• Visit our Dallas Elections 2011 special section for more coverage, like video interviews with mayoral candidates.

It doesn’t seem like it, as I write this three weeks before the election. This has been the dullest campaign in memory — no controversy and hardly any name calling, something that seems impossible given the way politics works in the 21st century. Four of the 14 city council seats are uncontested, and the mayor’s race seems to have turned into a contest to see who can promise the most not to raise taxes.

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The city’s $100 million budget crisis? It hardly seems to matter, either to voters or to the candidates. The latter don’t talk about it much, other than to say we need to run the city like a business. Which would be nice if the city did things that turned a profit, but there’s not much margin in putting out fires, solving murders or fixing potholes.

And the voters? We’re bored to tears with the whole process. Four years ago, turnout was 13 percent, and it looks like we won’t even do that well this time around. So the mess Downtown will continue to fester, and we’ll keep closing rec centers and cutting library hours until there aren’t any rec centers or libraries left.

This is how bad the budget crisis is, and this is what none of the candidates will tell you. But you can find it on the city’s website, dallascityhall.com:

• In the 2010-11 budget, the city says we can afford to make only three-quarters of the prostitution and drug arrests that we made in 2009-10.

• We’re spending 17 percent less to operate and maintain Fair Park this year than last, and Fair Park is supposed to one of the things that makes us a world class city.

• We can afford to have only 84 percent of the city’s street lights working, down from 90 percent a year ago.

Yes, as ex-Mayor Park Cities was so fond of saying, it’s not as bad here as it is elsewhere. But it’s not like this is any good. “I’m sorry, sir, we can’t fix your street light. No money for it.”

Yet only 1 in 10 of us will vote — if we’re lucky. Maybe we don’t think we matter, and that the bosses downtown will do whatever they want regardless of what we say. And, given the way the system has failed us over the past four years, there may be some truth to that. When we don’t have enough money to arrest whores and junkies, something is broken.

But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be fixed, and it doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Because the politicians and the bureaucrats want us to quit, so they can spend our money the way they want. Case in point: The debt service for this year’s budget accounts for 13 percent of spending, and what do we have to show for it? Not much, save for last year’s tax rate increase so we could afford to pave some streets and buy some library books. But the politicians have lots of shiny buildings to use in their campaigns, and the bureaucrats have gold-plated lines on their résumés.

So vote this month. It doesn’t matter who you vote for; just vote. Yes, one of the main mayoral candidates was on the city council that spent us into this predicament. And yes, another of the candidates says that running a pizza company prepared him for running a city that does nothing remotely resembling pizza making. And the other main candidate says he is going to eliminate the budget’s sacred cows, but also says that the city seems to be pretty well run, all things considered.

Because regardless of who wins, if we don’t let them know we’re in charge, we’re the losers.