The Magic Touch

I like it. Call me the "Flying Dutchman of Bryan Parkway."

It's because I made the horrible mistake before the recent mayoral election of saying in a column who was going to get my vote. So now I'm looking at a runoff election in which both candidates are 100 percent in favor of putting a big highway through the planned Trinity River park—the one idea I really hate.

But that's not the worst part. I fear that my ill-advised opening of my mouth could be why my guy, Sam Coats, had bad luck at the polls. Long experience should have taught me by now that the Jim Schutze endorsement is like 1,000 broken mirrors.

I should have stuck with superstition. Normally I believe that if I say out loud which candidate I like even one little bit in an election, it won't be five minutes before the phone rings and somebody screams, "OH MY GOD, A PIANO JUST FELL ON THAT GUY!"

Coats should have done better. I blame myself for making it rain pianos that day. It's like Laura Miller endorsing somebody in southern Dallas. Just send the hearse while you're at it.

Now my choice is either Tom Leppert, whose platform is, "I had a single mother, now I'm rich, and I think we need a highway right through the park," or Ed Oakley, whose platform is, "I may be gay and a Democrat, but I'm still willing to bulldoze large apartment buildings full of poor people, and I think we need a highway right through the park."

Talk about a Hobson's choice. But I do have to choose, right? Because we all do. We can't just sit it out because of one issue. We've got to hike up our belts and place our bets based on everything else.

In the past week I have gone back into an Oakley issue that I wrote about before the election—his ownership of real estate in the area most immediately affected by the Trinity River project while he has been chairman of the city council's powerful Trinity River committee. I now have a better sense of his side of that story.

I don't necessarily buy it, but you might see it more his way than mine. First I need to correct a mistake I made in writing about this for the Dallas Observer blog, Unfair Park. I included as owned by Oakley some property owned by an entity called Trinity District Partners. Oakley did own that property, but he sold it to Trinity District Partners, which is not his company.

It's relevant, because Trinity District Partners is not named on his financial disclosure statement to the city. In fact Oakley does disclose all of the properties he does own and all of the entities in which he has an interest.

The issue here is this: Oakley has taken a very strong position on the most controversial element in the Trinity plan—the placement of a high-speed highway through the proposed park along the river, just outside the area where he himself owns real estate. So does he have a conflict? Has his position been warped by his ownership of property that might be adversely affected if the road were taken out of the park and placed closer to his holdings?

And did Oakley help shape zoning and planning policies for this area in a way that created value for his otherwise minimally valuable properties?

Oakley wouldn't talk to me, but David Marquis, his campaign manager whom I have known for a very long time, did talk. He said basically that Oakley has been involved in real estate in the area called the Trinity Design District for a long time. Marquis said Oakley has been diligent about using abstentions and even transfers of ownership to keep himself within the law and within reasonable ethical limits.

In 2002, when Mayor Laura Miller named Oakley chairman of the Trinity River committee, his ownership of real estate was raised as an issue by other council members. Marquis told me last week that Oakley assured the council in 2002 that he had sold or transferred all of the property that was of concern.

My issue would be this: He sold or transferred it into companies he owned or controlled himself.

Marquis told me Oakley did what city lawyers told him to do. He changed the way he owned the property in question. He declared all of those ownerships on his disclosure. He did not vote on zoning issues directly affecting those properties.

"I think the disclosure of it is the main factor," Marquis said. "He went in and talked to the attorneys and to everybody else to make sure. He felt like he did his due diligence."

I had also asked Marquis about Oakley's influence on zoning and planning for the area and about the effect the "Crow factor" might be having on his position on the proposed toll road alignment. Oakley's political contributions lists for the last several years have included many contributions at the legal maximum level from the Crow/Billingsley families.