KUDOS to Dallas Observer for Coverage of Dallas Budget Process

By Faith Chatham - DFWRCC - June 18, 2009
It's refreshing to see reports of an elected official break from "incumbent-speak" and call fee increases what they actually are: "tax increases." Mithcell Rasansky has done it before but this is the first time I've seen it this prominent in a report.

It has happened many more times than it has been reported. I hope it keeps happening more often and I hope reporters will take note and include it in their coverage. Fees are taxes. Tolls are taxes. Ignoring them and excluding them from receipts and tax percentage numbers is shoddy bookkeeping. It is done in attempts to deceive the public.

I don't think most people are that dumb or that gullible. Most people realize the difference between the money they start out with and the money they miss at the end of the day.

The Dallas Observer's coverage captures the "flavor" of City of Dallas Budget meetings. I hope more elected officials on more levels will follow Councilwoman Angela Hunt's example and plug the numbers into spreadsheets. If the numbers given don't add up, demand clarification in terms that the numbers do add up before a vote is taken. If votes are attempted before comprehendable clarification is given, object to the vote in strong enough terms that reporters who dozed off for a minute wake up and take note!

Rasansky Calls Budget "Non-Transparent," Says Increased Fees Are a Tax Increase and Introduces $21.7 Million in Savings

By Sam Merten in News You Can Actually Use, Actually Use - Dallas Observer - Wednesday, Jun. 17 2009

City Manager Mary Suhm, Mayor Tom Leppert and CFO Dave Cook all stressed this morning that the city is facing the same budget challenges as other cities and states. As Cook briefed the city council for the last time before a more detailed budget is presented August 10, he said the more than 700 projected layoffs are expected to begin in August and claimed most other cities are in worse shape as some are laying off police officers, while Dallas plans to hire another 200 officers in the coming fiscal year.

He cited approximately $130 million in declining revenue as the most significant contributor to the $190 million deficit, and said Dallas is using similar methods as other cities to address the shortfall, such as implementing furlough days (which saves Dallas approximately $800,000 per day), closing public buildings and increasing user fees instead of raising taxes.

But, as far as Mitchell Rasansky is concerned, jacking up fees and raising taxes are one in the same. He claimed the proposed increases to utilities are equivalent to a 2.3 cent property tax hike.

"This is a tax increase," Rasansky said. "Anyway you want to look at it, it's a tax increase."

Long known as the council's tax hawk, Rasansky made the most out of his last opportunity to weigh in on the budget before he's replaced on Monday by Ann Margolin, who was in attendance. After thanking Suhm and her staff for their work, he offered some harsh criticism of the proposed budget.

"This is the most non-transparent budget I've ever seen since I've been down here at City Hall," he said.

Rasansky battled Leppert twice because the mayor only gave council members five minutes each to speak, as Rasansky blasted him for not giving him time to explain all of the $21.7 million in cuts he proposed.

He handed out a memo to the council (which you can see below) suggesting the city dip into the "unrealized gain" of $21.2 million in the city's investment pool that won't mature until early 2010. Although he acknowledged the city will lose some dough by cashing in early, he said pulling out $7.5 million would serve to close the gap or fund services on the chopping block.

Also among his nine suggestions is grabbing $10 million from the city's contingency fund that has contained approximately $20 million for the last 20 years and removing $1.5 million from the city's $5 million emergency fund.

Other cost-cutting measures offered up by Rasansky are reducing the Trinity River Corridor Project staff from 15 to eight, combining city bills into the same envelope, selling advertising on the envelopes and charging developers a 1-percent application fee when applying for tax abatements or other incentives.

Angela Hunt said she's confused about why Suhm can't provide council members with line item budgets to assist them in finding cuts and understanding how the money is spent. Suhm said cooking up a line item budget would force city staff to stop work on the budget, and she stressed that the numbers change on a daily basis.

Hunt also asked once again for the budget to be separated into departments, saying her constituents "don't think in terms of key focus areas." She dropped some numbers into an Excel spreadsheet on her own and expressed concern that it appears as though the Public Works and Transportation Department's budget will increase by more than 50 percent from the actual 2007-08 budget.

While it's a rough draft, her document (which was provided to Unfair Park) shows reductions of 73.7 percent to housing and 31.6 percent to libraries compared to the '07-'08 budget, yet the mayor and city council's budget is planning to see a 10.2 increase in funding.

"We've all got to roll up our sleeves on this budget because it's so challenging," she said.

Dave Neumann appeared enamored with Hunt, using her as an example on two separate occasions, once as a hypothetical constituent and another time as a citizen. He also praised her for previous comments when she stressed that the city must focus on providing citizens with core competencies.

"This is not a wish-list year for the budget," he said. "It's an essential-list year."

Dallas Observer

Jim Schutze urges Dallas voters to VOTE YES to keep the origninal plan for Trinity Park without the tollway

By Jim Schutze - Dallas Observer - Oct. 25, 2007
Click on title to read story.

In '98 bond vote, backers referred to Trinity toll road - Documents contradict claims of toll road 'bait and switch'

By BRUCE TOMASO - The Dallas Morning News - Sat., August 11, 2007

Opponents of the Trinity River toll road say city leaders pulled a fast one nine years ago, promising Dallas voters a beautiful downtown park and delivering a hideous highway instead.

