Angela Hunt has a straightforward post on her blog about Ross Avenue and her thoughts about renaming it. In a word, she is saying "no" to the proposed name change. She also does a good job of dissecting the failure of leadership downtown on the whole street-renaming process. (She didn’t blame Mayor Tom Leppert directly for this mess, even though I do.) I’m not going to try and summarize what she said, because she spoke clearly and her thoughts stand on their own. No matter what you believe should happen on the Cesar Chavez issue, it’s worth your time to read her comments.

The city plan commission voted 7-6 Thursday to deny an application to change the name of Ross Avenue to Cesar Chavez; the plan commission’s "no" vote means that if the measure goes before the city council, it will take 11 votes to overturn the plan commission’s decision and rename Ross. According to the DMN story, Oct. 22 looms as decision day — at least at this point — potentially for both Ross and Industrial at city council. That’s when the full council could consider a request to rename Industrial as Riverfront and/or consider renaming Industrial for Chavez.

There are three great stories in this week’s Dallas Observer, if you’re interested in Josh Howard, DISD’s budget problems and the taxpayer-owned convention center hotel.

Jim Schutze weighs in on DISD Supt. Michael Hinojosa and his culpability, or lack thereof, in the budget mess. I was standing next to Schutze for about an hour of last week’s board meeting (we were jammed together in four-by-five-foot area behind the chairs, pressed against the wall by all of the TV station camermen and reporters gathered for the meeting), and his account of the portions of the meeting he cited is correct. I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion, but he persuasively argues that Hinojosa is more responsible for the mess than he seems willing to admit.

On the next page, under the creative headline "Sympathy for the Devil", (for some reason, I can’t find the direct link but here’s the general one) Richie Whitt writes about how Mark Cuban ingeniously turned Josh Howard into a victim by revealing racist, inflammatory and generally ignorant emails Cuban received from people upset about Howard’s dissing of the National Anthem. It’s a great read on a lot of levels: Cuban as sports team owner, Howard as insolent dummy, and people armed with email capabilities as the ultimate idiots.

And one page later is Sam Merten’s recap of the latest happenings with the finally-becoming-controversial taxpayer-owned downtown convention center hotel. I’m becoming more and more of a Merten fan as he continues writing for the Observer, because he does a good job of weaving lots of facts and figures into his stories, which still ultimately have a persuasive objective. It’s unfortunate that the hotel deal has devolved into an all-or-nothing watershed — the convention center could use an adjacent hotel, and that part of downtown could use a shot in the arm. But the referendum language, if approved, precludes the city from doing virtually anything to help build it, and given the choice between spending $550 million and $0, I’m willing to error on the side of caution this time, even though I believe there was a middle ground that would have been better for the city’s longterm vision if the project had been appropriately aired out in public.

Anyway, these are good stories worth reading, even if you ultimately disagree with the conclusions. After all, say you’re Mayor Tom Leppert, and you already know what you’re going to do downtown anyway: Wouldn’t you still want to know what the people who disagree with you think?

Then again, maybe that’s not the kind of guy Leppert is.

No decision Thursday on what to do about DISD’s budget shortfall, but that’s not a bad thing. As we talked about last week, the school board members appear to be more engaged — and why wouldn’t they, having been partially responsible for what has happened — and the administration appears to be answering the board’s questions, even if it takes considerably more prodding than seems necessary. It’s a big problem, politics and kids are involved, the media is watching, and people are laughing and expecting the worst, so taking a little more time to consider the alternatives appears to be a prudent move.

Much of the discussion at today’s meetings, with updates courtesy of the Observer and the DMN, centered on whether school board members are entitled to see a list of "to-be-laid-off" people before (several board members’ position) or after (the administration’s position) those to be terminated find out for themselves. It’s an interesting employment question — how many people should find out someone is being laid off before the victim himself/herself finds out? If it was me, I’d prefer to find out before everyone else, but this is public money, so I can see the other side of the coin, too. Ultimately, the school board is the boss here, and if the board’s choice is to see the names first, so be it.
Also lots of wrestling Thursday about whether every stone has been turned over looking for savings prior to cutting teachers. The administration seemed to think it had exhausted its options; a majority of board members seemed to believe otherwise. I thought it was interesting, though, that cutting additional per-student funding for DISD learning centers appeared to be a non-starter, primarily because board members Ron Price and Carla Ranger believe that cut would be squarely aimed at black students. That’s purportedly $18 million or so in additional expenditures, if learning center schools were funded the same way as other schools; as far as I know, no one is talking about closing the learning centers, just equalizing the expenditures. Looking at the situation another way, why should any school receive more economic resources than any other school? Given that the district is desegregated now, channeling extra funds to any specific school(s) seems discriminatory by itself.

