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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Allison’s theory was put to the test immediately. In June 1998, the first month I was on the council, then-city manager John Ware put an innocuous-looking item at the tail end of a 143-item voting agenda. We were being asked, for no apparent reason, to put some vacant city-owned land up for sale for a minimum bid of $2,000. It was 1.4 acres of property just off a major downtown highway, and I remember wondering how it could possibly be worth only $2,000. But I was new on the council, and that morning I’d already lost a bloody battle over giving the city’s precious power of eminent domain to Ross Perot, Jr., so I said nothing. We voted unanimously on a voice vote in a split second to approve the sale. The next morning a reporter called me on the phone. “You’re the so-called expert on Ray Hunt—do you know what you voted on yesterday?” Well, it turns out that Ray Hunt wanted the land so he could expand his Hyatt Regency Hotel. Not only were we not told that, but included in the fine print of our agenda item was a waiver of two significant city policies. First, no For Sale sign would be posted on the land, as is typically required. And second, no area realtors would be notified that the land was for sale. But it was the $2,000 price tag that was most outrageous. According to an appraisal commissioned by the city, the land was worth $1.7 million. But thanks to a previous (bad) deal that the city had cut back in 1974, Hunt had one-hundred-year leases on numerous parcels of city-owned land around his hotel (25 acres in all), many of which he leased for $100 a year, including the parcel that was for sale. Since the land that Hunt now wanted to buy was encumbered by that lease, the city staff had decided that it was worth only $2,000.
Why would intelligent city bureaucrats, who are paid big salaries by the taxpayers to protect their interests, forgo $1.7 million? Government Lesson Number One: The council-manager form of government is designed to get “politics” out of “government” and let management professionals run the city in a businesslike way—but all too often, the business community is the bureaucrats’ real constituency, not the council or the taxpayers. (And often, it’s their future employer too: Ware had announced two weeks earlier that he was quitting his job to go work for Tom Hicks, the Dallas Stars hockey team owner who had spent much of 1997 holed up behind closed doors with Ware negotiating the $125 million tax subsidy for himself for a new arena for his team.) Surely, I thought, the council would cry foul once they were aware of the facts. Here was my argument: If Hunt didn’t want to pay market value for the land, the taxpayers didn’t have to sell it to him; we could just abide by the lease until Hunt wanted the land badly enough to pay what it was worth. Better still, it just so happened that the city needed some of Hunt’s land (in that same area) for a future convention center expansion—why not view this as an opportunity to renegotiate the 1974 deal and do a land swap?
Only one council member agreed with me: Donna Blumer. A veteran of eight years and my one true council ally, Blumer represents the wealthiest part of North Dallas, and despite her tony constituents, she is a tigress about government giveaways and waste, beholden to no one and intimidated by nothing. Although she and I missed the boat on allowing the land adjacent to the Hyatt to be put on the market for such a paltry amount, we both voted no—and we were the only ones to do so—when the council was asked seven weeks later to approve the sale for $100,000 to the highest of five sealed bids. That bid, of course, belonged to Ray Hunt.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Hunt apparently was not satisfied with the council’s largesse—he didn’t want to have to pay property taxes on the hotel expansion either. So Ware, whose last day at city hall was the day we accepted Hunt’s bid, placed another item on our agenda for two weeks hence, exempting Hunt from 90 percent of those taxes for ten years—a savings of $2.9 million. Hunt also requested a rebate of all the building-permit fees that everyone (else) incurs when they do construction. Ware dutifully recommended we approve a $40,000 rebate.
The council was only slightly nauseated by this plethora of riches: The vote this time was 10-5 in favor of Hunt.
As a reporter, i spent years observing city council meetings, during which I usually ended up asking myself, What are these people doing? Why don’t they just do the right thing? Why is my version of the “right thing” so different from their version of the “right thing”? Why don’t they just do what the citizens who elected them want them to do instead of doing what the city’s business leaders want them to do? Worse, why do they always insist on doing it in the name of “doing what’s best for Dallas?”Now I am finishing my second term on the council, and I still don’t know the answers. I have spent much more time than I would have liked on the losing side of lopsided votes, and whenever I argue against this subsidy or that tax break for the rich and powerful, I think, “There, that’s sure to convince them.” It never does. Government Lesson Number Two: Politics is not a debating society. Politicians make up their minds how they are going to vote for many reasons, but one of the rarest is a fact-packed argument made in the heat of battle.
