t have crime, taxes or potholes to worry about – which leaves you time to work on the important stuff.
In fact, the self-appointed head of the North Dallas delegation (whose name I won’t mention because the last time I did, he wrote me a nasty letter questioning my morality) even went so far as to say that Halstead had better mind her manners – she was not immune from a challenge just because she was a white Republican who happened to agree with him on a couple of other things.
This was as mean as it was ridiculous as it was arrogant. Donna Halstead’s voting record is not what ails Dallas. Truth be told, she is an outstanding Councilman (who would have made a fine mayor) whose biggest concern is making the City a better place.
Reasonable people may disagree with her about what she thinks needs to be done to make Dallas a better place, but no one should question her motives or her loyalties. She is a friend of the neighborhoods, regardless of the neighborhoods.
Even DODN has its corporate heart in the right place for a change. For years and years, it wrote off Downtown and its neighborhoods in its rush to bring civilization to Frisco and Allen.
But it changed course in the late 1980’s, when it discovered that Downtown was dead (and that, by a small coincidence, all of its real estate Downtown was worth a lot less money). It has even pitched in to this battle with some rare local reporting, which is enlightening even if it’s not always fair and even-handed. Yet even those excesses don’t ail Dallas.
What ails Dallas is the attitude of the North Dallas delegation, which doesn’t want to make the City a better place. If it did, it wouldn’t look for phony issues to grandstand on. The business about Love Field and DART is a smoke screen for its real agenda, which is to sacrifice those of us in the neighborhoods for the benefit and welfare of North Dallas.
But you can’t say that and get elected, so its candidates, potential candidates and former candidates have dug up something else.
The North Dallas delegation wants to make its part of the City a better place. Then the rest of us can sit down here and lump it and dream about the day when we move to one of its gated communities.
As if we would actually want to.
One day, the North Dallas delegation will finally figure out that Dallas means all of Dallas – and not just its part. It will learn that City money spent in East Dallas and Lakewood, as well as Fair Park and South Dallas and Oak Cliff and Oak Lawn, helps them too – just like money that is spent in North Dallas. That’s because it increases the tax base and brings in jobs and reduces crime.
Siding with DODN every once in a while is a small price to pay to make that happen.
