Back Talk Far North Dallas

Council subcommittee considers a smoking ban in bars, billiard halls

A city council subcommittee is considering expanding the city's current smoking ban from restaurants and workplaces to bars, billiard halls and within 15 feet of entrances to publicly accessible villages, according to the DMN. A majority of the six councilmen on the subcommittee seem to be leaning in favor of the proposal, according to the News story and more comments on its blog.

I have to admit that when the city council first decided to restrict smoking in restaurants and other public places a few years ago, I had my doubts: It seemed like a draconian measure, and it seemed likely to drive business out of Dallas. Today, though, I haven't seen a single study indicating that significant business was lost to the more smoking-friendly suburbs, and the air in most places I go these days is cleaner and clearer.

City budget: So much for the sales tax

The sales tax projections in the city budget, which seemed wildly optimistic in August, apparently are. The city has collected less in sales tax than it budgeted for three months in a row (and a tip o’ the reporting hat to Dave Levinthal at Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper). Sales tax receipts account for about 21.5 percent of city spending.

Levinthal notes that September’s collections were off almost 9 percent; the city has projected a 1.75 percent increase for the fiscal year. He doesn’t detail which other months missed projections, and I haven’t been able to locate month-by-month numbers in the city budget. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there, though, and I will keep looking.

However, in trying to find trends, some numbers from the state comptroller’s office could be useful. They show that Dallas got 8.7 percent more in August 2008 than it got in August 2007, before the stock market collapsed. But after the market meltdown, the city took 1 percent less in October 2008 than it received in October 2007.

Technorati Tags: Dallas city budget,sales tax

Easing credit crunch puts the convention center hotel back on track

Good news for fans of the taxpayer-owned downtown convention center hotel, as well as for the pending DISD bond issue: The credit market, at least for public works projects, appears to be easing enough to allow AA-rated and above public entities to obtain financing. A DMN story indicates the city of Dallas intends to close on $253.3 million in water improvement project bonds this week; a few weeks ago, this and just about every other bond project in the country were frozen due to lack of capital or political will or lenders — take your pick. The $550 million convention center hotel, which Mayor Tom Leppert and many city councilmen have vowed to fund in January, requires issuance of municipal revenue bonds to generate the cash, so now that the market is coming back, lack of available funding shouldn't hold back Leppert or the council. I guess we'll see if the May referendum on the project causes the council members any heartburn when it comes time to approve the bonds in January.

Barack Obama says "no" to a saggy pants ordinance

President-elect Barack Obama may well have an impact on one of the least-pressing but most-discussed issues facing the Dallas city council: whether to pass an ordinance outlawing "saggy pants". The DMN city hall blog reports that during an interview with MTV News, Obama dissed the very idea of outlawing saggy pants, saying: "I think people passing a law against people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time," among other comments you can read by clicking here. Anyway, deputy mayor pro tem Dwaine Caraway, an Obama supporter, has been the city's leading proponent of the saggy pants ordinance.

Leppert says our votes count. Except for the convention center hotel?

Here's an interesting juxtaposition: Mayor Tom Leppert is circulating an email with the top headline saying "Convention Center Hotel Critical to Dallas' Future", while the second item is headlined "Vote! It's Your Voice!" (Click here to download tom_leppert_email.pdf and see the email.)

The irony: At least one Leppert spokespuppet on the council already has chortled out loud that even if Dallas residents vote in favor of a potential referendum scuttling the $550 million taxpayer-owned convention center hotel downtown, those votes won't stop the council from moving forward to build the hotel.

So whose voice is Leppert talking about?

Tom Leppert: 'Doesn't give a darn about the citizens of Dallas'

So, do you think Mayor Tom Leppert cares about the citizens of Dallas or not? Councilman Mitchell Rasansky tells the Observer Leppert doesn't care — "doesn’t give a darn about the citizens of Dallas". Rasansky goes on to mention that Leppert was on the board of directors of Washington Mutual even as that financial institution bit the dust, saying Leppert's comments about WaMu's financial health a few weeks prior to its bailout — “the feeling is that there's sufficient capital and good things ahead" — is indicative of Leppert's go-for-broke actions with the convention center hotel, regardless of a possible pending referendum on the project and a disintegration of the bond market. It's worth clicking on the post, written by Sam Merten, because it has a whole list of interesting information and story links. As for me, I tend to think that it's not that Leppert doesn't care about the rest of us. I think he just believes he knows better than everyone else what's good for us. Come to think of it, that was the prevailing attitude on Wall Street for a few years, too, and look what happened to those guys...

Victory after 10 years: Iconic but not helping downtown

Not long ago, the DMN published a series of stories titled "Partial Victory", which was a rather ingenious way of highlighting the big, new "Times Square for Dallas" surrounding the American Airlines Center downtown. The good news, according to the story: Ross Perot Jr. says that Victory is farther along, development-wise, than he thought it would be at this time. The bad news: Apparently, if you don't live there (and not many people do), you don't know what's happening at Victory and you aren't participating in terms of spending money.

