Fluid Victory

The backdrop for all this was DART's admission last December—right about the time I filed a major open-records demand about its construction budget—that it was suddenly a billion dollars short of funding for construction projects to which it was already committed. In January, I reported that DART's outside auditor, Deloitte Touche, had an undisclosed side-deal contract with Shaw to talk kids into becoming accountants.

A month later DART announced that it would not seek a full outside audit of the billion-dollar shortfall. Instead, DART plans to go to the next session of the legislature and ask for permission to solve its funding woes by borrowing more money, including a change in the law to eliminate DART having to seek voter approval when it wants to borrow money.

There is a key question here that I don't think has ever been laid out clearly in public. It has to do with where the billion dollars went.

Former Dallas DART board member Joyce Foreman has insisted since the discovery of the shortfall that DART needs to find out what role has been played by so-called "change orders" in construction projects already under way. The change orders were the thrust of my original open-records demand, and believe it or not, I am still struggling for an adequate response.

Here's the deal. Foreman thinks the DART board may have been too soft on major contractors when they came in for contract modifications aimed at getting more money out of the agency. Instead of holding the line and telling contractors to stick to their contracts, she says the board tended to roll over.

Construction costs have gone way up everywhere, of course. But anybody can use that trend as an excuse for flabby controls. Foreman's fear is that DART has done just that, and therein may lie the true explanation for the sudden billion-dollar shortfall in the budget for future construction.

What I see in this second batch of Shaw e-mails is this: Shaw, the chairman of the board, was never in a position to point so much as a pinkie finger at a contractor, because she was so profoundly compromised by her unethical pursuit of subcontracts for her friends.

Subcontracting and patronage are not the only reasons why DART board members might compromise their principles. The suburban members have what may be an even more powerful motivation: Since the budget embarrassment, they have been able to jawbone DART staff into moving their own future rail projects ahead of City of Dallas projects in the funding pipeline. In exchange, they have agreed not to press for the firing of DART president Gary Thomas over the shortfall or press for an outside audit.

Why drag all this up again? Because the problem has never been solved. The answer has never been given. We still don't know where the shortfall came from. There is not going to be any outside audit to tell us. And DART still plans to go to Austin to get voters cut out of the approval process so it can borrow all the money it wants without our say-so.

And that's not even the scary part. The Dallas Morning News editorial page in recent weeks has been starting up a drumbeat in favor of a whole new regional transit authority for the entire Dallas/Fort Worth area. That's a formula for DART to balloon up into an even more immense agency, even farther from the control of voters, even more reminiscent of the Soviet Ministry of Transport.

Follow me back to my man Betz for a minute, will you? Former DART board members Joyce Foreman and Beatrice Martinez both urged the agency to deal more compassionately with Betz and his neighbors on Alcalde. Both women were forced off the board by critics who said they were too "confrontational."

I have a different take. Foreman and Martinez confronted the bureaucrats at DART because Foreman and Martinez saw themselves as representing and sticking up for citizens. For taxpayers.

Look. A good lawyer is like a good dog. Point him in a direction, and he'll tear ass until you call him back. In a politically responsive agency, somebody should have called the DART lawyers off Betz and the people on Alcalde a long time ago. They should have said, "We're a tax-supported public agency. We can't go around using our might to screw taxpayers when common sense says the taxpayers are right."

At DART that doesn't happen. The board tends to be so deeply compromised that it can't separate its own interests from the interests of the very bureaucracy it is supposed to oversee. And they can't remember what taxpayers even look like.

That's why the Roscoe Betz story is no small potatoes for me. I think it's the small story that tells the big story. And the big story ain't good.