Although Ventura's neighborhood association isn't political beyond zoning--and has never formally discussed the arena as a group--she applauds Mote's desire to do something about it. "I think she's great," Ventura says. "If she wants to be the fireball, what she needs to do is contact every homeowner representative, all of whom are supposed to be on file down at City Hall. I'd kind of like to help her on this. I don't know if I'd like to be in the thick of it--but I'd love to help her."
This could all add up to a nice, fat nightmare for the Dallas City Council. Mote is articulate. She is smart. She is not a radical, or a crank, or a person with any kind of political aspirations. She's just a taxpaying, voting, home-owning citizen with a sense of fairness and a good dose of moral outrage.
Last April, Mote and her husband bought their first house, near Hillcrest High School. They have three bedrooms, two baths, two cars and one mutt named Coco who likes to beg for scraps at their dinner table. "I guess once you buy a house, and you realize where your taxes are going, and people aren't doing what they said they were going to when you elected them, and you pass a bond issue but nothing's happening, you get more motivated," says Mote.
Mote is not sure what her plan of attack is going to be. First, she says, she wants to learn a lot more about the nuts and bolts of the arena project. She wants to go beyond media reports and search out the facts for herself--collect some documents, sit in on some meetings. She's never stepped foot in City Hall, but she hopes to start today--the day this article is printed--because Mayor Ron Kirk has decided (thanks to the avalanche of criticism the council received two weeks ago) to hold that elusive public briefing on the arena.
Mote plans to miss a morning of work to be there, but the whole idea intimidates her a bit. "I'm afraid of being eaten alive down there," she says. "I have so much to learn. I had to call around just to find out who my councilperson is."
Another thing Mote--and others--might do is visit the city's Downtown Sports Development Project office on the third floor of 500 S. Ervay, right across from City Hall. That office has been collecting thousands of arena records from departments all over the city since December 20, when it received a formal request from a reporter at The Dallas Morning News to see any and all arena records generated since June 8, 1995 (the ending date of records requested by Dallas Observer).
In typical anal-retentive, control-freak form, the city manager's office and the city attorneys have been sifting through the documents for a month now, weeding out the most revealing ones that they don't want the public to see.
The city ships those documents to the Texas attorney general's office for a ruling on whether it has to release them under the Texas Open Records Act--knowing that by the time the attorney general's office makes a decision, the records will be so old they'll be obsolete. (I guarantee that by the time we get all those documents that are sitting in Austin released, we'll be watching dirt fly on the new arena.)
This latest batch of sterilized material is about to be made available, and when it is, anybody in the world--not just the reporters who keep requesting it--will be able to go down to 500 S. Ervay and sit in the conference room and pore over it.
You'll no doubt have a Big Brother baby sitter assigned to you while you do it--at least that's how it's been with the media. The baby sitter will be some low-level city employee who, besides staring at the wall for hours, keeps a log of the documents that the reporters want copied so the Big Boys at City Hall know what's being disseminated and, in case it's potentially troublesome, can quickly get a copy of it to city councilmembers with appropriate explanations before the media airs it.
For a minimal charge of 10 cents per page (don't let them charge you more), anyone can have copies of the arena documents for their own purposes. (Just don't expect immediate service--they don't even have a copy machine over there.)
"Once the records are open, they're open," says Margaret Hudgens, the office's overworked secretary, who can be reached at 670-5948. "People just have to call the office and tell me when they're coming."
Mote will come, you can count on it, and--who knows?--she may just inspire others to come along with her.