They accuse the city of a "bait-and-switch," contending that when voters approved a 1998 bond issue for Trinity River improvements, they thought they were voting for a "parkway," a sort of Turtle Creek Boulevard by the river – while what's being planned instead is a multi-lane, high-speed freeway, something closer in concept to the Dallas North Tollway.

But a review of city and state documents, court records, news coverage and campaign materials put out by both sides in the months before the 1998 bond vote shows clearly that the city intended to build a tollway inside the levees.

Those records, thousands of pages of them, show that city officials and state transportation planners thought a major reliever route was needed to alleviate traffic congestion downtown and along Stemmons Freeway.

"I can tell you unequivocally and emphatically that we never, ever misrepresented the nature of what was being proposed. We were proposing a highway," said former Mayor Ron Kirk, who pushed hard for passage of the Trinity bonds in 1998.

"In everything we communicated, we made that clear to voters. And the opponents of this project know that. If they're saying otherwise, it's totally disingenuous."


Ballot language

But Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt, the driving force behind a November referendum to kill the toll road, said if anyone's being disingenuous, it's Mr. Kirk and his allies. She points again and again to the language on the May 2, 1998, ballot, which described the project only as the "Trinity Parkway and related street improvements."

"If the people who support this road are so certain that everyone understood that what was being proposed was a huge, high-speed toll road with no direct access to the park, then why in the heck wasn't that on the ballot?" Ms Hunt said.

"If what you intend to build is a high-speed toll road, to describe that to voters as a 'parkway' – there's something purposefully deceptive in that."

A lawsuit brought by environmentalists in 2000 unsuccessfully sought to halt the Trinity project on those very grounds. The suit argued that city leaders had altered the project substantially after voters approved the 1998 bond issue.

"Bait-and-switch is a perfect description," James Blackburn, the Houston lawyer who represented the environmentalists, said last week. "They called it a 'parkway' for a reason. If they had called it a toll road, it might never have been approved."

The environmentalists lost that argument, however. On Sept. 18, 2001, state District Judge Anne Ashby ruled in the city's favor, saying the bond proposition "constitutes a valid contract with the voters."

The Court of Appeals in Dallas upheld the city's position on June 6, 2002. The appellate court ruled that there was no reason a "Trinity Parkway" couldn't be a multi-lane, high-speed tollway, if that's what the City Council wanted to build.

"There is nothing in the language of the proposition that defines the specific number of lanes, speed limit, or configuration," the appellate court wrote. "Rather, specific parameters are not included, most likely so that the city would have the needed discretion to define the specific roadway as all the component parts come together."

In addition to the road, the $246 million bond package called for construction of a downtown park with lakes; flood-control improvements; acquisition of hardwood bottomlands south of downtown in the Great Trinity Forest; and other recreational amenities.

Ms. Hunt said that today, as she goes around talking to voters, "when I say, 'Do you know they're building a toll road where we're supposed to have our downtown park?' they look at me in disbelief. They look at me and say, 'What are you talking about? That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard.' "

Voters may indeed decide this fall that building the Trinity toll road is a dumb idea. And many of them thought it was a dumb idea nine years ago.

The Trinity bonds were narrowly approved – by fewer than 2,400 votes. Ten other bond proposals – for things like parks and playgrounds, a new police headquarters, a fire station, libraries and an animal shelter – won overwhelming public support.

"One of the major points of public debate back in 1998 was the toll road," said Craig Holcomb, the former Dallas City Council member who supported the bond issue and who now leads the group opposing Ms. Hunt's referendum.

"People who voted against the Trinity bonds weren't opposed to the Great Trinity Forest. They weren't opposed to an equestrian center. The controversy was about the toll road."

The list of documents that identified the Trinity Parkway as a planned toll road before the May bond vote is a lengthy one:

•The city printed 20,000 booklets (5,000 in Spanish, 15,000 in English) to distribute to voters in advance of the election. The 18-page booklet summarized all the propositions on the ballot. The summary of Proposition 11, the one to authorize the Trinity bonds, described the proposed Trinity Parkway as "a 6-8 lane reliever route" and said: "This project is under consideration by the North Texas Tollway Authority for development as a toll facility."

•On Nov. 5, 1997, the City Council was briefed on "Trinity Corridor Transportation Improvements." Printed materials for that briefing discussed options for speeding up construction of the Trinity Parkway by building it "as a toll facility."

•In the weeks leading up to the election, supporters of the bond issue mailed out slick color brochures to about 75,000 households, urging voters to approve the bonds. The brochures could not have portrayed the Trinity project in more glowing terms. They included watercolor drawings of sailboats on the downtown lake, a bubbling fountain, bicyclists, street vendors, a couple in a canoe. (There is nothing in the drawings that looks anything like a highway.) The brochures likened the Trinity project to "San Antonio's bustling Riverwalk ... New York's beautiful Central Park ... Austin's scenic Town Lake."

Yet, even this exuberantly flattering brochure made it clear to anyone who read the text that "a system of tollroads" was part of the deal.

•A political ad purchased by opponents of the Trinity project was published in The Dallas Morning News on April 28, 1998, four days before the bond vote. The ad urged voters to reject the bond proposition. One reason: "Proposed eight-lane tollway inside the levee would increase pollution."