As a reporter, I was forever searching for specific explanations for defy-all-logic behavior—bribes, arm-twisting, threats, payback, flashy gifts, hefty campaign contributions. I dug and dug and searched and searched. And if I couldn’t pinpoint the reason, I figured it was because of my failure to find it, not that it didn’t exist. Now, as a politician, I see that political causation is far less tidy.
Government Lesson Number Three: Just about everybody in politics thinks that they are doing the right thing. But why would elected officials think that rubber stamping a $4.6 million gift to an exceedingly prosperous oilman like Hunt—in his twenty-fifth year of uninterrupted city subsidy, in a time of unprecedented prosperity for everyone in Dallas except the lowly taxpayers—is the right thing? Government Lesson Number Four: Because this is Dallas. Every city has its rich and powerful business leaders who want city hall to make them richer, but only in Dallas is the view so widely held that, yes, of course, the city should do it. And the choir goes along. On and on ad nauseam, the council is presented with proposals for tax abatements, rebates, grants, infrastructure reimbursements, forgivable loans, and insanely cheap land. And every time, the argument is the same: This is good for Dallas, and so if you’re not for this deal, then you’re not for Dallas.
So, Wick, you were right: I am not a good choir member. I just can’t get rid of the attitudes I developed as a reporter, especially my belief that the City of Dallas gives away far too much taxpayer money to those who need it the least. Then, to add insult to injury, we turn around, lament the fact that we don’t have enough money, and deliver mediocre city services to the average, working-class citizens who never get any tax breaks and would never even think to ask for any.
Okay, okay, I know this sounds self-righteous. I admit it. And sanctimonious. (The Observer recently described me as a “sanctimonious vigilante.”) But when I was first running for office, I seriously worried that if I actually won, I would wake up the morning after the election and be a totally different person. Somehow, the mere mantle of the job would automatically transform me into an agonizer and a compromiser who would never again make a spontaneous, nakedly honest statement about anything. After all, as a reporter, I’d seen plenty of candidates go from being passionate populists on the campaign trail to indistinguishable pulp in office. “Just shoot me when it happens,” I told people, who promised to do just that.
Well, no one has had to shoot me. But, I can tell you, doing things my way does come with distinct disadvantages.
When I joined the council, I was, as they say in politics, radioactive. As a columnist, I had made unflattering comments about a number of council members, particularly Mayor Ron Kirk. A lawyer, a former legislative lobbyist for the city, and an African American, Kirk is probably the greatest salesman the city has ever had. He’s a terrific ambassador for Dallas. He can be charming and self-deprecating, and he is one of the funniest people I know. On the other hand, he can be hot tempered and mean, and he constantly gives away the city store. He remains permanently and irrevocably exasperated with me. He recently told me over lunch that he’s not sure which he dislikes more—my writing about the council or my serving on it. And we both laughed. In the council-manager system of government, the mayor and the council have little real power. But make no mistake, Ron Kirk is a powerful mayor. Government Lesson Number Five: Personality and popularity matter more than the limitations of position. The business community relies on Kirk to keep all bad things from happening, which he usually does, and to be the chief salesman for their projects—in particular, a new sports arena (51 percent of the voters agreed to levy car rental and hotel room taxes to generate the city’s $125 million share) and the Trinity River Corridor Project (51.6 percent voted to spend $246 million in bond money to build a tollway, a lake, and some parks and levees in the river bottoms). Kirk is paid a six-figure salary by a downtown law while he is mayor; he freely admits he does very little legal work. Fear of Kirk—of having him publicly humiliate you, privately revile you, gleefully strip you of any leadership post he bestows upon you—is one of the most prevalent themes on the council.
Kirk gets a large helping hand with damage control from the Dallas Morning News (for which I wrote from 1983 to 1986). The News not only embraces everything the business establishment pushes as “good for Dallas,” but, in those rare instances when a reporter digs up an embarrassing fact that can’t be easily ignored, it may appear as a one-day story that is barely mentioned later—a case in point being the report, shortly after the hotly contested sports arena vote, that Kirk’s wife had accepted a $12,000 annual corporate board salary and more than $500,000 in stock options from one of Tom Hicks’s companies before her husband joined the city manager behind closed doors to negotiate the $125 million tax subsidy for Hicks.
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