Don't You Wish Your Mayor Was Hot Like Me

At a real estate forum at the Hotel Palomar in March, after Leppert bragged about his CEO experience yet again, Griffith nudged Coats, whose business credentials are every bit as impressive as Leppert's, and the two chuckled like kids in the back seat of a car laughing at their dad's affinity for soft rock radio.

Coats, a former lawyer, says his business experience, while broader than Leppert's, is only marginally relevant.

"I've run more companies than Leppert's even seen. I've been on the board of publicly traded companies and private companies and nonprofits, and I've been CEO of a bunch of different companies," he said in an interview last month. "I've done all that stuff, but I've told everybody the CEO of this city is not the mayor; it's the city manager. Even though I have the skill sets of a CEO, that's not how I'm going to approach the job.

"I want to be the choir director or the orchestra leader—someone who gets people to come together."

That, in essence, is the basis of Coats' campaign: If Miller was a rock star, he'll be the kind and meek choir director who can work well with others. But Coats also brings an independent streak that is unique among his serious competitors. Of all the candidates running for mayor, only Coats says that he plans to re-evaluate the Trinity River project, particularly the controversial decision to build a high-speed toll road in the middle of the downtown park.

"I will support the project, but I will not give carte blanche to putting a road inside the levee," he said at a forum in Oak Cliff. "There are logical inconsistencies there, and I can't be bullied, blackmailed or bought not to look at it again."

It says something about this year's mayor's race that the short, soft-spoken Coats, who has been married 46 years, is the maverick of the field. Coats isn't even that opinionated, declining, for example, to take a stand on one of the most divisive issues that came before City Hall in the last four years. In 2005 Mayor Miller fought to deny billionaire oilman Ray Hunt a generous package of tax inducements to keep his firm in downtown Dallas. Hunt used his sidekick John Scovell to pit the council against the mayor and got his way, making off with more than $6 million in incentives. Other than Rasansky, no one on the council voted with the mayor. While Coats has tried to cast himself as the most independent candidate in the field—and often makes an effective case for it—he doesn't take a real stance on the Hunt giveaway, preferring to differentiate himself not by substance but style—or in this case, sound.

"It's a matter of tonality. I think Laura and I have a different tone. She's very bright and has done a lot of good, but she's also more aggressive," he says. "I approach things more from a mediator's point of view."

Leppert's campaign is run by the princess of darkness, Carol Reed. The political consultant typically represents the favored candidate of the pro-business Dallas Citizens Council, and while Leppert says that he's his own man, he's dutifully carrying their water, particularly as it flows through the Trinity River project. Unlike Coats and Jordan, who have expressed misgivings about parts of the project, Leppert is aggressively pro-Trinity, opposing council member Angela Hunt's proposal to put the toll road, now $600 million over budget, before the voters.

Although a graduate of Harvard Business School, Leppert was never your conventional CEO. Under his direction, Turner Construction did a billion dollars' worth of business with minority contractors—although at least some of that was federally mandated—while also spending $13 billion on green construction over a five-year period. He was also pretty good at what he did, helping double the size of the company during his seven-year tenure.

"He is an effective CEO who is liked," says Matt Papenfus, a vice president and general manager of Turner Construction, who worked with Leppert. "He is able to implement change but not turn things around to do it."

As a condition of taking the job at Turner, Leppert relocated the company from New York to Dallas. That's a commitment to the city that he hopes overshadows the fact that he's only lived inside the city limits since 2003.

"I moved a $4 billion business to Dallas," he said at a recent forum. "I look forward to sitting across the desk from any business leader in the world and saying, 'Not only do I think you should move your business to Dallas, I've been in your shoes and here's what I did.'"

Although Leppert has effectively cast himself as a savvy executive and has raised more money than his peers, he's trying to campaign as more than your typical big business candidate. In fact, while Leppert's first two stated priorities are fairly generic—crime reduction and economic development—his third emphasis is on education. In any other city, that would be normal, but in Dallas, the mayor has no formal role in the school district.

"In the end, what we have to do is have an educational system where people want to stay in Dallas or they want to move back," he said in a recent interview. "I can ask this question in the north or the south, and I get the same answer: How many people know families who have moved out of the city of Dallas because of education? And people will raise their hands."