My magazine column this month has elicited the usual comments –- moron and idiot among them (though the pro-elephant lobby has not yet been heard from).
The larger issue is that our elected representatives, almost to a person, refuse to ask questions about how the city is being run. They accept, as gospel, whatever the city manager and Mayor Park Cities tell them. And this baffles me. What’s the point of running a campaign and getting elected if all you’re going to do is rubber stamp decisions? You don’t need to spend time and money to do that. You can stay at home, ignore the whole process, and watch football on TV.
We sent emails with three basic budget questions to the city council members in three neighborhoods where we do magazines, to run their answers on the blog. These weren’t trick questions, either:
1. How confident are you in the city manager’s prediction that property tax revenue will increase by seven percent?
2. Are there tradeoffs in the proposed budget — like cutting clearance rates for some crimes — that make you uncomfortable?
3. Where does the proposed budget cut services that you think need to be restored?
In two of the neighborhoods, a council member said they didn’t do email interviews, and most of the rest of the answers, save for Elba Garcia in Oak Cliff, were the usual sort of political obfuscation. You can see them here, here and here.
This is what drives me so crazy about this council. We wanted to give them a chance to get on the record about this, something one would think an elected official would love to do. But even when you give them a chance to be a hero — the answers should have been: I have my doubts, but she has a proven track record for No. 1; yes for No. 2; and libraries, zoo, and 311 for No. 3 — most of them won’t take it.
