As Always, Dallas Politics in Black and White

Yesterday, in a pitch of live-blogging fever at the Dallas City hall corruption trial, I penned a little missive — as a sort of aside, really — about a certain sick symbiosis in Dallas politics between rich white arts mavens and sell-out minority politicians.

Between my wife and Sandra Crenshaw, I ran into a hell of a lot of debate about it for the rest of the day. Both Sandra and my wife thought I was giving short shrift to the role of the arts in making this is a good city to live in, and my wife thought I was demonizing people who are probably, in her words, “not evil, just clueless.” (Personally, that’s what I’m going for on my tombstone.)
So today I am excerpting myself, which sounds like something probably forbidden by the Bible, in order to give it all a second airing and see what you think.

The specific instance here is evidence presented at the trial that former Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill and Lynn Flint Shaw, who was chair of Mayor Tom Leppert’s political fund-raising committee, cooked up a deal to get money out of the arts crowd for the anti-strong-mayor campaign in 2005.

Here is what I wrote yesterday:

The stuff above about Bill Winspear, Charles Wyly, et. al., is about
the development of the arts district. There is a syndrome here that
goes back to the Meyerson, in which committees of rich people keep
piling on levels of luxury finish-out — more marble! more teak! more
tapestry ! — until they wind up with a building they can’t afford to
maintain. They pile all the money into show, and they don’t have enough
endowment left for upkeep. So they want to off-shore the upkeep onto
the city.

This is a city that can’t mow the grass in its parks. Nobody who was
sitting on that council and paying attention would agree, absent other
factors, that the public should get stuck with major maintenance for
the play-things of the arts-fatarties.

You also have this factor: Laura Miller was fighting the good fight for
the one reform all of these same people believed in — a charter reform
to create a strong mayor system and clean out the dark places in the
existing system where corruption occurs.

But it was more important to them build their pleasure domes. And they
wanted the city to agree to take on fat annual maintenance payments so
they could do it.

The go-between is Shaw, the mayor’s top political operative for black
Dallas. Remember: She’s the one whose e-mails I published lecturing
Leppert that he was to deal only with “the inner circle” in black
Dallas, headed up by her.

The deal is that the rich folks kick money in to Don Hill’s campaign to
defeat Miller’s charter proposal at the polls. In exchange, they get
black votes on the council to subsidize the arts district.

So the white folks screw the city to get what they want. And black
leadership screws its own constituency, saddling the city with expenses
that will come straight out of the budget for street repairs and
clean-up, in order to protect the back-room.

This is the bone structure of the Old Plantation in Dallas politics.

Right there, full view, on the table. Read it and weep.

My wife and discussed this again on the way to work today. I said I
might give her half a point to, like, maybe 1.7 points for the
importance of the arts and maybe another .6 to .8 points for rich
people being stupider than they are wicked. But I said I must retain
1,246.5 points for myself for people in Dallas, rich and poor, being
remarkably un-civic-minded when it comes down to it.

All those arts-fatarties knew that Laura Miller’s strong-mayor option
was the one way to clean up the worst abuses of single-member
districts. So did Don Hill. That’s why he was against it.

But go back to the beginning. The Citizens Council types were the
city’s most committed foes of single-member districts, because they
feared two things: 1) democracy, and 2) Black Man Voting. The federal
courts said, Tough. You got it. Single-member city. Live with it.

So they did. The same people figured out quickly that the path of least
resistance on the city council was through the unemployed
African-American paupers on the council (upwardly mobile black people
with real jobs, like upwardly mobile white people with real jobs,
couldn’t afford to serve). You could have Al Lipscomb’s vote for a cab
ride, for God’s sake.

The old wealthy leadership of the city, which used to pat itself on the
back all the time for being civic-minded, mainly because it was easy
for them to get their way, became the prime enablers of corruption on
the city council. That’s what you see in the Lynn Flint Shaw deal
above, and, by the way, it’s what you see every day at City Hall in the
approach of Mayor Tom Leppert — contracts for votes.

Well, that’s how I see it anyway. Tell me how you see it.