So in the end, the board voted 6-3 to delay a vote until at least next week’s meeting. And prior to any vote, it appears the list of people to be terminated will be reviewed by the board. Again, these steps seem prudent, given that the board members are unpaid volunteers, they haven’t had much time (just a couple of weeks) to digest the problem, and it’s their right to fully consider the options prior to voting.

All of this — in terms of the process of evaluating this issue, not the budget screw-up itself — seems like something to be proud of rather than something to ridicule, as so many people seem to be doing. How we got into this situation needs to be resolved, certainly, but if the board members take a few additional days to make sure that a minimum number of teachers are terminated, aren’t they just doing what any of us would do if we faced a similar decision? And once they’ve put the cuts behind them, it looks like they’ll be eager to make sure DISD doesn’t wind up in this situation again any time soon. And as Martha Stewart would say, that’s a good thng.

For those of you who can’t get enough DISD coverage, here’s some additional information from yesterday’s "state of the district" luncheon that featured school board president Jack Lowe and Supt. Michael Hinojosa. You can read the DMN version of what happened by clicking here and you can also read on and see what neighborhood resident Eric Horstman, who attended the luncheon, had to say about the event.

Here’s Eric’s version, excerpted from an email making the rounds among neighborhood residents:

To begin, he (Michael Hinojosa) said the board and administration took full responsibility and that they "own" this mistake, it happened on their watch. They have made it a top priority and are working overtime on a solution and to put measures in place so that it does not happen again. They listed the specific causes for what happened:

1. The average teacher salary that was plugged into all the budget formulas was $3,900 too low.  This may not seem like much, but multiplied by 11,000 positions, it is $42,900,000.
2. The formulas used historically for a long time to set campus ratios of campus administrative positions to enrollment #s were not followed. This has resulted in an AVERAGE excess of 1.5 positions per campus, multiplied by the 225 DISD campuses and that is approx. 338 positions that should not be in place.

Those were the "what", next they spoke about the "how" it happened:
1. The district was heavily involved in the 2007 audit for the better half of the year. When that audit was concluded, resources were focused on the 2008 budget, and the errors were discovered.
2. There were three separate, independent systems for tracking staffing, budget, and hires. They did not communicate with each other.
3. There were people of incompetence responsible for the tracking of this information and they no longer work for DISD.

Dr. Hinojosa then spoke specifically to what will happen:
1. Approx. 100 jobs will be cut in central administration
2. Campuses will be re-aligned with the historical formulas of staff to ACTUAL, not budget or projected enrollment ratios.
3. The 600 strategic hires that were made as a part of the Dallas Achieves program (and which have contributed to significant academic gains) will NOT be let go.
4. Performance pay program will remain in place. Those dollars come from grants, other sources, not operating budget.
5. 22:1 elementary ratios with only one section per grade level allowed to exceed that will remain in place, as will art, music, P.E., and all Federally required programs.
6. The fund balance may have to be dipped into in order to make up deficits. This will be repaid and built back up over 3 years.
7. Tracking systems will be consolidated to provide single source of data.
8. Options are being considered.

These were the points as presented "straight from the source". For those of you that know about school funding, you know it is very complicated and there are many restrictions, laws, regulations, etc. that govern it. For instance, you can’t raise taxes to cover this. You can’t use bond funds to cover this. Speaking of bond funds, the $1.35B bond that was passed in May has nothing to do with this, that program has not started yet. The previous bond program projects were ALL completed on time and on budget, and have nothing to do with this.

City staff recently sent the council a briefing document that says less than 60 percent of Dallas sidewalks are in satisfactory condition, according to Dave Levinthal with the DMN. More bad news: The 2006 bond program, which includes a bunch of money for sidewalk improvements, will only impact 60 linear miles of sidewalks, even though 1,831 linear miles of city sidewalks are considered "unsatisfactory", according to the briefing. (Click here to download TEC_SidewalkImprProgr_092208.pdf and read the briefing for yourself.) The city’s solution, other than to just keep plugging away, is to push a new program that guarantees a new sidewalk to everyone who wants one — the only catch is that you have to pay for all, or at least half, of the repairs yourself. (Click here to download PWT_sidewalk_replacement_program.pdf and read about that program.) We talked about this a few weeks ago, and a reader commented that paying for your own sidewalk makes sense if the sidewalk is on your property — it’s already your responsibility anyway. Unfortunately, given the various economic issues tugging on our pocketbooks these days, how many people are going to put paying for a new sidewalk at the top of their holiday wish list?

