What exactly is wrong with Dallas City Hall?
No, not the building, though there is plenty to be said about that.
We mean the government itself.
It just isn’t working anymore, and the problems are spilling over everywhere, from fleeing corporations to broken budgets to a sense that when the city does win, it’s in spite of its government, not because of it.
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The time is ripe for a discussion about change, and three former mayors with a reputation for getting things done for Dallas are right to step forward with a plan to reform the way our government is structured.
Call it strong(ish) mayor, because the idea put forward by Mike Rawlings, Tom Leppert and Ron Kirk stops short of creating a true chief executive in the mayor’s seat. But the plan does transfer enough additional power to the only person elected citywide that it would shake up the way City Hall functions.
Former Dallas Mayors Mike Rawlings, Tom Leppert and Ron Kirk are proposing a May charter amendment referendum to increase the power of the next elected mayor. Here are the key additional powers they propose.
The mayor has the power to appoint the city manager and city attorney subject to council approval.
The mayor has the power to remove the city manager or city attorney, a decision that the council could overturn within 14 days with a supermajority vote.
The mayor has responsibility, with the city manager, for drafting the city budget and bond recommendations.
The council can approve the budget with amendments. If the budget is not approved by Sept. 30, the mayor’s budget is automatically approved.
The mayor has line-item veto power over the city budget, subject to being overturned by a supermajority of the council.
The plan requires an outside audit of city finances every two years.
It’s too early for us to recommend this plan, but we are grateful the conversation is going. Voters who care about this city should hear out three men who have given a lot of time to pushing Dallas forward. The mayors are looking to get this on the ballot for a vote in May, so there will be plenty of time for debate.
But it seems worthwhile now to consider how we got to the bad place we find ourselves in.
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Because if every voter in Dallas doesn’t agree this is the right plan, they can at least agree things can’t remain as they are. Dallas will struggle to win with the government we have today.
We have a City Hall that casts no clear vision for the future. Hard decisions about everything from the budget to addressing homelessness are all but impossible to make. Small groups of vocal advocates often get their way over the best interests of the majority of residents. And basic services are getting more expensive even as they seem to decline in quality.
In his signature blunt style, Rawlings put it this way: “This is all about the citizens,” he said. “They don’t believe anybody’s accountable in this city. Whose throat do I choke when I’m mad? They can’t figure it out.”
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson listens during a City Council meeting Jan. 14 at Dallas City Hall.
Juan Figueroa/Dallas Morning News
A weak weak mayor
Yes, Dallas was designed as a weak-mayor system, but it’s hard to believe civic leader George Bannerman Dealey, who brought the system here in the 1920s, could have imagined a mayor as weak as Eric Johnson.
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Dealey’s conception of how Dallas government should work was like a council of wise elders who appointed a competent executive to ensure that the elders’ vision for the city was implemented, the trash got picked up, the crooks got arrested and people felt like they could invest their lives and capital here.
Historian Royce Hanson put it this way in Civic Culture And Urban Change: Governing Dallas: “The business of the city should be conducted as a business. Its board, the city council, should be composed of men of widely recognized business judgment and broad experience.”
This form of government, “promised a clean and orderly city within which business could thrive.”
Dealey, the founding publisher of The Dallas Morning News, had good reason to push for a weak-mayor/strong-manager system. First among them was ridding City Hall of the Klan members who ran it. He also recognized that a weak-mayor system was (and remains) far more resistant to the ward politics corruption that polluted (and still pollutes) cities of the Northeast and Midwest.
But the government Dealey implemented had to change because, first and foremost, it excluded minorities. More broadly, it reduced democracy to an almost feudal system. What the lords of Dallas decided, they decided often behind closed doors, and that was the way things were.
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For a long time, politics, at least in the public sense, sort of passed Dallas City Hall by. Things… just happened. This was in lockstep with the will of business leaders of the Dallas Citizens Council, a group chartered in 1937 that the powerful Mayor R.L Thornton dubbed the “Yes and No Council,” according to the historian Patricia Evridge Hill.
The late, great News columnist Bud Shrake put it this way: “Oligarchy likes to keep things quiet, smooth, gray, lifeless.” There weren’t too many political struggles because there really wasn’t politics.
But let it be said that what they lacked in inclusiveness, they made up for in vision. From DFW International Airport to the lakes that supply our water, they put in place much of the infrastructure we now rely on for growth. That’s to say nothing of Fair Park and the State Fair of Texas.
Mayors were at the center of those visions and none more than J. Erik Jonsson, whose Goals for Dallas defined where the city would go after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
And that has always been the most important job of the mayor, the ability to cast a vision and get collaboration around it. It’s not written down anywhere in the charter, but it’s the central tradition of how Dallas is supposed to work.
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Which brings us squarely to our current problem. The unwritten rules of Dallas’ government don’t have a way to deal with a mayor like Eric Johnson, who exerts almost no influence at City Hall and who casts almost no vision for the city.
Johnson lacks the essential quality that Dallas City Hall depends upon: a mayor who has a vision of where things should go and who can do the work of wrangling seven council members to follow him. The magic number at Dallas City Hall is eight.
Johnson’s aside to the city manager upon the passage of the most recent budget is emblematic of his leadership.
“I think you did about as good as you were going to do with this cast of characters,” he said, referring to the council.
It’s not the city manager’s job to align the council around a budget. That’s the mayor’s job. Johnson is unable to do that, so he’s left to name calling and shoulder shrugging.
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The ability to pull together a council coalition is the single quality that gives the mayor some authority at City Hall. It keeps the city manager and the bureaucracy in line and ensures the mayor can push forward major goals and initiatives.
