How I Learned to Hate the Media And Love Politics (Well, Sort of)
A hard-charging city hall reporter wins a seat on the Dallas City Council, takes a hard look at her old profession, takes an even harder look at her new one.
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When Kirk appointed his council committee chairs in 1999, I swallowed my pride and asked him to make me chair of the Housing and Neighborhood Development Committee, which handles all of the meat-and-potatoes issues that I care about. Whatever I managed to accomplish in that position, I promised the mayor, I would give him all the credit, just for giving me the opportunity. He scoffed: “You’re not on the team. People who aren’t on the team don’t get chairmanships.” And that is Government Lesson Number Six.
As Wick Allison predicted, “Miller doesn’t know how to cut deals, and she won’t want to learn; she’ll only slice up anyone who tries.” What if, in our discussion of the team, Kirk had said to me, “If I make you the chairman of Housing, will you shut up about the arena and fully support the Dallas 2012 Olympic bid?” I wonder what I would have said. “Fine”? Or “Don’t pull any quid pro quo with me”? Would I have felt like a sellout? Or a really smart pol? Would the chance to make an impact on the so-called little issues be worth going along on the big ones—especially since I typically lost the votes on those anyway? I simply don’t know.
In the wake of Kirk’s successes on the arena and Trinity projects, he admitted in his annual State of the City address that the quality of city services had declined. “With our thriving economy, the time has been right to capture important long-term projects,” he said, “but now we must refocus on the nuts and bolts of our city services. Problems facing code enforcement, housing, and city streets are realities that can no longer be ignored.”
I praised him profusely for his speech that day—but a mere three weeks later, Kirk announced that he was backing the Dallas business community’s grandiose plan to lure the 2012 Olympic Games to town. The business leaders promised to fund the $5 million bid and the $2.2 billion Games with private money, but Blumer and I were skeptical: If they wouldn’t build their own arenas or pay their own property taxes on their projects, why would they pony up hundreds of millions to build athletic facilities, housing, media centers, and transportation systems that they ultimately wouldn’t own or control?
To obtain a unanimous vote for a crucial council resolution endorsing the Olympic effort, Kirk agreed to accept an amendment from Blumer that prevented the city from ever allocating more than a “minimal” amount of taxpayer money and city staff time to the Games. But this past November, only two years into the fourteen-year effort, the Dallas 2012 Committee requested that the council remove that restriction. The outcome was a familiar one: The council voted to remove it, 12-2.
Oh, well, you can’t win them all. But I did see a victory last spring after the city staff and the Dallas Park and Recreation Board (appointed by the city council) unexpectedly decided to shut down 26 neighborhood swimming pools—more than half the pools in the city. The pools were small, old, and in need of updating (new filtration systems, handicapped drinking fountains, and restrooms) to comply with new state regulations, but the majority of them were in the poorest neighborhoods and were much loved by the surrounding residents. The most beloved pool of all was located in my council district. Only one Park board member, my appointee Ralph Isenberg, cried foul. The city staff, he said, had briefed the board about the new regulations too late to fix the pools before summer and, for good measure, had floated a grossly overblown $4 million price tag to do the repairs. So began a two-month odyssey. First, I got a real cost estimate for fixing our pool—a manageable $30,000. Then I found existing bond money to pay for it. Then I went to the Park board, hat in hand and neighbors in tow, and begged them to make an exception for our one pool. The answer was no.
I appealed to city manager Ted Benavides, who told me he wanted nothing to do with saving my little pool. In fact, he said, he completely understood why the Park department wanted to keep me from opening it. “They have a business plan,” Benavides told me matter-of-factly. “And if you let one council member interfere with the plan, that invites other council members to interfere with it, and then you unravel the plan.” Government Lesson Number Seven: No system that gives bureaucrats more power than elected officials is good.
Finally, the only option I had left was to appeal directly to my colleagues, none of whom wanted to get involved in this issue. I spent an entire rainy day on the telephone, trying desperately to get four of them to support putting my pool repairs on a future council agenda. (It takes five council members to get an item on the agenda, which is otherwise controlled by the mayor and the city manager.) At five o’clock, fifteen minutes before the deadline, I made a last-ditch attempt—in my car, on my cell phone, in the rain—to find deputy mayor pro tem Steve Salazar in Japan, where he was on a city trade mission. By what I can only attribute to divine providence, Salazar answered his hotel room phone and became my fifth signature.
