I don't think this fight is over, by the way. The Paul Quinn students were not impressed by the buy-off offer from the city and remained adamant in their opposition. But the ministers went the other direction. The new more-trash policy was praised by the head of the most influential southern Dallas black clergy group, with pointed references to the promised fund.
That's just more disappointing than I can convey. Here was an opportunity to bring these college students into the center of things at City Hall, to learn from them and recruit them as a valued leadership cadre for the city's future. There may even have been an opportunity to create significant green economic innovation in a seriously blighted part of the city. It would have been nice to hear more about that before a vote was taken.
Jen Sorensen
Instead, the city did a deal to hold down taxes by choking the landfill with more trash, the preachers got a handout and the students got the back of the hand.
That's a typical Citizens Council deal, just like redistricting. It's more of the same. More of the bad old days. A rejection of the future.
I told you I talked to the mayor. I was frank about what I was writing. He was frank in his response. He said first that none of the Southeast Oak Cliff Economic Stimulus money is going to preachers.
"I have established a steering committee," he said. One of the committee's top priorities for the fund, he said, will be "making sure we deliver the grocery stores and other development that the neighborhoods need."
He said decisions about spending the fund's money will "stay at the city council level," assuring those decisions will be aboveboard and public.
He also told me I was wrong about redistricting. He said my interpretation of the final map — four black seats, three Latino, seven white — is based on a wrong analysis of the numbers. Instead, he said, we are looking at Dallas' first majority-minority city council at the next election in 2013, which is what he was going for.
"For the first time we have eight winnable minority districts," he said. "A majority of the city council will be minority. Four will be Latino and four will be African-Americans."
He said even my riff about the population numbers is wrong because I'm counting the wrong numbers: "The growth in (Latino) population is in total population, not in voting age population," he said.
And then finally the mayor implied in a very polite way that my stuff about the Citizens Council is, well, Loony-Tunes.
"I won't opine on the conspiracy theory," he said. "You know how I feel about that. I just don't think the facts bear out what you say."
Those are all good points. But I do disagree about the redistricting maps — I squinted real hard, but it still looks like four black, three Latino, seven white seats plus a white mayor to me. But that argument takes us so far out into the Wonk Zone that we'd need oxygen tanks.
I also don't agree that my feelings about the Citizens Council amount to a conspiracy theory. The Citizens Council has always been pretty obvious about its role. Donna Halstead, their hired executive director, was front and center in all of the redistricting debates. It's a matter of public record that both Rawlings and his immediate predecessor were Citizens Council members and drew their principle financial support from its members.
I've never thought of the Citizens Council's role in civic affairs as conspiratorial. It's about control and whom the Citizens Council can count on for support, but it's also about culture. You see it in the close connections between Citizens Council members and the city's most powerful elected black official, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. It's a relationship that has everything to do with personal comfort levels.
It's the people who fall outside the Citizens Council's comfort zone who get screwed: white people who want to live in old neighborhoods, young black people not comfortable with the old ways, almost all Hispanics. Together they form a demographic defined by its exclusion from the old Citizens Council pattern.
It's not right — it's a serious mistake, in fact — to imagine that the leadership of the Citizens Council, the membership, their allies in the old political structure of southern Dallas and the mayors and council members they elect are conspirators. They're the old Dallas doing what Dallas always has done, doing what the old Dallas sincerely believes is best for everybody.
Rawlings, though, offers a new wrinkle — a mayor from the old mold, but a Democrat who defends the outcomes in Democrat-sounding terms. The problem is that the outcomes are exactly the same. The bell rings up at the Big House, and everybody lines up the same way they always have. A Citizens Council Democrat doing the strumming or a Citizens Council Republican: It still sounds like that same old banjo to me.