•In the 10 months preceding the 1998 bond election, there were at least 27 news stories, four editorials, two letters to the editor and two "op-ed" commentaries in The News that described the road as a toll road.

Both commentaries were written by environmentalists who opposed the Trinity project. One called the project the "mayor's exorbitant scheme" and said it included "costly, dangerous, polluting toll roads inside the levees." The other said, "The construction of an eight-lane tollway within the levee system ... isn't economically or environmentally sensible."

•Jim Schutze, a columnist for the Dallas Observer, wrote a lengthy story denouncing the Trinity project on Jan. 22, 1998 – 14 weeks before the election. Today, Mr. Schutze echoes the line of Ms. Hunt's group, TrinityVote, that what happened back in 1998 was a bait-and-switch – a phrase he used in an Aug. 2 appearance on KERA-FM (90.1). "This was presented to people as a park and lakes and sailboats," he told KERA's listeners.

But his 1998 story made it clear that he, at least, was aware that the Trinity bond proposal called for a toll road. In it, he referred to the role of the North Texas Tollway Authority ("a bunch of road hucksters hungry for work"). He described the toll road's route and how it would be built using fill dirt excavated from the riverbed. And he talked about how financing for the transportation aspect of the Trinity project was critical to the project's overall completion.

"Without the road money," he wrote, "the river plan doesn't work financially."

Mr. Schutze did not return telephone calls or e-mail messages seeking his comment for this story.

•Elsewhere, the Observer, on April 23, 1998, described the Trinity project as "a fetid, mosquito-infested lake in a treeless park bounded by expressways – all paid for with taxes."

Former Mayor Laura Miller, who succeeded Mr. Kirk in office, was running for the City Council for the first time in that same May 1998 election. (She would win and go on to represent an Oak Cliff district.)

As a candidate, she opposed the Trinity bond project.

That's because she didn't like the toll road, she said last week.

"We all knew there was a highway in the river bottom," she said. "And I didn't like anything about it, and I said so loud and clear."

In 2003, as mayor, she led an effort to revamp the toll road design, making it more environmentally sensitive. The new design, unanimously adopted by the City Council that December, reduced the number of lanes and shifted them all to the downtown side of the river, providing unfettered access to the river park from the Oak Cliff side.

Ms. Miller, now a strong supporter of the Trinity project, said she is "frustrated and dismayed" by the current efforts of Ms. Hunt and her supporters to undo that work.

Agency study

Those who accuse the city of a bait-and-switch often point to a March 1998 study by the Texas Department of Transportation, the "Trinity Parkway Corridor Major Transportation Investment Study." That thick document offers a comprehensive look at the city's downtown traffic woes and transportation needs.

That study does describe the proposed Trinity Parkway as something akin to what Ms. Hunt's group has in mind – "a lower speed parkway design rather than a freeway design," with a posted speed limit of 45 mph. (Her referendum would limit any road inside the levees to two lanes in each direction and a speed limit of 35 mph.)

However, on the next page, the study said: "Some or all of the Trinity Parkway reliever route could be constructed using toll funding" – a decision, in fact, that the city had already made by March 1998.
And if that happened, the study said, "some design changes could be necessary," meaning the road would have to be built as a high-speed, multi-lane freeway, to move more cars more quickly.

"No one is going to pay a toll to drive 35 miles an hour," Paul Wageman, chairman of the North Texas Tollway Authority, said in an interview last week.

Ms. Hunt, however, reiterated that if the city wanted to build a high-speed toll road providing little access to the park, it should have just said so.

"If that was the case, then that can be stated on the ballot," she said. "Why not be honest with people?"

Ray Hutchison, who represented the city in the 2000 lawsuit brought by Mr. Blackburn, said general, even vague, language is common in bond proposals. (Mr. Hutchison's firm, Vinson & Elkins, also employs Mr. Kirk, the former mayor.)

"You've got a lot of discretion in the issuance of bonds in how you frame the proposition," said Mr. Hutchison, a nationally recognized expert in public finance law.

"But once you frame the proposition, you're stuck with it."

He said, for example, that if the City Council issued bonds "for the improvement of Main Street between Harwood and Ervay, it couldn't turn around and use the money for repairs on Elm Street."

But if the proposition just said, "for downtown street improvements," the council would have the leeway to use the money where it saw fit.

In the case of the Trinity Parkway, he said, the proposition intentionally said nothing about what sort of road should be built. "That is a matter for the City Council to decide."

Planning for what would become the Trinity River project began in 1996. In the summer of that year, Mr. Kirk hosted a summit of state, local and federal officials to discuss improvements within the river corridor. The city established a Trinity River Corridor Project Management Office. Its first director was appointed in January 1997.

By mid-1997, the city was evaluating a comprehensive, $1 billion plan, devised by the Texas Department of Transportation, to address downtown traffic woes.

One element of that plan: the nine- to 10-mile-long Trinity Parkway.

As early as that summer, there were public discussions of building that parkway as a toll road.

The main advantage of that approach, Dallas city officials were told, was that a toll road could get financed much more quickly, shaving years off the completion schedule.

