Honest question. Are you even aware there is a race going on now for mayor of Dallas? Honest answers only, please.
Sam Merten
Of the top three mayoral candidates, Ron Natinsky (left) is gung-ho for the Trinity River toll road. David Kunkle (right) is down on it. And Mike Rawlings (center) is too smart to say.
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It's OK. Especially in the early phase, the mayoral election is a boring thing. I don't expect you to be on the edges of your seats clicking updates every two minutes like you did for the tsunami.
But think about it like this. Dallas is such a great place in so many ways, so much fun with so many things happening—a great leg-up market, great place to break in, good weather, lots of bars—and then why is the city itself such a piece of crap?
I'm talking about potholes so bad they give you that jangled-head feeling like somebody just punched you in the helmet. I'm talking about city parks with litter blowing through unmowed weeds. Or you go to the Bachman Lake Public Library on Monday, and the damned thing is closed for the day.
So what's the deal? With all of this action going on, why can't the city keep up? Do we not pay enough taxes?
We could talk all day on that one. We pay high fees for things like water and city permits. Our property tax rate is lower than Fort Worth's, but it's substantially higher than the rate in Houston and way higher than the rate in Austin.
I don't think that's it, and here is where we circle back to the mayor's race and why you might actually want to pay a little bit of attention. The answer is buried somewhere in this election.
Last year city council member Angela Hunt (known here as "the smart one") did a very interesting analysis of the city's money problems. Hunt said it's not an issue of the tax rate, exactly. It's not spending, exactly.
Those things are factors, but they're not the fundamental drivers giving us crappy streets, worn-out flood control and shuttered libraries in a city that ought to be doing a lot better.
It's debt.
In the last 10 years, Dallas has borrowed money without raising taxes to pay for it. So if you keep a flat tax rate but you keep borrowing more money, then you have to take money away from running the city and use it to pay back your debt.
Bought a BMW? Didn't get a raise? That means you can't pay the plumber.
That's what Hunt found we have been doing. She compared the city budget for 2000-2001 with the budget for 2010-2011 and found that debt payments have gone from 14 percent of the overall city budget to 21 percent. Before you decide that's not so awful, please allow me to tell you what it did to the rest of the budget.
Let's talk about those potholes. The amount of money the city has for streets has been cut in half in the same period. Hey, as the city ages and the streets get older, it should cost more money, not less, to maintain them. But we've cut the streets budget in half.
Libraries: cut in half. That's why doors are closed. Parks: from $83 million to $50 million a year. And they're telling us they want to build a huge new park along the Trinity River. Who's going to operate and maintain it, the Boy Scouts?
It's not that we are not paying taxes. We pay taxes, but we're shifting too much of the city's financial burden from operations and maintenance to debt.
So next question: Are we just idiots? How did this happen? Aha. Back to the mayor's race again. The phrase you would listen for, in relation to this issue, is "big ticket items."
Big ticket items are major fancy public works projects that we don't absolutely need but somebody for some reason very badly wants to build for us—the whole Trinity River project but especially the zany underwater toll road they keep talking about, the deck park on the Woodall Rodgers Freeway downtown, the arts district, the faux suspension bridges over the Trinity.
For decades city politics in Dallas has been dominated by the public works construction lobby, expressing its will through groups like the Dallas Citizens Council and handing out money through various law firms and political consultants.
Are these all bad projects, bad for the city, a total waste of money? No. Not all of them. We voted for them. Were we wrong? No. Not always. But here's the key. The trick. The angle.
The same people who push the big ticket projects always fight against any tax increase to pay for them. You heard as a mantra from our former mayor, Tom Leppert, that we just cannot raise taxes under any circumstances.
So how do we pay off our loans? The only answer acceptable to the big ticket lobby is that we will make our bigger and bigger loan payments by getting richer and richer. By "growing the tax base."
Put yourself in the uncomfortable chair in front of the loan officer's desk, and try that one on for size in your own life. He says, "Mr. Schutze, here on the application under current debt, you have written 'eyeballs.' I suppose you mean as in, 'up to.' Can you tell me then how you would pay back this new $50,000 loan you want us to give you?"
