Their main spokesperson was not a board member but varsity men's rowing coach Jonathan Stevens, who answered every single question amiably and intelligently, even the ones vaguely suggesting satanic origins for his club.
Josh Theodore of Page Southerland Page architects walked the audience through the design of the proposed clubhouse, explaining it as a minimally invasive scheme, and I would have to say he sold it. By the time he was done, some of the crazy senile hippie paranoid delusional crackpot wingnuts I respect most were on their feet saying it looked pretty darned nice to them.
Jared Boggess
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A couple of people even made speeches to the effect that roping in some Parkies and getting them invested in White Rock Lake is a good idea in the long run. That way we'll have them around to go put the arm on when it's time for the next dredging.
But even in this rose-tinted mist of newfound good-feeling, a single difficult issue loomed. Several people, including Jung, asked Theodore and the board members of Dallas United Crew two things: Was it true the original plans called for a rentable social space on top of the clubhouse, and if so, whose idea was that?
The Dallas United people conceded that early plans had called for some kind of rent-collecting dance hall on top. They told Jung the idea had come from "someone in the park department." But when Jung and others persisted in asking who specifically had told Dallas United to put a dance hall on top of their boat club, the Dallas United people all suffered group amnesia.
The husband of a board member told me on the parking lot after the meeting that the club was thrilled when they got new directions from the park department, after the dance-hall thing went ballistic, telling them to deep six the dance hall.
"We didn't want to have run it," he said.
Later on the phone Jung told me he didn't really blame the Dallas United people for trying to duck a crossfire. "I understand," he said. "They're trying to get approvals and so on. They can't afford to make enemies at City Hall. But inquiring minds want to know."
Those inquiring minds are curious not just because they're all in the skulls of crazy senile hippie paranoid delusional crackpot wingnuts. They are curious because they are all too aware of a tendency on the part of park department officials to act behind the scenes pushing cheap commercialization as the solution to budget problems in a city that won't give them the tax support they need to run the parks.
I asked Jung if he thought a larger sub-rosa agenda was at work. He said he thought it was a smaller sub-rosa agenda. He recalled a time in the mid-'90s when he was on the board of Friends of Fair Park, and the park board was crazy to find ways to get money out of Fair Park.
What was their big idea? It was the same response City Hall has always had to any sort of promising entertainment, dining or recreational activity in the city. Charge for parking.
I was really struck by that after I hung up from talking to Jung. We should bring a team of UT McCombs business school students up here and have them use Fair Park as the subject for a study asking the question: "Over a 20-year period, how effective will charging for parking be in encouraging the long-range success of an entertainment or recreational venue?"
What happened to the Dallas United people was what happens to most people who wander into Dallas City Hall unanointed and unaware. They got sandbagged. Someone dragged them into a really stupid attempt to build a major project on White Rock Lake behind the backs of the key White Rock constituents.
Call us whatever. East Dallas don't miss no tricks. It was the trickery here much more than the project itself that set the jungle fires ablaze.
Now we know there was nothing about the boat house itself that needed to be secret. But there was every reason to try to sneak the dance hall under the blankets.
I can't think of a long-range solution to the larger problem here other than what we do already: grab our pots and pans, go out in the street and bang the hell out of them when we get excited. If they're going to be carnies, we'll be pot-bangers. A match made in Dallas.
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