In a month, Dallas residents will have the opportunity to put an end to the way the City has been run for most of the 20th century. After May 1, if it’s bidness as usual, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Next month’s City Council elections will give voters – especially those of us who live in what the editorial writers love to call The Inner City – the chance to demonstrate that democracy in Dallas is not an idea whose time has come and gone. The past two years were a start; now it’s time to finish the job.
The first 14-1 Council has been a revelation for those of us who always considered the City Council little more than a place where neighborhood issues went to die.
The neighborhoods finally started to receive a hearing – at the expense of the social and political elite that has governed the City for the past nine decades.
This may very well be a revolutionary change in the landscape.
The bidness of Dallas has traditionally been bidness, and the Council – save for the occasional member such as Craig Holcomb or Lori Palmer – rarely did much to interfere with that philosophy.
North Dallas, for example, was built at the expense of our neighborhoods with little objection from the Council.
Usually, the only time the Council ever made news during my decade in East Dallas was when a meeting lasted too long or its members were too unruly.
But the current Council has been different. Not earth-shakingly, democratically different (this is Dallas, after all), but different nonetheless.
There has been talk of decentralizing the police force, taking cops out of their regional fortresses and putting them into the neighborhoods, using a variety of police storefronts.
And not only has there been criticism of the upcoming soccer World Cup – something that would have been unheard of in the old “Dallas is an international city” days – but the criticism came from Chris Luna, who was elected in 1991 with a lot of help from the traditional Dallas political establishment.
Even Dallas’ only major newspaper, which rarely mentions this part of town except in connection with shootings and stabbings, has decided that it may not be such a bad idea to put some money into the Inner City.
Of course, much of its concern has to do with its extensive real estate holdings, which would be worthless if Dallas abandoned it. Downtown in much the same way Detroit has during the past 20 years.
Yet when the paper of the establishment hints at change, For whatever reason, almost anything is possible.
But it is not inevitable – unless the people in the neighborhoods make it inevitable. This is our opportunity to make sure that our tax dollars are used to repair roads and to ensure regular code enforcement, and not to pay for boondoggles such as the Meyerson Symphony Center or the proposed downtown shopping mall (which would almost certainly feature more tax giveaways than there are empty offices in Downtown skyscrapers).
This is our opportunity to set the Council’s agenda and not to be distracted by issues that are all too often smoke screens launched by the elite to confuse us.
I’m not so sure that nearly every issue that divides Dallas – from assigning blame in the Cowboys parade debacle to the intricacies of our racial problems – isn’t related to one basic question: Will Dallas be governed from the bottom up, like the rest of the free world, or will it be governed by the top down, as it has always been?
That’s the question that will appear on the ballot next month, and its is the question we can finally answer with something we want to hear.
