Don't You Wish Your Mayor Was Hot Like Me

"I am offering you the next eight years of my life," he said at a forum in Oak Cliff. "They are probably the most productive years of my life. Please take me up on it."

You can gain at least a partial understanding of the 11 candidates by dumping them into four rather broad categories. You have a pair of status quo candidates—council members Hill and Oakley, who are promising to keep Dallas surging, which it is if you listen to their view of things. You have three candidates from outside City Hall—two avowed Republicans in Leppert and Darrell Jordan and loyal Democrat Coats—who each claim that they have a new way of addressing the city's old problems of crime, education and southern sector development.

The third category is rather murky. It includes two candidates who have City Hall experience—second-term city council member Griffith and former Mayor Pro Tem Wells—but don't have as rosy a vision of the city's fortunes as Hill and Oakley. But unlike the outsider candidates, Griffith and particularly Wells stress their familiarity with the mechanics of local government.

Finally, the last group of candidates includes those who have little chance of winning. This is in part because of their complete lack of credentials (Herrera and homeless transgender candidate Jennifer Gale), their lack of money (John Cappello and Edward Okpa), or their lack of any type of coherent, understandable message (all of them). In fact, what's most depressing about this marginalized cluster of mayoral aspirants is that none of them are using their long-shot status to raise issues that the mainstream guys are ignoring, except the ties that bind mankind.

"I care what kind of person you are," Herrera told prospective voters in Oak Cliff. "We're all human beings; we all have humanity in common."

In fact, the candidates seem to have just about everything else in common too. They are pro-development and anti-Farmers Branch; they want to hire more police officers and encourage growth in the southern sector. They blame—most of them at least—Laura Miller for losing the Cowboys and don't credit her for defeating TXU. We could go on, but you get the point. In the 2007 mayor's race, the candidates don't have dramatically different takes on the issues; what divides them is how they see the city.

Hill and Oakley have to take that position. They've been leaders of the current council and have prevailed in just about every fight at City Hall, usually at Miller's expense. Oakley and Hill can't run as change agents when they're as responsible for the status quo as anyone. It's an odd state of affairs when Oakley, who is openly gay, and Hill, who is openly black, are running as the face of the establishment, while aging white guys such as Leppert and Jordan act like they're the ambassadors of change and reform.

In fact, Hill and Oakley are running on almost identical platforms: Dallas is on the upswing, not because of local and national economic trends but because specific council initiatives helped development in and around downtown. New high-rises and shopping centers are helping grow the tax base, which last year allowed the council to pay for 150 additional police officers.

Hill and Oakley also point to how the council crafted a record-setting $1.35 billion bond package that the voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The package, which followed a $555 million bond initiative in 2003, will raise money for flood control and the city's aging infrastructure, with nearly 30 percent going toward upgrading shoddy streets. Council members also tacked $71 million onto the city manager's original package to fund various pork projects in their districts, although none of Oakley and Hill's rivals sees fit to criticize that.

"I helped set the policy and draft the two bond programs that put the city back on the right road," said Oakley during an interview at his office on Industrial Boulevard. "We're winning. We're winning the battle on attracting new businesses, new retail, new housing."

They're not winning, however, on many other fronts. To take just one, Dallas is around $10 billion behind on deferred maintenance, which, among other things, accounts for why parts of Dallas will flood after a few hours of heavy rain. If the council's policy of giving tax breaks to every developer who waddles up to the trough is a good thing, then why can't we pay for basic infrastructure needs?

There is a time and a place to debate how and when a city should award tax breaks, but apparently that time and place are not at any point during this campaign. Nobody in the mayor's race is challenging how the council rewards so many developers, allowing Oakley and Hill to boast about the cranes without holding them accountable for the roads.