But I knew I faced an uphill battle. Park board members were lobbying the council not to make an exception for my pool. A few of my peers feared they would look bad if I saved my pool but they didn’t save theirs (not that they were trying). One felt I wasn’t respecting “the process” by not going along with the staff’s recommendation. And another saw this as an irresistible opportunity to lecture me about … me: “Do you respect us? I mean, do you really respect us? Because, in our opinion, you don’t act like you do.” A long-winded response about how much I respected the council failed to get me her signature.
I managed to line up a corporate gift of $50,000 to repair the pool, but it had to be accepted by the council. After a vitriolic debate, the council voted 8-6 to accept the donation. But as the vote was read aloud, a clearly surprised mayor loudly and pointedly asked an ally if she had made a mistake voting yes. “Oh, yes” was the quick response. “I must have hit the wrong button.” As I yelled out to her to stay the course, the mayor allowed the vote to be changed and the motion failed.
Which would have been the end of it, except that a North Dallas resident with a good heart, a humble-paying job, a couple of kids, and no previous interest in politics heard about the vote on the radio at work that morning and became suddenly seized with a severe case of moral outrage. Tim Daniels went home to his wife at lunch and told her he was going to open a bank account to raise money for the pools. And that’s what he did. And then he called me. In the ensuing 28-day blitzkrieg of activity—constant radio and TV coverage, e-mail and fax overload at city hall, a saveourpools.com Web page, eight billboards donated by local businessmen stating “Millions for Billionaires, But Zero for Kids,” and a pools fund-raiser on the City Hall Plaza, where I was repeatedly soaked in a dunking booth for the cause—we raised $100,000.
Through it all, Kirk repeatedly told the public not to bother making donations because the pools were never going to open. Which only stirred up the public more. Finally, after a month, Kirk gave in, instantly bringing all but one member of the council with him. “I never change my mind,” he told me and a reporter the day the issue came to a head at a council meeting. “That is, I never change my mind until the public beats the crap out of me, and then I change my mind.” We fixed four swimming pools in four council districts by midsummer. Government Lesson Number Eight: You can fight city hall—but only if you wake up the sleeping giant called the masses to help you do it. On the opening day of my pool, I swam with Tim Daniels; my Park board appointee, Isenberg; and my three kids. It was the sweetest day I’ve had in public service.
It sounds trite to say that thanks to my unexpected foray into politics, I now believe that journalism would be a much more thoughtful, reasoned, credible institution if every reporter were forced to run for some sort of public office at least once. But it’s true. Being the pursued and realizing that you have zero control over what people tell the public about you, because they’re going to write whatever they darned please, is a humbling and frightening experience, and it poses the ultimate question to someone like me: If I ever go back to journalism, will I be any good at it? Conversely, will I be much better at it?I think the latter, in part because of what happened when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, only two months after I was sworn into office. I recall with extreme clarity the morning after the surgery that removed a malignant tumor from my left breast. My husband had taken the kids to school, and I was drinking coffee and aching over the morning paper. The phone rang. It was a young, unmarried, carefree city hall reporter for the Morning News: “I hear you either have breast cancer or you had a test for breast cancer. Which is it?”
I wasn’t ready to discuss it yet, I told him. I hadn’t gotten back the pathology report from the procedure, and until I knew how serious my situation was, my husband and I had decided to postpone telling our children. I would let him know when I was ready to go public. The reporter paused. “That’s fine,” he said, “but my editor and I have discussed this, and we’ve decided that if we think you’re not able to represent your constituents, we’re going to write the story anyway.”
Which has not endeared me to my former profession.
Quite frankly, I’ll take the public over the media any day, even when I get a question like, “Why don’t you shut up and get out of politics since you’re such a loudmouth and so completely ineffective”? A man did ask me that recently, following a speech I gave to a breakfast club of mostly wealthy businessmen. The questioner added that I should take more advice from my universally respected husband, who was clearly a much better politician than I. When he said that, the room grew quiet. People were embarrassed for me. I just smiled at the man, knowing what I would say—that I agreed with the part about the more politically savvy husband. But in the second before I answered, the seasoned journalist that I used to be spoke to the politician that I am: “You did this to yourself, pal,” I heard it say. “Nobody forced you to run for public office.”
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