Rawlings, who spent eight years as mayor, was a tireless lobbyist and whip of his council colleagues. If he wanted to get something done, he started making calls, finding people in their offices or calling them into his. He understood the power of persuasion. He understood what he could trade to get what he needed.
It’s impossible to overstate how Johnson’s inability to practice the soft powers of being Dallas mayor has changed the way City Hall functions. If he were an effective mayor, we wouldn’t be having this debate about changing the city charter.
But during his tenure, Dallas has been led from the outside, not within.
In November 2024, an activist businessman, Monty Bennett, led an exhausted public to pass two propositions, one aimed at forcing Dallas to hire more cops and pay them more. The propositions made the city more vulnerable to being sued and tied the council’s hands on the budget. But they did serve as a wake-up call that Dallas residents are fed up with a sense of disorder and social breakdown.
The other major public initiative that marked a similar course shift was the Safe in the City effort that downtown business leaders launched with City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert. That plan finally forced the clearance of homeless encampments in downtown, but it came too late to address the frustrations of AT&T’s leadership with a dysfunctional city government.
As Leppert said, “AT&T came to the city years ago and said, ‘You have a problem. You have an issue.’ Nothing happened. Nobody was accountable. Nobody was responsible for saying to AT&T, ‘I will make a change, and we will make sure that change is made for you.’”
Dallas City Council members Zarin Gracey (from left), Paul Ridley, Cara Mendelsohn, Chad West and Jaime Resendez, along with City Secretary Bilierae Johnson, listen during a council meeting April 22 at Dallas City Hall.
Elías Valverde II/The Dallas Morning News
The fiefdoms
Dealey’s vision for Dallas’ government had to be broken because it failed to provide fair representation to a huge part of the city and especially minorities.
The long legal struggle for that representation led to the 14-1 system we have today, with the mayor as the only at-large elected official.
The rest of the council has a slice of the city, and their power over that slice is understood by every developer, neighborhood activist and zoning consultant in Dallas.
Historically, the fiefdom problem has been more serious than the weak-mayor problem, largely because we’ve had mayors with the charisma to do the job.
But absent a mayor who can coalesce the council around a vision, this structural problem of Dallas’ government — its tendency toward fiefdoms — metastasizes.
What Rawlings said about people not knowing which throat to choke at City Hall is not entirely true. People know exactly who is responsible for zoning decisions and increasing density in particular. And that is whoever the council member is in that district.
We are no longer a city of council members and a mayor. We are a city of 14 little mayors and a guy who runs a meeting.
“The mayor is just sort of handicapped in our system when you walk in the door, and every day the council reminds you there’s 14 of us and one of you,” Kirk said.
But there’s a flip side to that, and it’s getting worse. Individual council members are now commonly subjected to brutal, personal and even threatening social media campaigns. That’s because, to the public, the clearest line of authority at City Hall is a single council member’s unofficial power over what gets built and what doesn’t in his or her district.
The current debate over building a high-rise at Preston Road and Royal Lane is the key example. A recall effort is now raging around council member Gay Donnell Willis because residents who oppose the plan know she is the decision-maker on what happens in the district.
That is a system primed for stagnation and division. But it’s so completely baked into the 14-1 form of government that it’s hard to see how it will change without changing the single-member structure.
A saner form of government would reduce the ability of a single council member to have such extraordinary power over development. In theory, that’s how 14-1 should work — all council members should take each zoning case on its merits as a benefit or problem for the whole city.
In practice, it doesn’t work that way, and it’s been exacerbated with this council, where the sense of fiefdom is as ingrained as we’ve ever seen it.
Rawlings, Leppert and Kirk don’t want to touch the single-member district question in their proposed reforms. They didn’t say exactly why, but they all understand how deeply tied that system is to the long and hard work of addressing of racial discrimination.
“Most of the people we’ve talked to have rejected trying to open that Pandora’s box,” Kirk said.
Social media or democracy?
No system of government is perfect. Dallas’ has worked for a long time to stem the sort of endemic corruption that has defined cities like Chicago. And, for generations, it also worked as a way to keep government focused on attracting business, keeping costs low and delivering quality services.
That’s no longer the case, so it’s time to consider a change.
But it’s worth asking a question not just about government but about the times themselves. At every level of government, we have seen a deepening of extremism and an increase in governmental paralysis.
There isn’t a single root cause to point to, but it’s worth thinking about the way our media affects our governance now.
When it comes to local government, our experience lately is that most people vacillate between two states. They are almost totally indifferent to it and fewer and fewer can even name the mayor of their own city. Or they are so passionate about a single issue that they almost define their lives around it.
It’s very common for us to get messages now from people who believe a zoning case is a moral question.
People have always been passionate around such questions. But the zeal and anger today have taken on a sinister dimension that we haven’t seen in our collective years covering politics.
A big part of it is driven by social media. A local activist who has made a personal brand of opposing growth and redevelopment makes a sport of demonizing and belittling council members on social media. He makes cruel and taunting caricatures of them that serve as the foundation for the online mob to pile on.
The ability of social media to help people organize is to the good. But its capability of rapidly spreading dehumanizing content about people with whom we disagree has corroded our democracy. Council members are now subject not only to nasty AI cartoons, they are deluged with anonymous insults and threats.
It’s hard to see how any of this ends well for a system where you need people to give up a lot of their lives to serve their city.
The debate to come
We fully expect to see lots of nastiness around the charter reform proposal put forward by the three mayors.
Hopefully, through the muck, Dallas can have a serious debate about what changes we need to make to have a city that works.
There is too much opportunity here, and too many good things that are already happening, to accept the low-functioning government we are now saddled with.