Miller pledges to press for council salaries if she's re-elected to her Oak Cliff seat on May 1. She says council members quietly support the issue. "There's historically been a reluctance to push it because they think it seems very self-serving," she says.
Miller says she can circumvent that charge, because if she serves another term, she vows it will be her last. Any change in compensation would go into effect after she's gone.
The question is whether Mayor Ron Kirk will lend his support to any such effort. Early in his tenure, Kirk openly backed council salaries, spokesman Justin Lonon says. But "regardless of what the mayor thinks about salaries, the voters have spoken emphatically in the past, and he's not sure it's time to revisit it again."
Tim Dickey gets impassioned whenever Kirk's name comes up. His jaw clenches. He speaks in jagged sentences. He thinks about the time when he was one of Channel 5's Public Defenders and asked the mayor who had financed his recent trip to South Africa.
"I got a foul-mouthed speakerphone reply--'What's with all these goofy fucking questions?' I was shocked," Dickey says. "I'm foul-mouthed too, but not in inappropriate circumstances. It's not so much the language, it's the bullying attitude."
Earlier this year, Dickey, 46, now a television producer, hankered for the opportunity to go downtown and look Kirk in the eye "when he starts his foul diatribes."
Dickey had decided to challenge Barbara Mallory Caraway for the District 6 council seat, which encompasses parts of West and North Dallas. He had learned his way around City Hall by serving on the Human Services Commission, analyzing policy and punching holes in the information provided by city staff.
He figured it wouldn't take much to better the record of Mallory Caraway, who he claims hasn't done anything to protect his Bachman Lake neighborhood.
"I don't think she's a policy person," Dickey says. "I think she mainly wants to ride a float in parades and wave at the crowds."
Only one obstacle stood in the way of Dickey's run for city council. The money. But he came up with a plan: He would work as a freelance television technician, scheduling jobs whenever the family trough got low.
It all seemed pretty much settled, with his wife and two kids behind him, when Dickey received unexpected news in February. The home-improvement show he produces for cable television, Your New House, was renewed for another season and expanded from 30 to 60 minutes.
"It was a huge professional success to have it renewed and expanded," Dickey says, and suddenly, all the timing for a city council run, all the urgency, just seemed to evaporate. He couldn't justify walking away from an outstanding in-hand opportunity.
If Dallas offered even a modest salary for its council members--say, $30,000 or so--Dickey says he would have forgone the job and run. And he figures numerous other city commission members, well qualified to move up to the council, have made the same calculations and realized they couldn't do it either.
The people left to serve, he says, are the parade queens, the wealthy, and the women Laura Miller indelicately refers to as "the housewives." (She counts herself among that group.)
These days, Dickey still fantasizes about staring down Kirk, about having his voice heard on issues such as the arena, which he calls Dallas' biggest policy blunder in a generation. "Print this," Dickey says, still chafed about Kirk. "I think he's just a bully who throws his toys out of the pram when he doesn't get his way."
Surveying his own working-class district and its proliferation of nightclubs and topless bars, he gets even angrier. About the money. "Dallas needs to stop whining about the level of city council representation and do something about it," he says. "To say no to paid politicians and all that hokey-pokey BS, it's dinosaur thinking.
"Get real, Dallas. Why do you expect council members to sacrifice their first-born to make the city better? It's ridiculous. It's silly. Do you really think that Dallas is such an uncomplicated village that anybody can go down and do the job?"
Anybody like Elijah McGrew.
Additional reporting for this story was provided by Dallas Observer staff writer Rose Farley.
Want to whine like a child? E-mail Observer Editor Julie Lyons at jlyons@dallasobserver.com.
