He didn't.
Within months of beating Loza (1,100 to 900 votes), Luna began an incredibly aggressive campaign to protect the city's topless bars, which the city has been in a pitched battle with for the past 10 years due to the fact that they are magnets for prostitution and drugs and assorted criminal problems.
Luna was doing some pretty brazen things for the clubs; he even passed a council resolution urging the city manager to help resolve some of the legal beefs the city has with the clubs. Ten days after the resolution passed, Luna accepted a whopping, $5,000 contribution--a nearly unheard of amount in a city-council election--from the family that owns Burch Management, a big topless-club company.
Still, the articles about his impeachment stayed in the file cabinet.
Until now.
Because now--four and a half years after he was first elected, 18 months after he toyed with the idea of running for mayor, six months after he thought about quitting the council to run for U.S. Congress in John Bryant's old seat--Luna's political career is over. Because this time what he's done is so egregious that even his diehard supporters are walking away.
"Politically he's dead," says one of his staunchest supporters on the city council. "It's sad. Because he's one of the smartest, most fun people I know. And I can't tell you how much he wants to run for something else. But he's dead. We all know it."
On the day this column comes out, the city council will meet behind closed doors to discuss what to do about Luna. It will hear from the city attorney, who finally confirmed what everybody at City Hall already knew. It will hear from Luna. It will review the code of conduct. It will perhaps move to strip Luna of his title as deputy mayor pro tem (Mayor Ron Kirk insisted the council give Luna back that position after the previous council had stripped him of it) and chairman of the Housing and Neighborhood Development Committee. The council may reprimand him; some council members may even try to have him expelled from the council, though his outrageous behavior apparently doesn't fit the narrow criteria set out in the city charter for doing that.
Luna swears he will prove his innocence. The council knows otherwise.
Kirk Williams, who has now dutifully fessed up twice in eight months--once to this reporter and once under oath--to having accepted Luna's sellout of the public trust, is known around City Hall to be a good guy, and a straight shooter, who has absolutely no reason to commit professional and economic suicide by falsely accusing a council member of doing something so terrible.
Luna, on the other hand, has no such reputation.
"It is the responsibility of this body to purge itself of those who compromise the integrity and credibility of this council," a fellow UT business-school student said when Luna was being impeached as president of the school's student council back in 1982. "We did tonight what unfortunately was necessary."
Let's hope the Dallas City Council has the same fortitude that a bunch of college kids had many years ago. If not, the voters will have to wait a year to summon theirs.
