A ROAD MAP FOR RENEWAL

The Dallas Morning News

Sunday, April 18, 2004

Page 15W

For most of the last century, Dallas City Hall was run like a business by the same people who ran Dallas biggest private businesses. Others werent particularly needed, or necessarily welcome. Now, the face of government, like the face of the city, has been transformed, leaving the question: Who will lead?

find someone with enough time and energy to run a major business and also give back to the city. These problems are hardly unique to Dallas. Yet in the best-performing peer cities, such as San Jose and Phoenix, the lines of communication between business and government are clear and open. In Dallas, they are filled with static. Asked to name the institution most influential today in city life, one Dallas business leader heaved a sigh and named the city government. I do so reluctantly, because I wish it wasnt true, this executive said. I wish the answer had been business people, again. Right now, thats not really the case. o o o ITS REALLY IMPORTANT TO CREate a system of government where voting matters, Dr. Hanson observed. Dallas doesnt have one. The May 2003 election featured a trifecta of electoral bounty campaigns for the mayor and council, for the school board, and a $555 million city bond proposal. Yet scarcely one in 10 registered Dallas voters turned out. Five incumbent council members ran unopposed; one was elected with barely 1,000 votes. Several candidates who lost City Council races in Arlington polled more support. With the exception of San Antonio, every peer city in the Booz Allen study had higher turnout in its most recent mayoral election. In the last 35 years, turnout in a Dallas mayoral election has cracked 26 percent just once the 1991 election that marked the citys first under 14-1. The numbers say either that people are not upset with what theyre getting, or else that they see no chance for real change so they arent bothering to vote, said Dan Weiser, the Dallas political an-

alyst and demographer. The 2003 Dallas Morning News Poll found support for both hypotheses. When asked about city services, residents were less satisfied than they were 10 years earlier. But they said they were more positive about the city as a whole and their neighborhood in particular. At the same time, they also expressed no consensus on who is most important in shaping the citys future, and by a large margin they believed they have little influence on what happens there. A more hopeful view of residents feelings about their city emerged in a group interview with five City Council members. Looking past the anemic turnout, they cited the ballot-box endorsements given to the citys 2003 bond package. That tells you something. For a city that is about to tip the wrong way, that wouldnt happen, Dr. Garcia said. o o o EXCEPT IN CITIES SUCH AS BOSton and Chicago, Americans typically dont organize around municipal politics. Schools, traffic, security and property taxes are more likely to be the issues that galvanize residents and draw neighborhoods together. But its hard for this to happen when neighborhoods are in constant flux. Booz Allen found that Dallas population is remarkably transient, with almost one in five residents moving to the suburbs between 1995 and 2000. In many cities, broadly focused community organizations help compensate for sprawl and neighborhood volatility. Producing a good active set of community organizations is as important as anything you can do on the economic front, Dr. Hanson said. Dallas would seem to have plenty of grass-roots organizations linked to schools, churches, neighborhoods

that could stitch together the citys fragmented constituencies. Compared with similar groups in other peer cities, though, they are much more narrowly focused, according to social scientist Patricia Evridge Hill, author of Dallas: the Making of a Modern City. Dallas neighborhood groups are very inward focused on specific needs, she said. In San Jose, by contrast, these groups are deeply involved in framing citywide issues such as growth management. Theyre not parochial in the way Dallas groups are. The best of these groups are involved with the community as well as one another, and for long periods of time, so that they develop the credibility and trust needed to produce civic capital, and ultimately to shape government. The tri-ethnic Dallas Alliance, which dissolved in the mid-1990s, had some of those attributes. Spinoff groups such as Dallas Together were more ad hoc and short-lived. Minorities often dismissed them as public relations stunts rather than serious attempts to resolve serious problems. Phoenix, a sprawling, multicentered city like Dallas, has tried to address both neighborhood stability and a sense of community by supporting construction of thousands of middle-class

homes about 4,000 last year alone within a few miles of downtown. While the architecture is generic Spanish Colonial hodgepodge innovative design is not a staple of boomtowns the sheer number of units allows the city to attract and keep middle-class families that are the foundation of urban stability. Phoenix also subdivides itself into 14 urban villages, each with some type of civic center usually a shopping mall or a library plus a village planning committee that reviews major zoning and land-use matters. The committees were created because people got tired of a [downtown] elite making all the decisions, said Ray Quay, a planner for the city. They provided broad public representation in a city that did not have much of an ethic about creating place and community. The committees cut across council districts so that they arent under the thumb of a single politician. They meet regularly with the citys planning staff. Although the committees roles are only advisory, their recommendations are taken seriously by City Hall and developers. o o o DALLAS MOST AMBITIOUS EFfort at public consciousness-raising

Whos watching City Hall?

The Dallas Morning News Poll asked Dallas residents how closely they follow the activities of city government.
Very closely Somewhat closely Not very closely Not at all

20%
SOURCE: 2003 Dallas Morning News Poll

50%

20%

9%

was the first Goals for Dallas program in the mid-1960s. It was the last hurrah for the Dallas oligarchs, initiated and orchestrated by Mayor Erik Jonsson and staffed by recruits from Texas Instruments and other leading corporations. It was a product of its time, built around dynamic leadership, ample funding, a sense of common purpose and a feeling of urgency and, in the beginning, a need for civic therapy. Erik felt the needed to do something to get Dallas out of its depression after the Kennedy assassination, recalled Bryghte Godbold, who was recruited from the Ford Foundation to run the program. And what he decided on was to plan our future as a city. Residents met in small groups to develop 100 goals on a broad range of topics: improved public transportation; better schools, including a research university; economic development; and environmental quality. Out of this process eventually came an expanded library and community college system, a retooled University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and a research center that became the University of Texas at Dallas. But the process didnt satisfy everyone politically, nor did it achieve some of its most critical goals. Black leaders felt sufficiently shortchanged that they created Goals for Black Dallas. And if the unfinished business from Goals for Dallas regional transit and environmental planning, for example sounds familiar, thats because it is. Dallas continues to revisit these issues over and again. The city must find a way to break this cycle, Booz Allen said, because the consequence of business-as-usual will be to see Dallas go the way of declining cities like Detroit.
E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com

LESSONS
This report sends a clear message the future is in no ones hands but

our own.

Absent a sustained, focused effort, the type of turnaround required is all but impossible.

foundation for future civic change.

A strong set of community organizations builds democracy from the ground up, establishing a

Is low voter turnout due to apathy or overall satisfaction? Either way, more public participation is better a system of government where voting matters.

SOURCES: Booz Allen Hamilton, Dallas Morning News research