And the redistricting winner is … Donna Halstead

Donna Halstead

You can now visit the City of Dallas’s Web site and take a gander at the various ideas for redistricting the city’s 14 council districts, including one from former Dallas Observer writer Sam Merten. Of all of them, I like commissioner member and former council member Donna Halstead’s the best. She has solved one of the worst representation problems in the city, of which I am familiar because it’s the area where I live — what I call the “Forgotten Triangle,” that area of Dallas north of LBJ Freeway and east of North Central Expressway. Right now it is situated in District 11, but it has far more in common with Lake Highlands (District 10) than it does with North Dallas. And Halstead, being a Lake Highlands resident, obviously knows this.

My son auditioned for and was accepted in the Arts Magnet High School, but if he had gone to the high school whose district covered where we lived it would have been Lake Highlands High School. He did attend Forest Meadow Junior High, located in District 10.

A couple of years ago, a Walt-Mart opened between Forest Lane and LBJ Freeway, just west of Abrams, less than a mile from my town home, but not in the same council district as I. Former District 10 council member Bill Blaydes did a superb job of notifying all his constituents about the progress on that site (it included closing and demolishing a couple of whore/crack houses). But even though it impacted my area far more than the overwhelming majority of the residents in District 10, we never received any notice of what was going on. We were offered no chance to give input into the project. Not that I was opposed to the construction of the Wal-Mart, far from it, but its location in the northern most reaches of District 10 had a direct affect on us.

Donna Halstead’s redistricting map is the only one I saw that corrects this glaring mistake of keeping us in District 11. As Bob Dylan so eloquently put it, “One should never be where one does not belong” and those of us north of LBJ and East of North Central are currently where we don’t belong.

Incidentally, this area of Dallas does not have anything located within its boundaries, featuring the seal of the City of Dallas — not a rec center, not even a park, not a library — nada. As I said earlier, we’re pretty much forgotten, at least when we’re in District 11.