What is the deal down at city hall with some councilmen and their penchant for spending taxpayer money to compete with private businesses? We all know about the big taxpayer-owned convention center hotel, which eventually could cost us $500 million or more.

Now, Dwaine Caraway, Ron Natinsky and Mayor Tom Leppert are at it again: This time, the Morning News reports they’re ready to spend $30,000 to $70,000 on a "comprehensive, independent study" to determine how much it would cost to turn the Dallas Convention Center Arena into a junior Nokia Theater or American Airlines Center.

We wrote about this a few months ago, when Caraway rightly was exploring ways to keep Reunion Arena from falling under the axe; ultimately, the council determined the city was better off spending a few million to tear Reunion down rather than let it sit for a few years to see if anyone might want to buy the facility as-is. That decision was fair enough — I didn’t necessarily agree, but it was a coin-flip either way, and it was a case of our elected city officials trying to do their best to limit city expenses and liabilities.
But as described in the DMN, "in exchange for Mr. Caraway’s support and at his behest, the City Council agreed to order Reunion Arena’s closure contingent on exploring new uses for the Dallas Convention Center Arena." Again, fair enough: The word "explore" does not necessarily mean throwing city money at what should be a private enterprise.

So now, the News reports that we’re just another council vote away from spending up to $70,000 to help decide whether the city should re-open the convention center arena (no estimates on the cost from the council guys, but the DMN uses the words "millions of dollars" in its story).

Can the city really beat private enterprise when it comes to booking entertainment? I don’t know much about that business, but the answer is still clear: No way.

If the council wants to do something with the convention center arena, put together an RFP asking for private companies to invest their own money in paying for studies about what it would cost to rehab and restore the arena, and then look at their work for free before deciding what to do. And if we do anything with the arena, let’s make sure that we "lease" the facility to someone with their own money in the deal rather than throw more taxpayer cash away.

In fact, where are we getting the money for this little venture, anyway? Surely there are other priorities in Dallas — potholes and street repairs, for example — that we could spend that cash?

I spent my Friday afternoon at DISD’s special board meeting to discuss the $64 million (or more) budgeting shortfall. There are plenty of places to obtain the short-hand version of what happened at the meeting (the place was crawling with TV people; outside the admin building on Ross looked like the White House lawn with the cameras and talking heads spread all over the grounds), but if you want an accurate blow-by-blow of the meeting with minimal accompanying editorial commentary, check out Allen Gwinn’s blog post here. Allen presents a running summary of the information as it happened, and other than a few comments along the way, what he reports is essentially accurate from my perspective at the meeting. He also has a link on his site to a post called "Time for Hinojosa to go?"  Sometimes, Gwinn seems a little over-the-top with his posts, but this one is a thoughtful commentary discussing the DISD superintendent’s job qualifications and accomplishments and whether Hinojosa’s empathy as a parent/educator outweigh some of the problems that have occurred on his watch.
Be forewarned, though: You’re probably looking at about 30 minutes of reading to take in everything Gwinn’s presenting.

Here’s a more interpretive and somewhat shorter version, based on what I saw today.

First, the board acted reasonably and professionally, and that’s a pleasant surprise. There are still those of us who remember the televised "armed conflict" of board meetings during the New Black Panther phase of DISD. The current board members didn’t point fingers, didn’t do too much grandstanding and seemed motivated to move forward and find the least painful solutions rather than grind around and rehash the mistakes while posturing for the cameras. The board members were clear about wanting to solve the problems so they don’t happen again, but the task at hand is addressing the shortfall, and that’s what they focused on.

In one particularly shrewd but controversial move, the board voted to keep the meeting in a small boardroom (capacity of about 60) rather than its auditorium-sized boardroom — I’m sure the rationale was to keep the crowd size manageable and keep the crowd quiet. It may not have been the most democratic way to proceed, but it definitely kept the TV people from being able to show pictures of people yelling at the board and calling them incompetent, and that’s exactly what would have happened. There was enough murmuring in the small room to get a sense for the circus that was avoided by the board’s decision to take the crowd out of the meeting. Some of you will no doubt be offended by this deliberate move to be exclusionary, but the alternative was to have a televised riot during the board meeting, which would not have contributed to the solution and would have made parents and taxpayers feel even less secure about the district’s prospects.