With conventional funding, collected in the form of gasoline taxes and dribbled out annually by the state, design and construction of the road was expected to take at least 13 years – and probably longer. Dallas would stand in line, along with other Texas cities, for a share of that highway money.

But as a toll road, where the tolls paid by motorists help pay back construction costs, the Trinity parkway could be built in as little as eight to 10 years, state officials said.

"We're going to have to look at a toll road. It may be the key to getting things going along the Trinity," Alan Walne, then a Dallas City Council member, said at a council meeting on Aug. 20, 1997. Three weeks later, the council unanimously endorsed the state plan, including the Trinity toll road.

Although a formal contract between the city and the North Texas Tollway Authority regarding financing of the road wasn't finalized until January 1999, in principle, the City Council had agreed by the fall of 1997: The Trinity Parkway would be a toll road. That would necessarily mean a higher speed, and more lanes, and less direct access to the park than what many environmentalists wanted.

From then on, a high-speed toll road "was always intended to be a key, integral piece" of the downtown traffic solution, said Timothy Nesbitt, a project manager in the Dallas district of the Texas Department of Transportation.

"To claim, 'We didn't know about it, you disguised it' – it was never disguised."A color brochure that Trinity bond supporters mailed to voters in the spring of 1998 showed sailboats, blue skies, a green park ... but no highway or cars in the park. The text of the brochure, however, mentioned that the project included "a system of tollroads." A March 1998 report from the Texas Department of Transportation (above right) described the proposed Trinity Parkway as a low-speed road, but added "some design changes could be necessary" if it were built as a toll road instead.

Newspaper ads taken out by opponents of the 1998 Trinity bond proposal show they knew what they were fighting against: an "eight-lane tollway inside the levee."

But the ballot language for the bond proposal described the planned road only as "the Trinity Parkway." Critics contend that this was misleading, particularly because city officials already knew they were considering a high-speed, multi-lane toll road.
Read more in the Dallas Morning News

Trinity Toll Road going to Dallas Voters in November

Trinity toll road opponents force a vote

By BRUCE TOMASO - The Dallas Morning News - Friday, June 29, 2007
Supporters of a referendum in Dallas to scuttle the Trinity River toll road said Friday that they have enough signatures to force a November vote.

They turned in what they said are more than 48,000 signatures of registered Dallas voters by Friday’s deadline. If enough of those signatures are verified as valid by the city secretary’s office, a measure to remove the proposed toll road from the Trinity River corridor will go before voters in the fall.

City Council member Angela Hunt headed the effort to put the matter before Dallas voters. She and her group, TrinityVote, contend that the toll road should be scrapped because it will detract from a proposed downtown river park. They say that when Dallas voters approved $246 million in bonds for the Trinity River Corridor Project in 1998, many thought they were voting for a low-speed parkway, not a high-speed, multi-lane toll road.

See more Trinity Toll Road/ Trinity Parkway stories on WFAA

Supporters of the road say it's needed to alleviate downtown congestion, and that removing it now from the plans could delay work on other aspects of the Trinity project, including the park and flood-control improvements.

Eminent Domain, lies, manipulation and deceit on both forks of the Trinity

Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer calls D Magazine publisher Wick Allison on distortation of "facts" (Trinity Toll/Park project)
Ed Oakley mutters against bothersome property rights in Dallas City Council;
Citizens face elected officials on both sides of the Trinity over eminent domain and property rights
By Faith Chatham - June 8, 2007
The saga in Dallas continues between media moguls, (DMN and D Magazine publisher Wick Allison, City Council person Angela Hunt and Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze. Biased coverage of the political scene is nothing new in big city journalism, but DMN under BELO's coverage of toll roads and transportation frequently seems to translate it into a new art form.

For a couple of weeks I've been posting articles on the Trinity Park-- er Tollway -- with sparring between opponents and proponents of the Trinity Toll Way. Trinity Vote has attempted to clarify the facts.

This week Jim Schutze's column (My Brain on Crack - Wick Allison, The Trinity Park Project. Have I gone mad?)

It costs money. We have to borrow. We have to pay more taxes. It's an investment.

But look. This is also like a car deal. We went to the showroom in 1998 when we voted to let the city borrow $246 million for the Trinity River Project. We chose a fancy one—the Lexus SUV with the leather and the mag wheels and the two DVD players and the GPS navigation.

Now it's eight years later. They're trying to get us to take this Ford Escape with steel rims, cloth seats, a cheap portable CD player with earbuds and a map of Texas in the glove box. And the contract says we could owe them a billion dollars.

