My Life and Times

December 20, 2004
The Heady Days of J. R. and Landry Are History in Humbled DallasBy RALPH BLUMENTHAL
ALLAS, Dec. 15 - The losing Cowboys are fixing to defect again, the police chief and city manager were shown the door, a 350-pound gorilla made his own grand exit, and the hometown daily, former employer of the ex-reporter now ensconced in City Hall, is pinning Pulitzer Prize hopes on a pitiless exposé of everything gone wrong.
It has been that kind of year for Big D, Texas's second biggest - oops, third biggest - city; San Antonio gained a 6,000-person edge to slip in with just over 1.2 million, behind Dallas's longtime archrival, Houston.
"You know, I didn't like it," said Mayor Laura Miller, a once-fearsome investigative reporter who, as ex-colleagues joke, went over to the dark side. "I liked saying we're the eighth largest city in the nation. I don't like saying ninth."
The news hasn't been all bad, as Ms. Miller, 46, is quick to point out, reciting highlights of a $1.2 billion project - second biggest in the city's history (after the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport) and one she originally opposed - to create a new roadway, designer bridges and urban recreation area 10 times the size of Central Park along a derelict Trinity River that now regularly floods.
And she said, "I resent it when The Dallas Morning News says I fumbled the ball" just because the Cowboys, looking for favorable terms, are negotiating for a new football stadium in Arlington, having abandoned Dallas's historic Cotton Bowl in 1971 for fancier quarters in Irving. "I didn't want to play ball," she said.
But the tone may have been set in March when Jabari, a 13-year-old western lowland gorilla, apparently managed a flying leap over a 14-foot-wall at the Dallas Zoo and ran amok, mauling a toddler and his mother and a third visitor before being shot dead by the police.
The next month, The Morning News published a special 20-page section, "Dallas at the Tipping Point," a collaboration between a reporting team and consultants from Booz Allen Hamilton, examining every major parameter of city life and concluding: "Dallas calls itself 'the city that works.' Dallas is wrong." Dallas, it found, was a city in crisis, "and City Hall seems not to know."
Mayor Miller disputed the last part - "We're not in denial" - and said she didn't care for the lurid cover artwork depicting a storm over the city. But in all, she said, "It wasn't wrong."
Meanwhile, at Founders Plaza, a few steps from the haunting site of the Kennedy assassination, which remains Dallas's top tourist attraction, the county is considering moving the crude cedar cabin that may or may not have belonged to the city's first settler, John Neely Bryan, but that long seemed a remnant of Dallas's rugged pioneer past.
The city was humbled in other ways as well, watching sourly as conventioneers thronged Houston's budding entertainment district while Dallas struggled to begin a master plan study and select a flagship hotel for its own convention hopes, which it did at its final City Council meeting of the year on Wednesday, giving a provisional go-ahead to a developer for a 1,000-room Marriott. (In fairness, the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau may have been distracted, some of its executives having been found earlier wooing clients at topless bars.)
Based largely on a wave of property crimes, Dallas once again leads the F.B.I.'s list of high-crime big cities this year. Efforts to cope with a growing homeless population by making it illegal to take a shopping cart off the property of the store it belongs to did not solve the problem, but instead produced bizarre fleets of cannibalized baby strollers and shopping carts. The dramatically slanted City Hall that attracted architectural plaudits when it was completed in 1978 has become a magnet for derelicts.
Dallas officials also spent part of the year trying to figure out how a handful of police narcotics informants were able to plant some 330 kilograms of gypsum and other harmless substances on 30 innocents, mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants, to frame them on drug charges in 2001.
The scandal wounded Police Chief Terrell Bolton, a 24-year department veteran and an African-American. He was eventually fired in August, but not fast enough for an angry Mayor Miller. She and the City Council forced the retirement of the city manager, Ted Benavides, leaving the mayor and 14 other Council members a clearer field to attack each other, with racial tensions bubbling just below the surface. Mr. Bolton is now suing the city.
If it seems at times like Southfork, home of the feuding Ewing clan that enlivened the long-running television serial "Dallas," the action may only be getting started. Amid widespread dissatisfaction over pervasive problems from crime to education to development, a petition drive is aimed at putting a revolutionary change in city government to the voters in May.
The measure would create Dallas's first "strong mayor" government, replacing a system often described as weak-weak-weak - a weak mayor, weak city manager and weak City Council, imposed by a federal judge in 1990 as a remedy for the city's historic disregard of democratic niceties. Currently, the mayor is the only citywide elected official, presiding over a Council of 14 other members who are elected from neighborhood districts, some largely black, others predominately Hispanic and white.
The Council hires the city manager, who carries out policy - and need only please a majority of eight, not necessarily including the mayor. Meanwhile, the mayor, the only one elected to represent the whole city, is all but powerless to govern without a consensus, a challenge in the city's historically fractious racial and political climate.
Dallas's last mayor, Ron Kirk, the first African-American to hold the office, left it in 2002 to run what became a losing campaign for the United States Senate and is now a candidate to head the Democratic National Committee. As mayor, he was known for building coalitions and ending what he called City Hall's "blame game."
But the same success has often eluded Ms. Miller, who is white and filled Mr. Kirk's seat first in a special election and then won a four-year term of her own until 2007. She remains a polarizing figure saddled with the enemies she made as an investigative reporter, particularly as a columnist for The Dallas Observer, a freewheeling alternative weekly.
"One thing I did I can't change is I wrote about lots of people," she said, citing several black community figures she accused of wrongdoing. "There were no sacred cows," she said. One of them is now a regular visitor at Council meetings, denouncing her.
Ms. Miller credits her husband, Steve Wolens, who spent 24 years as a Democratic representative in the Texas House before retiring last December, with helping her understand the difference between journalism and politics.
"When you're a journalist, you're pure, you see things in black and white, you don't understand gray any more," Ms. Miller said. But as a politician, she said, she has learned to compromise and temper her famously sharp tongue, at least sometimes. As one visitor who once overheard her venting in a City Hall elevator said, "I've never heard anyone who looks like that talk like that."
Yet with all of that, Dallas, a city of middle-aged woes that still likes to think of itself as young, seems adrift. One remedy sparking debate is to give the mayor, or her successors, some real power.
The latest flashpoint is the petition drive, which collected 30,332 signatures and needed only 20,000 - to force the "strong mayor" measure onto the city ballot in May. The Council spent much of Wednesday's meeting trying to figure out ways of challenging the signatures, which need to be certified by the city secretary by Dec. 23.
"I think people want a discussion," said Mary Suhm, the acting city manager and a longtime municipal employee. "City services need to be revamped."
Darwin Payne, a historian, author and professor emeritus of journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said the time was ripe for change. "People in Dallas are grasping for anything that would work," he said.
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