Hunt re-invigorates stale budget townhall meeting

If you've never been to a budget town hall meeting (and that's somewhere around 99.99999 percent of the adult Dallas population) what happens is one of the city's assistant city managers or, on a rare occasion, the city manager her own self, will narrate a city-staff-prepared slide presentation of the city manager's proposed budget. It gives all those special interest groups who feel they've been shortchanged the opportunity to jump up and proclaim "But what our little group does really enriches the entire fabric of the city's society so all 100 gazillion dollars should be restored to our efforts, but don't raise taxes and hooray to you for hiring all those extra police officers." Sometimes intelligent discussions do come up such as whether the city should go to a system of once-a-week garbage and recycling pickup and, if so, in what areas of the city should that switch be made and when and how can we get the residents in those dadgum apartment complexes to recycle.

But the centerpiece of the meeting is the slide presentation and, in a huge example of overkill and at the expense of way too many trees, this massive slide presentation is also handed out to everyone who shows up at the townhall meeting. That means, of course, you can jump to the section of the budget that most interests you and not even pay any attention to the assistant city manager who's trying to explain what debt service is and how come so much of the budget must be spent on it.

This year's City of Dallas budget is (and there really isn't any better word to describe it) dull and that makes the slide presentation even more monotonous than it ordinarily is. This not meant as a criticism to the City's staff because any slide presentation on a municipal budget is going to be dull. Let's face it, replacing the city's aging water infrastucture is necessary and important, but it's not exciting.

Which brings me to Tuesday night's townhall meeting at the Village Apartments' Country Club hosted by Angela Hunt, who said "No offense, city staff, but I think I can do this better all by myself." And you know what? By all accounts she did. She presented the budget, not an assistant city manager (although one, A.C. Gonzalez, was present) and she even made her own slide presentation to accompany it. Now, truth be told, tonight was draft night for the fantasy football league I'm in and our draft started at 6:15 p.m. So, by the time I arrived at the Country Club, Ms. Hunt had already made her presentation and was deftly handling comments from a couple of nut jobs, one railing about people with multiple DWIs who continue to drink (I guess he's never heard the term "alcoholic") and the other espousing his racist views on illegal immigrants and why Ms. Hunt doesn't singlehandedly ship them all back to northwest Arkansas where they came from.

It was only after the meeting that I learned Ms. Hunt flew solo. In a conversation with My Hero who has been to a couple hundred of these budget town hall meetings in the last few weeks and who saw the whole thing, she told me Ms. Hunt made the budget presentation and not an assistant city manager and that Ms. Hunt had made her own slides. "She really simplified it and presented it in a way that made sense," My Hero told me. "She did a great job of presenting the budget from the citizens' point of view and not the city's point of view."

For those who might want to see if she'll do it again, Ms. Hunt will have her final budget town hall meeting for this budget process Thursday evening at the Latino Cultural Center. Unfortunately, I will miss that as well because I will be attending a screening of this movie at the Angelika, and I know the rest of Dallas civilization will be at home watching the opening game of the NFL season and thinking "Those guys beat the Cowboys in the playoffs last year? How did they do that?", but just in case you're civic minded in the least, the Latino Cultural Center might be the place to be Thursday evening.