As it stands now, about 10 years into what Hillwood describes as a 25-year process, there are about 13 restaurants, a dozen retailers, more than 750 residential units and quite a bit of office space, including WFAA-TV's Times Square-like station on a corner near the AAC. But the place has become more upscale, to the exclusion of everything else, than the developers apparently planned, so while it's easy to find a $1,500 hotel room and a $400 dress, you can't find an inexpensive lunch, a drugstore or a grocery store, according to the News.

Interestingly enough, that's the same complaint that the people living and working downtown — and I mean the original downtown — have, too. And it's interesting to remember that one of the sales pitches we were given when the developers floated the $230 million arena bond in 1998 was that Victory was an important step in downtown's revitalization. As we can see now, that hasn't been the case — the distance between Main Street and Victory is too far for the average person to make the walk, and whatever good is happening at Victory isn't trickling over to downtown.

"Renegade towing companies"

Friday update: I made a few calls yesterday, and no one wants to talk about this. Or, as one person put it, "Everyone’s acting like Sgt. Schultz." Which, for the younger members of the group, means they're saying, "I know nothing." I'll keep poking around, but since no one wants to talk about this, my guess is there is a good reason: The towing companies are very well connected.

Thursday post: Note to Mayor Park Cities and the rest of the city council: Lone Star Auto, which made headlines last week when it towed cars belonging to Texas-OU fans, has been doing this sort of thing for a long time. In fact, it has even been on TV before.

Lone Star’s “renegade-ness” is not news. City Hall has been trying -– and failing -– to make the company behave for almost two years. You can go here. Or here. Or even here. So, Mayor Leppert, if you’re going to make this one stick, you’ll have to do more than play to the cameras.

Because, you know what this Lone Star business is? A typical example of how the city can’t regulate businesses that it’s supposed to regulate.

Technorati Tags: towing companies,Lone Star Auto,Tom Leppert

Convention center hotel update: Check out the model we paid for

You have to hand it to the Go Hotel people — they're not going to let anything like a potential public smackdown stop them from fulfilling their promise to bring a taxpayer-owned convention center hotel to downtown Dallas. Sam Merten with the Observer points out that Thursday's unveiling of a model of the hotel shows that, public backing or not, they're going to start building a hotel.

Merten's story makes a couple of interesting points. One, the people at Matthews Southwest — the builder "we" have selected for this project — are being realistic about what's going on. Jack Matthews told Merten that by the time a May referendum on the project comes around, at most about $10 million will have been spent readying the site, working up plans and demolishing a parking structure already there (I used to park in that two-story structure when going to Mavs games at Reunion Arena). So for all of the bluster about "pushing forward" with the hotel, no matter what happens with the referendum, Matthews' comment shows this is a pretty empty statement. Leaving another $10 million on the table, assuming the referendum passes, is a drop in the bucket for this $550 million-plus deal.

Second, the pictures of the model itself, along with the computer renderings published in the Observer, are pretty anti-climactic. For a monstrous hotel that Mayor Tom Leppert bragged would and should be iconic, this one seems pretty straight-forward. No stunning visual architecture (like nearby City Hall, for example). No cutting-edge futuristic design. No throw-back to anything else downtown, either. It's just a big, tall glass-sheathed building. (If you really want to see something iconic, check out this link on Matthews' website; it's a picture of a 58-story project the company is building in Canada.)

I guess to a builder like Leppert, who was merely paid to build things in his past career rather than actually designing them, this thing is iconic. I just don't see it, though. For $550 million, I expected something blow-away cool, and this just isn't it. Maybe we need to bring Calatrava in on this deal, too...

City budget watch: Texas, Chicago, New York City make cuts

I’ll post this periodically, which will look at how the city budget –- with its projected seven percent gain in property tax collections and its 1.75 percent increase in sales tax cash –- is doing in real time.

Today, how other governments are dealing with their budgets in the face of the continuing downturn in the economy.

• Gov. Perry, hardly a Chicken Little, has asked state agencies to cut discretionary spending and to limit travel. News-released the governor: “As good stewards of the resources entrusted to us by Texas taxpayers, we are obligated to not only watch the outside forces affecting our economy, but deal with them proactively.” The state, incidentally, projected a $2 billion surplus in May.

• Chicago mayor Richard Daley, facing one of the worst budget crises in a generation, is laying off more than 900 employees and not filling some 1,300 vacancies.

• New York City axed 2.5 percent from all departments last month, and told city agencies to make do with 5 percent less next year.

Technorati Tags: Dallas city budget,property tax values,sales tax