Ever since Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert announced on January 17 that he won't run for re-election next May, people have been talking about who will run. I say people. Maybe six people.
Patrick Michels
If you liked Tom Leppert as mayor, you should have little problem with whomever the Dallas Citizens Council next attempts to crown.
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Most people don't care. I know. People these days are into other things, like unemployment. Wondering what to do with Granny when the Republicans boot her out of the nursing home. Selfish things.
I'm not here to nag. If you don't care, you don't care. I'm just a fly on the wall. But may I point out one thing? If you don't care, then things will keep rocking on pretty much the way they always have.
That means the next mayor will be chosen, as always, by the Dallas Citizens Council, the private leadership body with roots in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era that still picks the establishment's mayoral candidates.
They brought us Leppert, who was an unknown construction industry executive before his anointment. It was their word two weeks ago, passed on to The Dallas Morning News political writer Gromer Jeffers, that effectively ended Leppert's tenure, a week before Leppert got a chance to do it himself.
Jeffers had a story in the paper January 12, quoting Dallas lawyer and former Citizens Council chairman Michael Boone as saying, "I and others failed to convince Leppert to run for re-election. Now we have to turn the page."
The Citizens Council anoints. And they denoint. Or at least they get to announce the denointment before the denointed does.
I know I said I wanted to bring up just one thing. But may I point out one more thing? The Citizens Council, which brought Leppert to the picnic, has major culpability in what may well turn out to be the single biggest crisis this city has faced in modern times—the failure of the Trinity River levee system. I'm not saying they caused the levees to erode. But they talked us out of our one big chance to fix them in time.
In the 2007 referendum called by council member Angela Hunt, we had a chance to turn the Trinity River Project around. We could have put a halt to that crazy toll road they wanted to build out where it floods and out where new construction will threaten our aging levees.
We might even have been able to put the kibosh to crazy stuff like those fake suspension bridges. In the 2007 referendum campaign, Hunt and others talked repeatedly about levee safety. We should have listened.
But, no. That is not at all what the Citizens Council and the Dallas establishment wanted done. I have just been reviewing campaign finance reports for that election, and even four years later it's still pretty bracing—page after page of huge donations from well-heeled and wired toll-road proponents:
Five grand from Peter O'Donnell (philanthropist), five grand from his wife, 20 grand from Louis Beecherl (oil and gas), five grand from Deedie Rose (wife of investor and Bush pal), 40 grand from the Citizens Council, 25 grand from John Muse (Tom Hicks' former partner), 25 grand from Trammell Crow (Trammell Crow), 25 grand from Hunt Oil (the Kurds), another 50 grand from Beecherl (will that do?), another 25 grand from Hunt Oil, 50 grand from Hillwood Development (Perot), another 100 grand from the Citizens Council.
And on. And on. And all of it to defeat a grassroots petition drive started by a freshman council member concerned about levee safety.
They did defeat Hunt. They beat her by 5.78 percentage points at the polls. But now we can see what their victory did to the rest of us.
The toll road they were so determined to build between the levees has soaked up millions in design and testing fees and is still exactly nowhere. The costs have soared through the roof. There is no funding, even though Mayor Leppert swore to voters in 2007 that the road was already fully funded and would cost Dallas taxpayers not one additional dime.
But much more important, everything Hunt said at the time about levee safety has been borne out. As we now know, even as the campaigns for and against the Hunt referendum were underway the U.S. Corps of Engineers was sitting on data showing that the earthen levees along the Trinity through the center of the city were seriously compromised.
Two years after the election, under pressure from Congress to tell the truth about levees all over America, the Corps withdrew its official certification of the Dallas levee system, admitting that the levees could not be relied on.
If we had known any of this when we voted in 2007, do you think the Citizens Council would have won that election?
Last week I looked at the assurances given us back then by our Citizens Council-sponsored mayor. Leppert vowed again and again that all of the levee safety issues had been resolved and that the Corps of Engineers, which oversees levee safety nationally, had given him its guarantee.
"The Corps has signed off on the safety issues," Leppert said in 2007. "They have signed off on the environmental issues. They feel very comfortable with it. They're the experts. Don't take our word for it."
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