A day with the council circus, an evening with the council budget process

I spent the majority of the day today watching the Dallas City Council do what it does best -- waste the time of too many individuals, taking nine hours to accomplish what should take no longer than an hour and a half.

I'm referring essentially to a pair of items on today's council agenda. The first was Agenda Item 5:

An ordinance amending Ordinance No. 27932 and Ordinance No. 27933 to change certain election day polling and early voting locations for the November 2, 2010 special elections on whether to legalize "the legal sale of beer and wine for off-premise consumption only" and on whether to legalize "the legal sale of mixed beverages in restaurants for food and beverages certificate holders only" - Financing: No cost consideration to the City

If you can read, you can plainly see that this item only concerned polling places. Yet D-Wayne Demagogue and Carolyn Davis decided to turn it into a platform on the evils of selling spirits in South Dallas. And they went on and on and on and no one had the courage to tell these two that this meeting was neither the time nor the place to campaign on how citizens should vote on the issue. It was only about changing polling places to locations that are normally assumed to be voting locations in municipal elections.

The second had to do with the bidding process for concessionaires at Love Field. On this issue, Da Mayor was right. (Later in the day I had the opportunity to tell the mayor to his face on that issue but wrong on the tax issue. But I'll get to that in a minute.)

The entire debate on the concession issue -- a debate that lasted, by my estimation, almost seven hours, revolved around the manner in which the matters being debated were fair or unfair to the current concessionaires. Wrong argument! I could care less about the current concessionaires. The only matter of importance in this debate is what is in the best interests of those who will be using the airport for whatever reason. And, until someone can prove otherwise, competitive bidding would seem to serve those interests best because the bids should be judged on exactly that consideration. If someone can produce customer satisfaction surveys that illustrate (1) airports without competitively bid concession services rank higher with customers than those that do and (2) the customers' satisfaction is directly attributable to the lack of competitive bidding, I could be persuaded to change my mind. I doubt, however, anyone can produce such statistics.

There were several references to the Pittsburgh airport, one of many airports my former business partner and I frequented on a regular basis. In fact, it was during a drive to the Pittsburgh airport one afternoon that we devised our "Name That Subdivision" game. But I digress. The Pittsburgh airport resembled a shopping mall more than it did an airport and I remember making that observation to a resident who told me, "You're right. In fact, more people go there just to shop than go there to catch a plane." Of course, that's all changed since 9/11. I attended seventh grade at a school in Vallejo, Calif., which is northeast of San Francisco. And I vividly remember that when my dad wanted to take us out for a great dinner, we would go to this then world-renowned restaurant that was located in the San Francisco Airport. I'm not even sure that restaurant still exists, but whether is does or not is beside the point. The point is that those airports functioned under the concept that the people who used the concessions at the airport were far more important than the concessionaires, a concept that seemed to escape the minds of those on our city council.

Fortunately, the vote on this issue was taken in time for me to shower, dress and drive from my Northeast Dallas home to West Dallas to attend my first budget town hall meeting -- it being my first because I have been "transportationally challenged" until just recently. Usually I just sit, listen and observe at these meetings. Tonight, however, I broke that pattern, feeling it was somewhat hypocritical of me to hide behind the relative anonymity of this blog and not take the opportunity to make the same points in a public forum, especially when Da Mayor was present to disagree with what I said. I made to points during Council Member Steve Salazar's townhall meeting and I will repeat them here.

The budget briefing tries to outline how we got ourselves into this fiscal mess we find ourselves in today. But it omits one important fact. In 2006, the city presented the voters of Dallas with a bond proposal. City council members held townhall meetings almost identical to the budget ones being held now. In the presentation of the bond package, the city staff member making the presentation always said "Here's how passage of the bond package will affect your property tax rates." Not, mind you, how passage might affect, but will affect them. However, by an overwhelming margin (All but one of the bond propositions passed with 65 percent voting in favor of them, the other received 55 percent approval.), the voters told the City Council they would be in favor of paying that bill in order to purchase those capital improvements. Yet the city council willfully disobeyed the instructions of the voters and never instituted the tax adjustments. Why? Because, I'm guessing, those were good economic times and the council mistakenly thought those good times would go on forever. Of course, they didn't and now, instead of correcting their error and doing what the voters instructed them to do in that election, the council is asking us to pay for their mistakes by taking away much-needed city services. Shame on them.

Interestingly enough, Da Mayor, who did repeat his worn-out "I'm against raising taxes" speech, never once challenged my statements on the bond election. I'm guessing because he knew he couldn't. He did challenge me, however, when I responded to his no tax increase speech by arguing that he does, in fact, favor tax increases -- he and the city staff are simply masters at masquerading these tax increases as fees. I reminded him and assistant city manager A.C. Gonzales, who recalled conversations I had with him on this topic last year, that PILOT is a tax increase. For those who don't recall, PILOT stands for "Payment In Lieu Of Taxes" and it's a form of property tax the city charges its own Water Department, which, in turn, raises our water rates to pay for those taxes. There is a proposal on the table -- although admittedly not part of the proposed budget (yet) -- to charge the Sanitation Department a franchise fee. Of course, if this does become part of the budget, the Sanitation Department will have to increase our fees to pay for it. I call that a thinly disguised tax increase because that money would go into the General Fund, just as PILOT does today.

Da Mayor and Mr. Gonzalez tried to argue it wasn't a tax increase, telling me after the townhall meeting that the city charges all its franchise holders these kind of fees and those folks would also pass those costs along to us in the form of rate hikes as well. The fallacy in that argument, however, is that none of those other franchise holders are a monopoly. I have a choice when it comes to my electrical provider or my television service provider, but I have no such choice when it comes to who will provide me with running water or who will pick up my residential trash.

I must give Da Mayor credit where credit is due him, however, and, as I alluded to earlier, I also had the welcomed opportunity to say this to his face as well. This mayor is the hardest working board chair this city has ever known. I make it a point to attend as many of those town hall meetings as I possibly can. More often than not, Da Mayor is there. In my 42 years of living in this city, I have never seen a mayor give more of his time and energy to this position as our current mayor. I salute him for that and tonight I had the opportunity to thank him for that, even asking him "Do you have any personal life at all?"

One final word before I end this long-winded monologue (although it will take you far less time to read this then D-Wayne spent ranting today on the evils of demon rum), I need to thank my soon-to-be doctor son for loaning me his laptop so I could compose this post. As I wrote in the post that follows this one below, my mid-20th century model gadget simply couldn't make it though the first part of this century before calling it quits. Until I can correct that situation (and because of other matters I won't bore you with, that may come much later than originally anticipated), these posts will come with greater-than-usual intervals between them. Thanks again for your patience. I will resume "jibberish as usual" as soon as possible.