Irritated with coverage which he's termed "fiction" rather than "fact", columnist Jim Schutze ripped the facade off of the DMN's editorial a few weeks ago. City Council woman Angela Hunt took her speaking tour on the road and penned an open letter to Wick Allison to set the record straight. A soft-spoken very articulate lady with a Mission, Council Woman Hunt is upset that the project described to the citizens before they were asked to vote on the bonds for Trinity Park is vastly different now than what the citizens approved. She's (along thousands of other registered voters who have signed the Trinity Vote petition) are demanding that the Toll Road be taken back before the voters before ground is broken. Hunt outlines the differences between what the citizens were told prior to the bond election and what the City of Dallas, TxDOT, the RTC of the NCTCOG and other planners plan to deliver with those precious bond dollars which get paid by hard-earned dollars out of citizens’ pockets plans to actually build. The Belmont Debate between Councilwoman Hunt and Craig Holcomb has made it onto YOU TUBE VIDEO)

Numerous decades old DMN news stories and public meeting descriptors of Trinity Park with its PARKWAY, described as a 'low speed 45 mile and hour parkway with numerous entrances in to the park' have surfaced recently. Big dollars backers of the Toll Road (Trinity Commons Foundation) have been on the speaker’s circuit, trying to strike fear into the public about flood control and potential loss of Federal flood control dollars if the Toll Road proposal is killed. Jim Schutze came out with his computer keys blazing over that one. He quoted U.S. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson who fought hard for those flood control dollars and clarified for the Dallas Observer readers that there the flood control dollars remain for flood control whether any road ever gets built in or near or through the Trinity flood plane near downtown Dallas! Amid charges (and a YOU TUBE VIDEO of what some allege are "paid educational consultants" who functioned as political operatives during the May 12th City of Dallas elections to interfere with the petition drive to collect signatures calling for a referendum on the Trinity Toll Way, and charges that they were employed by the non-profit Trinity Commons Foundation promoting the Toll Way, and rumbles about possible lawsuits and/or charges for violations of election law, the plot thickened in Dallas and the soup smelled worse than the stagnant sediment ponds cropping up in Wise County and other places where injection gas drilling is changing the landscape. Schutze referred to "Laura's goons" in earlier columns.

Angela Hunt earned accolades from Schutze in the spring for detailed research and for saving reporters from boredom at meetings of Dallas City Council Trinity River Committee.This week's Jim has devoted his column to taking DMagazine publisher Wick Allison to task. I'm including excerpts here but urge you to read it in its entirety.
Jim Schutze is one of the best columnists in this area. He's consistently refused to cave to pressure by publishers or peers to water down his rhetoric or avoid topics which fly counter to the financial interests of the high and powerful, politically ambitious, or his own publishers (which has changed over the years, probably due to his refusal to sell out his journalist integrity to satisfy the corporate board room.

Schutze writes:

Wick Allison, the publisher of D magazine, has devoted his entire publisher's note in the December edition to a discussion of whether Jim Schutze—that would be moi—has been telling the truth or distorting the facts about the Trinity Project. He doesn't come right out and say it, but I think his implied conclusion is that Jim Schutze smokes crack.

So first off, let me take you back to what we saw in that showroom eight years ago. Before the 1998 bond election the "We Love Dallas" bond campaign committee published a brochure showing a sailboat regatta on a lake the length of downtown with a huge fountain in the center and promenades and terraces on the downtown bank.

The brochure's promise to voters was clear and explicit: "If you've ever taken a stroll down San Antonio's Riverwalk, sat by a lake in New York's beautiful Central Park, or driven along Austin's scenic Town Lake, then you know how valuable these recreational resources are to a city...

"With absolutely no tax increase to Dallas citizens, the Trinity River Project is the key to making 21st Century Dallas a world-class city—an 8,500-acre greenbelt bursting with new business and entertainment."

I'm a big advocate of following the money. Schutze lays out the Trinity Park -er Toll Way? Project shortfall.

In response to my open records demand, Trinity Project director Rebecca Dugger provided me with numbers to show the ultimate cost of each portion of the plan as it exists now. She also gave me the amounts available from the 1998 bonds and all of the money that has been found from other sources to help pay for the project.

I put all this in a simple spreadsheet and figured the shortfalls. Let me just give you some highlights. According to the city's own official numbers, provided to me in response to a legal demand for them, the cost for building trails alone will be $36.149 million.

Of that, the bond money will pay for $10.256 million. The city told me it had found $7.067 million from other sources. That leaves a shortfall of $18.826 million for the trails.

Look at it again. The money we approved eight years ago now only pays for 28 percent of the cost of the trails. The city has persuaded other entities to pick up an additional 20 percent. That means you and I, dear local taxpayer, are on the books for an additional 52 percent or almost 19 million bucks just for trails.

I sat at a conference table in City Hall and challenged the mayor, the city manager, Dugger and Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan to show me where my shortfalls were wrong. I gave them my spreadsheets.

Here are samples of the things they did not argue with: a $16 million shortfall to make the river curvy instead of straight; a $50 million shortfall for park roads; a $19 million shortfall for digging out the proposed lakes; a $27 million shortfall for improvements to S.M. Wright Boulevard.

To me and in public, Mayor Miller has been offering an excuse for these shortfalls that strikes me as especially dishonest. Her mantra is that everything costs more these days. It's sort of the Neiman Marcus defense: Only a cheapster would be surprised that stuff costs more than it used to.