There have been lots of public, blog-fueled calls for Hinojosa’s firing, and a fair number of people have also called on some or all of the board members to resign. Without commenting further on Hinojosa’s status (I think he should stay, at this point, based on what I’ve heard so far), I think it’s a horrible idea to pin the blame for this on the board of trustees.

It was clear from just this one meeting that the bureaucracy at DISD is massive, and it’s unreasonable to expect a volunteer board to provide hands-on micro-management. It’s clear that a few members of the board are probably overmatched somewhat with the challenges, but most of them — particularly Lew Blackburn and Jerome Garza — asked informed and pointed questions, and when the answer was incomplete, they said so and demanded more. I expect the board members, as a whole, will be more involved going forward — they clearly recognize their role in this mess, and they want to clear ther names. I don’t think there’s anything they could have done to prevent the current problem. Talking about getting rid of them now is ludicrous.

Lots of cost-cutting ideas were discussed, and some have merit. Unfortunately, with the exception of reducing the amount of money spent annually on the district’s specialized learning centers (estimated savings of about $17 million annually), most of the ideas will save mere pennies on the dollar that must be slashed from the budget.

After standing through the entire three-hour meeting, one thing is crystal-clear to me: There will be teachers layoffs, the number of teachers laid off will be significant, and there is no amount of creativity that will prevent that. Period. You can plead all you want with individual board members to save a teacher at this school or that school, but from what I can tell, it’s not going to make a difference — teachers will be eliminated based on board-approved student-teacher-class ratios at each school.

Some of the reports I’ve read indicate that thanks to the board’s insistence today on protecting teachers at all costs, no teachers were fired today (Friday). That is incorrect. It was clearly stated during the meeting that no teachers were going to be officially RIFed (Reduction in Force, or fired) until around Sept. 29. The plan was, and still is, for each school principal to compile a list of affected teachers, have the list vetted by DISD administrators to make sure everything is being done legally and by the book, and then consolidate the list and move forward. Even though the board didn’t vote to fire anyone today, it is just a matter of time before they do. In the meantime, DISD is spending approximately $1 million more than it’s taking in each week no significant reductions are made.

Back to the Learning Centers — they’ve long been a bone of contention in Dallas, because the district spends more to each educate each Learning Center student than it does to educate each student at standard schools (about $17 million more per year, district administrators said during the meeting). The Learning Centers were court-ordered back in the day that everything at DISD was court-supervised in an effort to provide better learning environments for particularly disadvantaged students; that supervision is gone now, and the Learning Centers could well be stripped of their cash advantages shortly, too. As I recall from past meetings, the extra money spent on Learning Center students doesn’t translate to correspondingly higher student achievement. Eliminating the funding disparity could reduce by 25-30 percent the number of teachers who are ultimately let go.

For what it’s worth, I stood next to Jim Schutze with the Dallas Observer for an hour or so, and I was near Brett Shipp (Channel 8 investigative reporter) for most of the afternoon. I saw Shipp’s report on the 6 p.m. news, and Shipp acted like the board had said Hinojosa’s job was safe FOR NOW. Honestly, no board member said anything bad about Hinojosa in the public meeting — nothing — nor did any board members say or imply that Hinojosa’s job is on the line. I don’t know what they said in the closed-door meeting afterwards (nor does Shipp), but I didn’t get the sense Hinojosa is a goner unless some other horrible thing happens soon. Shipp’s reporting was technically correct, but his inflection and wording — while adding some nice drama to his news segment — seemed to imply a sense of discord and head-hunting that wasn’t evident to me. That type of reporting is part of the reason so many parents and taxpayers are particularly inflamed about this mess.

So if you want to save teachers from being fired from your neighborhood school, take my advice and save your breath. If the school, relative to enrollment, has a higher teacher-to-student ratio than the board of trustees has approved — and it sounds like most schools are in this position — teachers are going to be laid off, period. No amount of public appeals or reasoning or pulling in chips from buddies on the board will make any difference — it looks as if the solution will be applied equally and across most schools.

