George Bush the Elder once said rather famously that he wasn’t much for the “vision thing.” Our city doesn’t seem much enamored of the vision thing right now, either, but we may have cause to regret that in 20 years or so.

During the recent mayoral race, none of the candidates seemed to speak much about a long-range vision for what Dallas should aspire to be in the future. Most of the emphasis, instead, was on a “back-to-basics” theme, as symbolized by repeated invocations of the humble pothole, that is, aside from a rather overblown feud about who offered whom what for whose endorsement (which, by the way, in my book is probably neither illegal, particularly unusual or that big a deal).

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But I digress. Back to the much-maligned and ubiquitous pothole: Absolutely, yeah, sure the streets need to be fixed, and badly. We need more and better code enforcement, higher police and firefighter pay, refurbishment of our parks and more books in our libraries, and I sincerely hope our new mayor can deliver those on time.

But what about preparing now for farther into the future, when we’re trying to grow our tax base by attracting new residents, new businesses, tourists and convention-goers? Think about the destination cities we all like to leave town to go visit, or would if we had the time and money. Form a mental picture of what makes them so desirable to visit. Sure, it’s nice if they have good streets and the trash gets picked up, but they also have invested in distinctive features, especially in or near their central core, that make them so attractive.

That’s why I’m a little perturbed by what I see as our lack of vision thing. Just to take one example, it’s looking like the futuristic “signature bridges” designed by Santiago Calatrava to cross the Trinity River will now, for lack of money and desire, instead be built in the form of standard issue TXDoT concrete highway bridges, thereby losing a terrific opportunity to give Downtown a distinctive and splashy look.

One of the campaigns even put out a piece saying we should, as they put it, quit “spending hundreds of millions of your tax dollars on big projects Downtown.” Excuse me? What hundreds of millions of dollars? I must have missed that, since almost everything that has happened in Downtown lately has been due either to private investment or to a voter-approbed special tax that wouldn’t have been in place otherwise. Downtown revitalization isn’t a good thing for him or her needs to get a better grasp of the big picture.

A lot of the same folks who don’t want to take on any more big projects now are the same ones who have opposed just about everything else over the years. For example, now that it’s a huge success and creating increased property values, everyone’s a big supporter of DART’s light rail system, but some of us remember the crowd who was sure it would be a failure, a boondoggle, and would bring crime into our neighborhood – as if gangs of enterprising and highly mobile burglars are going to get off the train, come rob your house, get back on carrying your TV and VCR, and ride back to from whence they came.

Before you fire off an annoyed letter telling me that your streets really do need to be fixed, I know – mine do, too. But we should be able to improve basic services and implement a longer-range vision. If we don’t get the leadership and the public support to do that, in the decades to come we’ll be a large nondescript city, albeit with pretty good streets, whose mention evokes big collective yawns.