Tarrant County citizens are up in arms over Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley, Whitley, a board member on NASCO, an international non-profit organization based in Dallas with a stated mission to develop interstate international super transportation corridors to speed up shipment of freight from ports in Mexico through Texas to Kansas City and Canada), fervently lobbied the Texas Legislature to exclude the DFW region from the 2 year moratorium on toll roads. Now Whitley is trying to persuade the Tarrant County Commissioners Court that it is wise for them to sign a letter urging Governor Perry to veto HB 2006 - a bill which curtains some of the dubious practices enacted in the previous session of the Legislature in TTC empowering legislation (promoted by NASCO!). Arlington school teacher Linda Lancaster showed up at Tarrant County Commissioners Court Tuesday (6-5) and said her piece. They delayed voting on signing the letter until next week. Hopefully many others will show up at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday the 12th and remind those folks that the powerbrokers who met in Fort Worth last week with NASCO are not the people who voted them into office and can vote them out!
The Dallas Observer readers also weigh in this week (published June 7, 2007) on Eminent Domain. Kudos to Fort Worth Star-Telegram political reporter Anna Tinsley for alerting readers to Whitley's attempt to undermine the citizens of Tarrant County to the detriment of landowners all over Texas.
Pirates of the Council |Hardee Har |Past Tense |And Finally Pirates of the Council and subtitled: The Pixies, The Police, Dallas comics, property rights ,

Is it safe?: "The Good Laura"—perfect title for Jim Schutze's article (May 31) exposing Bill Blaydes' ruthlessness and Ed Oakley's incredible disregard for individual property rights.

Folks, they can come after your property if they can do what Blaydes with Oakley's assistance tried to do to Jack Pierce at Hollywood Overhead Doors.

Makes you wonder if it's safe to invest in Dallas anymore. Well, at least Blaydes and Oakley will be private citizens in a few weeks.

Sharon Boyd

Jim Schutze's column (published May 31, 2007) The Good Laura, Or, how Bill Blaydes locked up the Bastard of the Year award

I have to tell you this story because it's three things: 1) an appalling example of arrogance and sleaziness at City Hall, 2) a stirring example of integrity and courage at City Hall, and 3) it's about Laura Miller.
This guy owns a business that has been in his family since 1938. Since the 1950s the business has occupied a series of metal barns on nine acres down in a hollow near Walnut Hill and White Rock Trail, in a little leftover remnant of countryside swallowed up by the city.

A small equestrian center is near him, as is a DART train track and a creek called Jackson Branch. You could pass this place a thousand times and never know it's there.

Across the DART tracks from him, major development plans are afoot. The guys doing the developing want this guy's nine acres. Offered to buy him out. He said no. Not interested.

Jack Pierce's business, Hollywood Door, makes garage doors, but its main business is the hand manufacture of huge, very heavy industrial overhead doors. His product is expensive to ship because it's so heavy. Over the last seven decades, his family has developed a good regional trade based in part on having the business right where it is.

He does not want to move, at least not at the prices being offered. The location is worth more to him than its real estate value. This company employs 40 people, and it makes a product, which it actually sells to other people.

Makes stuff. Sells stuff. This is what used to be called a "business," as opposed to insider grease-ball political land-flipping, which is what some people think is a business today.

Got it so far? Developers offer. Business owner says no.

Then he gets a letter. An official letter. A City Hall letter. It appears that Bill Blaydes, the council person for that area, wants to call a hearing to see whether the city should yank the man's zoning out from under him, which would force him to sell.

The saga moves to the City Council chamber:

I mean, are you still with me here? The guy's been on the property since the 1950s. His business is almost invisible from the road, emits no smoke or noise, generates very light traffic. But Commissar Blaydes comes along with his letter and pretty much tells him to get the hell off his own property.

And even worse in my book: While Pierce is standing there at the microphone looking up at the mighty councilpersons with his life and his family's business in his hand, Councilman Ed Oakley, one of two candidates for mayor in the June 16 runoff election, launches into this big, sleazy package of lies aimed at pushing him into giving up.

Talking in his trademark incomprehensible used-car-salesman-on-crank cadence, Oakley says to Pierce: "Let me just ask you hypothetically if you were to go through this process and the process and the staff would allow you to have your area that allowed the use that you have there today which is a manufacturing facility and in addition to that it was created into a p.d. or sub-district that allowed for the other uses such as mixed-use or whatever the neighborhood would determine but you were allowed to be legal and conforming but along with that some of the obnoxious uses that maybe the neighborhood would be fearful of such as a recycling plant or something would be left out of that and would allow you to continue the family business in perpetuity which would be legal which would be a given zoning which would allow you to use that specific use but then the additional uses would allow for residential or mixed-use development or office or retail which aren't allowed there today which actually gives you more land-use rights than what you would have today giving up some of the things that would be obnoxious would you be amenable to sitting down having that conversation?"

Pierce gave the perfect answer. He said, "Sir, I am out of my depth here today."

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Oakley, a City Hall apologist who has replaced Laura Miller as the city's point person working with Trinity Commons Foundation to get the big high speed Toll Road built through the what the voters voted to fund as a Park, is not high on the list of many of his former supporters. His opponent in the Dallas's Mayoral runoff also favors building the Parkway, but as an outsider, Tom Leppert seems less offensive when he discusses it than does insider Ed Oakley. Oakley, who represents a district in the southern quadrant of the city, should be concerned for the property rights of the little guy, but seems to spout the Corporate, big developer, big dollar interest line more than adhering to a more populist Democratic line. The Dallas County Democratic Party made an unprecedented move in endorsing a candidate in what is normally a nonpartisan city race, yet many of the Democratic activists I know are less than enthusiastic about the prospects of having Mr. Oakley as Mayor. Objections do not seem to relate to his openly gay lifestyle but to his conduct in rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful and failure to champion the plight of the little man in eminent domain squabbles and other issues when John Q Citizen must face off against the City of Dallas.