Having spent the afternoon thinking, talking and writing about all of this, I have to tell you that as a parent with two sons attending a DISD school, I am not more concerned in any way about the future of our sons’ education. The teachers will keep coming to work and doing their best until told otherwise, and like most businesses these days, restructuring due to economic woes is the rule rather than the exception.

There are those of you out there who no doubt are wringing your hands and worrying about your children; I can understand your concern. But for the past few years, I’ve seen definite and measurable improvements in the schools and learning environment at DISD, and I believe the board will do
its best to solve this problem and the administration will do its best to implement that solution. I believes our kids are in good hands, and for those of you shaking your heads in disagreement right now, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

The next DISD board meeting to discuss the problem is Thursday, Sept. 25, at 3 p.m. at DISD headquarters, 3700 Ross. If you have the time, attend the meeting. If you don’t, we’ll do our best to keep you informed, too.

Yesterday’s news from the city plan commission on the Ross-Industrial-Chavez imbroglio could very well be a political master-stroke that will set the tone for the next couple of years downtown.

With the entire plan commission voting not to rename Industrial to Riverfront — and with a plan commision subcommittee voting against renaming Ross, too — we’re seeing a renegade group of volunteer citizens taking action to produce a new vision for Dallas rather than rely on the politically expedient route that seems to have been holding sway downtown lately.
The plan commission action empowered the Hispanic council members, who have been insisting that a street in Dallas be named for Cesar Chavez. The message to them: This is your chance to do what you’ve been saying you want to do in following the will of the people who voted in the now infamous poll. Since the DMN reports that the council now needs a 3/4 majority (12 votes) to rename Industrial, that means four council votes in favor of Chavez are enough to block renaming Industrial to Riverfront. And once Riverfront is blocked, I would expect that at least a simple majority of the council would see the political handwriting on the wall and vote to rename Industrial for Chavez.

The three Hispanic members of the council — Steve Salazar, Elba Garcia and Pauline Medrano — helped instigate the current drama when the traded away their votes on the Trinity River subcommittee, voting with the mayor for Riverfront. It appears they were promised another street (Ross, as it turned out) in a part of town that I guess is less important to the mayor, so they went along with the master plan, figuring they wouldn’t have the votes to prevail at council.

Well, now they probably do. All they need is one additional member of the city council to vote with them against renaming Industrial to Riverfront, and they’re probably on the road to a victory.

I don’t know who will turn out to be the mastermind behind this little coup, although I notice that plan commissioner Neil Emmons (he of the "let’s rename the Tollway for Chavez" soundbite) seemed to be at the center of it. But to whoever came up with this idea, let me say this: Thanks.

The council vote Wednesday on renaming Industrial to Riverfront will be a telling one. If the Hispanic council members wind up giving Mayor Tom Leppert a black eye on this one, we could get a chance to see how he reacts to defeat. Should be interesting, to say the least.

Here’s a twist on the seemingly endless Cesar Chavez street-renaming story: According to the DMN, the entire city plan commission voted yesterday to recommend that the city council NOT change Industrial Boulevard’s name to Riverfront, while a subcommittee of the plan commission also voted against a plan to change Ross Avenue to Chavez.

With me so far?

Although I don’t know the inside story on this deal, it sounds like a little political dice-rolling and backroom payback is going on here.
A little history: Plan commissioners are appointed by individual councilmen to their posts, which generally involve overseeing development requests in Dallas. Usually, a plan commissioner thinks similarly to the councilman who appointed him or her, so plan commission votes on the issues roughly mirror city council votes on the same issues. Since the council’s Trinity River subcommittee already voted unanimously to ignore the results of the city’s poll that established Chavez as the most popular new name for Industrial, it followed that the plan commission would play nice and play along.

All of this sets the stage for Wednesday’s council vote about whether to change the name of Industrial to Riverfront; the DMN story on the issue says that as a result of the plan commission’s vote, the council now needs a 3/4 majority to approve the change to Riverfront.

I imagine there will be plenty of behind-the-scenes wrangling for the next week. Interestingly enough, Mayor Tom Leppert apparently wasn’t called upon to officially weigh in on the latest events, since he wasn’t quoted in the News story. I would guess, though, that he’s probably not looking forward to Wednesday, since the planned vote will involve council members going on record about their preference — and noting that the News story had 129 comments as of Thursday night, I suspect a lot more people than ususal will be paying attention to their city government leaders next week.