The Dallas Northeast Chamber board this morning joined the growing list of area chambers supporting the current Trinity plan by voting to encourage Dallas residents not to sign the TrinityVote petitions being circulated. The board’s executive committee was briefed on the plan by former East Dallas councilman Craig Holcomb last week, and the executive committee voted to support (and the board followed suit) the resolution. As a longtime board member, and as someone who has already signed the petition, I was the lone vote against the resolution (along with a couple of abstentions). The discussion centered around the threat of losing $300 million in federal funding for the road, the importance of keeping the Trinity improvements moving forward and the fact that the TrinityVote group doesn’t have a viable alternative. While it’s never fun to be on the losing end of a vote (particularly one this lopsided), I will say that the people on the board appeared to have given the entire Trinity issue some thought and consideration, which while I don’t agree with the conclusion is really what the whole petition process is all about anyway. Meanwhile, I was stopped coming out of a middle school baseball game this week by a very passionate TrinityVote volunteer, who already had a couple of pages of signatures on her petition. This is what politics is supposed to be all about – airing views, casting ballots and then moving on. So far (we’ll see about the moving on part later, I guess), that’s the way things seem to be going…