In previous column's Schutze has chided DMN reporter Steve Blow for superficial coverage of City Council and the Trinity Toll /Park Project in particular.

Today, as our fledging group of activists (DFW REGIONAL CONCERNED CITIZENS) trot down to the NCTCOG offices on Six Flags Drive in Arlington to tell the RTC and NCTCOG staff how their policies disturb us, it is encouraging to open my e-mail box and find Jim Schutze's column. Schutze can make dead serious squabbles entertaining. The Texas Legislature has scattered and I'm left to summer re-runs on television. Honestly, video links to Texas Senate Transportation Hearings and battles on the Texas House Floor as representative after representative asked Speaker Craddick to vacate the chair provided much more entertainment to me this Spring than slick news entertainment journals on network TV. (For me, one of the definite pluses to watching the Texas House and Senate via internet is that they don't cover Anna Nicole, any of her offspring or relatives or alleged paramours!)

Maybe it's those early bedside stories read to me as a child about knights and the round table and crusaders rescuing the underdog from the wicked, selfish despot that are rekindled when I watch Angela Hunt and Jim Schutze take on Trinity Commons, big corporate donors and Dallas City Hall. Whatever it is, I'm gratified that the Dallas Observer fights the giant with their feather.

In Fort Worth, Mayor Mike Moncrief (dubbed by the Fort Worth Weekly as the "GASFATHER" for his facilitation of the drilling of hundreds of gas wells in the densely populated cowtown,( and Fort Worth City Council members voted to send a letter to Perry urging veto of HB 2006 (restoring protection to landowners from seizure of property through eminent domain for private commercial development. Decades of property rights were bartered away by legislators in the 78th and 79th session of the Texas Legislature by massive changes to the Texas Transportation Code and eminent domain laws were enacted by state representatives and state senators who had accepted substantial campaign contributions from pro-toll road proponents. Speaker Craddick and Lt. Governor David Dewhurst moved the bills at rapid speed through their branches of the house. (Craddick, Dewhurst, Perry, Abbott, and Susan Combs all accepted campaign donations from Zachry Construction and Zachry family members. A significant correlation emerged between Democratic and Republican incumbents who accepted Zachry and other toll road proponents campaign contributions and their roles in sponsoring, voting for and moving TTC/CDA enabling legislation through both houses of the Texas Legislature. Public outcry against the taking of hundreds of thousands of acres of Texans unified grassroots activist in both parties to descend upon Austin. This past legislative session several folks who were instrumental in getting these bills passed stood and appeared to repent. (Steve Odgen, Florence Sharpio and others). When it was time to vote, however, Odgen's "Come to Jesus" contrition evaporated and he voted for Perry's detested "market valuation language" which many think negates the two year moratorium on CDA toll roads for most of the state.

It's been a busy season. Keeping up with who's pulling what and how the truth is twisted to give an illusion but the citizens are left holding lots of debt, empty promises, and developers, politicians, and engineering firms and highway contractors sit licking their lips with cream all over their greedy mouths seems to surpass the energy it must have required British Royalty to keep up with the palace intrigues in centuries past. We may be "tilting at windmills" but with citizens' access to the internet and writers like Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer and Jeff Prince of the Fort Worth Weekly maybe enough voters will wake up and realize that Judge Glen Whitley, Mayor Mike Moncrief and most of the City Council and County Commissioners in the DFW Region have conspired to fleece them of property and to double tax them for use of public infrastructure! Hammering on computer keys helps, but ultimately it is the voter's responsibility to evaluate whether local officials are truly looking out for citizens' welfare. Pushing that button or marking that little box in the election booth is ultimately the only way we can depose folks who misuse their office to lobby to ensure that the rich and powerful get richer and richer and the honest working folks forfeit property and political privilege to the dark room schemes of scum bags who think that the TTC is good for Texas!

Angela Hunt calls D Magazine Publisher Wick Allison on Trinity

Angela Hunt Sends Wick Allison a Note; Smelled a Little Like Vanilla Maybe?
by Robert Wilonsky-The Dallas Observer - Tue May 29, 2007

On Friday, Jim Schutze had a little sumpin-sumpin to say about Wick Allison's D mag editorial in which Allison claims Angela Hunt's TrinityVote toll-road petition drive is nothing less than "a wrecking ball [aimed] at the largest public works project in Dallas history." ...
Hunt spent the end of last week debating the Trininty toll road with Trinity Commons Foundation's executive director Craig Holcomb; there's some video from the Thursday-night Belmont Neighborhood Association-sponsored shindig after the jump, and you can find plenty of it right here, courtesy Avi Adelman. This week, Hunt sets her sights on Allison as well: Yesterday on TrinityVote, she posted an open letter to Allison, in which she "humbly offer[s] to bring Mr. Allison up to speed on a few facts that he may wish to correct in his next editorial." Only there's nothing "humbly" about the letter, which is also after the jump. --Robert Wilonsky

An Open Letter to D Magazine's Wick Allison from Angela Hunt
Monday, May 28, 2007

If you picked up the June issue of D Magazine, you no doubt read the editorial by its publisher, Wick Allison, in which he claims that a public vote on moving the proposed Trinity toll road out of our Downtown Trinity Park "is to aim a wrecking ball at the largest public works project in Dallas history."

