Councilwoman Angela Hunt and former mayor Tom Leppert have never exactly been besties. She was a frequent and vocal critic of the mayor, accusing him of lying, putting his ambitions for higher office before the interests of the city, and generally not doing a very good job running the city. The distaste was mutual.
It seems that Leppert isn't quite ready to bury the hatchet. Last week, he took a break from his duties at Kaplan, the D.C.-based test prep company, to robocall District 14 residents on behalf of Bobby Abtahi. Abtahi is facing off against Philip Kingston, Hunt's anointed successor, in the June 15 City Council runoff.
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"I personally worked with Bobby, and I saw [in] his role as a city prosecutor the work that he did protecting our communities," Leppert says in the recording. "He made a big difference."
The notion that Leppert, the ambitious mayor of a city with 13,000 municipal employees, somehow maintained a close working relationship with a talented but low-level employee in the city attorney's office, seems unlikely.
Leppert's endorsement, like those from Veletta Lill, Ed Oakley, Craig Holcomb and the Dallas Citizens Council, would seem to have more to do with the Trinity Toll Road, which, unlike Kingston, Abtahi has pointedly refused to take a position on.
District 14 voters generally already know how they feel on that score, just as they know how they feel about Leppert. They also know how they feel about robocalls, which have reached flood stage by this point in the race. One resident I spoke with yesterday pledged to vote for whichever candidate agrees to stop calling his house which, given the stakes, probably won't happen.