J. Erik Jonsson, whose Goals for Dallas <\/a>defined where the city would go after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.<\/p>\nAnd that has always been the most important job of the mayor, the ability to cast a vision and get collaboration around it. It\u2019s not written down anywhere in the charter, but it\u2019s the central tradition of how Dallas is supposed to work.<\/p>\n
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Which brings us squarely to our current problem. The unwritten rules of Dallas\u2019 government don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Johnson\u2019s aside to the city manager upon the passage of the most recent budget is emblematic of his leadership.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think you did about as good as you were going to do with this cast of characters,\u201d he said, referring to the council.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the city manager\u2019s job to align the council around a budget. That\u2019s the mayor\u2019s job. Johnson is unable to do that, so he\u2019s left to name calling and shoulder shrugging.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s impossible to overstate how Johnson\u2019s 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\u2019t be having this debate about changing the city charter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But during his tenure, Dallas has been led from the outside, not within.<\/p>\n
In November 2024, an activist businessman, Monty Bennett, led an exhausted public to pass two\u00a0propositions, 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s leadership with a dysfunctional city government.<\/p>\n
As Leppert said, \u201cAT&T came to the city years ago and said, \u2018You have a problem. You have an issue.\u2019 Nothing happened. Nobody was accountable. Nobody was responsible for saying to AT&T, \u2018I will make a change, and we will make sure that change is made for you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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Dallas City Council members Zarin Gracey (from left), Paul Ridley, Cara Mendelsohn, Chad West and Jaime Resendez, along with\u00a0City Secretary Bilierae Johnson, listen during a council meeting April 22 at Dallas City Hall.<\/p>\n
El\u00edas Valverde II\/The Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n
The fiefdoms<\/p>\n
Dealey\u2019s vision for Dallas\u2019 government had to be broken because it failed to provide fair representation to a huge part of the city and especially minorities.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Historically, the fiefdom problem has been more serious than the weak-mayor problem, largely because we\u2019ve had mayors with the charisma to do the job.<\/p>\n
But absent a mayor who can coalesce the council around a vision, this structural problem of Dallas\u2019 government \u2014 its tendency toward fiefdoms \u2014 metastasizes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mayor is just sort of handicapped in our system when you walk in the door, and every day the council reminds you there\u2019s 14 of us and one of you,\u201d Kirk said.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s a flip side to that, and it\u2019s getting worse. Individual council members are now commonly subjected to brutal, personal and even threatening social media campaigns. That\u2019s because, to the public, the clearest line of authority at City Hall is a single council member\u2019s unofficial power over what gets built and what doesn\u2019t in his or her district.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That is a system primed for stagnation and division. But it\u2019s so completely baked into the 14-1 form of government that it\u2019s hard to see how it will change without changing the single-member structure.<\/p>\n
A saner form of government would reduce the ability of a single council member to have such extraordinary power over development. In theory, that\u2019s how 14-1 should work \u2014 all council members should take each zoning case on its merits as a benefit or problem for the whole city.<\/p>\n
In practice, it doesn\u2019t work that way, and it\u2019s been exacerbated with this council, where the sense of fiefdom is as ingrained as we\u2019ve ever seen it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rawlings, Leppert and Kirk don\u2019t want to touch the single-member district question in their proposed reforms. They didn\u2019t say exactly why, but they all understand how deeply tied that system is to the long and hard work of addressing of racial discrimination.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of the people we\u2019ve talked to have rejected trying to open that Pandora\u2019s box,\u201d Kirk said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nSocial media or democracy?\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
No system of government is perfect. Dallas\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s no longer the case, so it\u2019s time to consider a change.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
There isn\u2019t a single root cause to point to, but it\u2019s worth thinking about the way our media affects our governance now.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s very common for us to get messages now from people who believe a zoning case is a moral question.\u00a0<\/p>\n
People have always been passionate around such questions. But the zeal and anger today have taken on a sinister dimension that we haven\u2019t seen in our collective years covering politics.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The debate to come<\/p>\n
We fully expect to see lots of nastiness around the charter reform proposal put forward by the three mayors.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, through the muck, Dallas can have a serious debate about what changes we need to make to have a city that works.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What exactly is wrong with Dallas City Hall? No, not the building, though there is plenty to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-449259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}