Now, we know a little bit about publishing. We are aware that it takes months of effort to put together a fancy, glossy magazine such as D. We understand that Mr. Allison likely wrote his editorial months ago, long before critical facts contradicting his assertions became public.

So we humbly offer to bring Mr. Allison up to speed on a few facts that he may wish to correct in his next editorial.

After years of embracing the Trinity toll road, Mr. Allison has finally acknowledged what TrinityVote has been saying all along: the planned toll road is a monstrosity, and we will end up with an ersatz North Dallas Tollway cutting through the last great expanse of nature in our city. Mr. Allison observes:

"I was driving back to the office the other day on the Dallas North Tollway after having listened to Angela Hunt speak against the design of the Trinity parkway. The speed limit on the Tollway is 55 mph, and I was doing 70. Looking at the six lanes of concrete over which I was speeding, it dawned on me that Hunt is right. The engineers want to build a Dallas North Tollway down the middle of the Trinity floodplain."

Mr. Allison is absolutely right on this point: The "Trinity Parkway," which was sold to voters in 1998 as a low-speed reliever route with direct park access, has become a high-speed toll road with no park access. Where Mr. Allison misses the mark is in his conclusion that the high-speed toll road "is not going to happen," and that with a little elbow grease, we'll get a terrific little park road. Mr. Allison is confident that we can fix this abomination if we all go back to the drawing board. He suggests we "lock the traffic engineers in a room and tell them not to come out until they have a parkway the entire city can embrace."

No doubt this method works splendidly at D Magazine's offices. However, in the context of designing the "Trinity Parkway," it will not. Mr. Allison seems certain that the toll road's high speed and lack of park access is somehow the fault of stubborn traffic engineers who simply refuse to sit down and discuss the design of this road. He seems to believe that if only these engineers had an eye for design, we'd have a lovely parkway.

But the fact is, engineers and designers have been planning this road for nine years. And after nearly a decade, they have been unable to resolve the fundamental conflict between a low-speed access road and a high-speed toll road: The North Texas Tollway Authority, the entity that will construct and operate the toll road, must generate tolls to pay for the road. To generate tolls, the NTTA needs lots of cars to travel on the toll road. To ensure a lot of cars travel on the toll road, the cars must go fast. So a low-speed route is out of the question. But what about direct park access? Unfortunately, that costs too much money and would slow down motorists, according to the NTTA's traffic engineers. All the good intentions in the world will not change these fundamental facts. Therefore, we’re stuck with a high speed toll road with no park access.

The toll road’s current plans did not result from the lack of a “context-sensitive” design, but from the NTTA’s practical need to generate tolls. The resulting design does not reflect the parkway voters approved in 1998. So why shouldn't we vote on this?

According to Mr. Allison, it would be unwise for Dallas residents to vote on the toll road because "The Trinity is the only place to build [the toll road]" and "The entire Trinity project is premised on the federal money the parkway attracts." We can only assume that Mr. Allison drafted his editorial before certain facts came to light and did not have time to make revisions before going to press. Unfortunately for Mr. Allison, with such a long lead-time, one risks looking foolish in the face of facts that are clearly contrary to one's assertions.

To Mr. Allison's claim that "The Trinity is the only place to build [the toll road]," we point out that the NTTA disagrees. They are currently investigating other locations for the toll road outside the levees: "An alignment outside of the levees is one of the alignments we are studying along with several alignments within the levee." (Kevin Feldt, NTTA Director of Project Planning and Development, on KERA radio May 16, 2007.)

Mr. Allison also states that "The entire Trinity project is premised on the federal money the parkway attracts. Without the parkway, the whole project could collapse." We find this claim curious, since U.S. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson – who has been Dallas’ champion of the Trinity River Project – disabused referendum critics of that notion two weeks ago: "I'm never anti people doing a vote. It hasn't been voted on before. So I guess that's the right of people if that's what they want to do. There really is no impact because what we're doing through water resources [federal funding for levee improvements] is different than what is being discussed about the tollway."

As to Mr. Allison's claim that the petition will "aim a wrecking ball at the largest public works project in Dallas history," we are unclear as to his meaning. Surely he does not mean that the Trinity River Project would be delayed if we have a vote, since both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the NTTA recently have stated that is not the case:

Gene Rice, Trinity River Project Manager, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: "The vote or the proposed vote, we don't think it wouldn't have a large impact on us as we have made some assumptions that keep moving along with our project."

Kevin Feldt, NTTA: "As far as the timing goes, the project is moving forward with or without the pending petition and pending election."

So we welcome and look forward to learning exactly what Mr. Allison means by his statement that TrinityVote’s petition effort will wreck the Trinity River Project. We would love to hear some specifics, rather than baseless rhetoric.

Mr. Allison concludes his editorial with the statement “Egocentrics make bad listeners and good populists. Because they won’t listen to facts, the facts never get in their way.”

Read more and view Angela Hunt debunking the lies on You Tube.