Mary Suhm is a very smart, very savvy administrator. On Saturday, the city manager was quoted in Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper that, in terms of the budget, “everything is going to be very tight for us.”

Why does this make her so smart, given that so many of us have been wailing about this for months? Because she probably already knew on Saturday that November’s sales tax collections were almost 7 percent better than budgeted. This is a vast improvement over the October numbers, which were a disaster – 13 1/2 percent below budget. (Our handy chart, with the budget projections, is here.)

So, when she briefs the council today on the financial situation, Suhm will be able to look very wise and in control. Yes, things aren’t good, she will say. But trust me – we’re only 3.4 percent down for the first two months of the fiscal year. I have things well in hand.

And the council, being the council, will believe her, despite the economic gloom and doom that everyone else sees.

As of now, at least. Turns out that the outcry from neighbors made an impact on the city’s Trinity River Corridor Project committee.

I heard from Fort Worth Avenue Development Group president Scott Griggs, who told me that "the committee decided unamimously today to postpone the vote on the project pending more community meetings."

Tomorrow morning, City Council will be briefed on a new alignment proposal for Beckley and Commerce, which would change Beckley from a two-lane road to an-eight-lane where it intersects with Commerce. The proposal is slated for next week’s City Council agenda, but if nearby neighbors and the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group have anything to say about it, the proposal — which the group has known about only a couple of days — will not move forward.

"The plan is all about a temporary solution to siphon vehicles off of I-30 while TxDOT works on the mix-master," local activist and Fort Worth Avenue TIF District chair Randall White wrote in an e-mail to neighbors. "Unfortunately, this ‘temporary traffic volume/through-way solution’ will create a permanent impact for residents and businesses for years to come.

"If this ‘improvements’ plan passes, Beckley will become a wider, speeding vehicle barricade of concrete that will allow the Trinity Project to turn its back on North Oak Cliff residents and West side visitors. The plan dramatically impacts neighbor-friendly economic development with decisions that are all about moving vehicles through and past North Oak Cliff … not about moving people to and from the park. … This is a bad idea that has tried to skulk in under the radar because of delays and funding deadlines."
Today I spoke with Katherine Homan, who lives in East Kessler Park and is the chairman of her neighborhood’s steering committee on the Trinity gateway project. She summed it up this way: The I-30 bridge crossing the Trinity, which will become one of the Trinity River Corridor Project’s signature Calatrava bridges, will be widened to 16-lanes. This widened roadway will lead traffic into the narrow "canyon" of the mix-master, where I-30 is six-lanes across at most. However, before TxDOT can commence its bridge widening work,  "this project is going to need reliever roads," Homan says.

Since Beckley is the last exit before entering the mix-master, "that exit is going to be a bail-out exit," Homan says. "At face value, it’s practical to widen Beckley to accomodate the bail-out traffic," but she chimed in with White saying that the realignment will be "a permanent solution to a temporary problem … this road will not go away, and it will be one of the biggest barriers between us and the Trinity park."

Today, the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group’s president, Scott Griggs, sent this letter to Councilman Dave Neumann, who chairs the Trinity River Corridor Project committee. The letter advocates for "complete streets" (which are not car-centric but also pedestrian friendly), points out the ways in which the realignment proposal does not mesh with the planned development district that governs the area (mostly in ways that are unfriendly to pedestrians), and proposes a solution that would involve looking at the entire picture — everything from land use to alternative transportation, like streetcars and bicycles — instead of a "piecemeal" approach.

When the Trinity tollroad was proposed, neighbors specifically campaigned for it to be on the downtown side so that Oak Cliff residents wouldn’t be cut off from the park, Homan says. But if this alignment is approved, "we won’t need the tollroad — we’ll have Beckley," she says.

Click here to see the current and proposed alignments of Beckley and Commerce, here to look over the city’s realignment proposal, and here to read Scott Griggs’s letter.

This fall, Mayor Park Cities gave a speech in which he outlined his vision for Dallas:

“But if we’re not willing to invest in the city, then in essence, we’re throwing up the white flag. The greatest risk is that we don’t move forward, that we don’t invest, that we accept mediocrity."

No one, not even the mayor’s harshest critics, will argue that Dallas needs to stand still. We do need to invest in the city. We do need to make this a better place to live. I don’t even know that the issue is over what the mayor wants to invest in – big-deal projects like the $2 billion Trinity River effort and the $500 million convention center hotel — or the smaller, day-to-day things the rest of us want — fixing pot holes, upgrading city services and cutting crime. Reasonable people can disagree.

The disagreement is over leadership, because that’s where Leppert is failing. He is fiddling, promoting his projects, while the city budget burns. In October, the first month of the city’s fiscal year, sales tax collections were 13 1/2 percent below projections. The mayor should not be spending his time strong-arming the council to get the hotel funded before next spring’s referendum. He should be working to avoid the big-time budget cuts that are coming in February if the sales tax numbers continue to decline this dramatically.
We’ve put together a handy chart so you can follow the sales tax figures, including what the budget says we need to collect, a blank to insert what we collect each month this year, and what we collected last year. I’ll update it every month, and you can see for yourself whether it’s time to worry.  Because, frankly, I think it is.

The sales tax accounts for about 21 1/2 percent of the city budget. The other major component is the property tax, which I think accounts for about half of revenue. That’s because deciphering the property tax numbers is much more complicated, but I’m working on it.

So why do we need to worry? Because the sales tax numbers have missed budget projections for the last three months – by less than 1 percent in August and 1.4 percent in September to close out the last fiscal year, and by a whopping 13.5 percent in October. The October tax collection was the smallest in some two years, based on figures from the state comptroller. (You can see historical sales tax figures on the comptroller site, but there’s a two-month lag between what the city gets and when it’s posted. That means that the figure you see in February 2008 was actually the number for December 2007.)

This year’s budget, wrote city manager Mary Suhm in August, was predicated on continued “economic development and growth, especially in expanded downtown neighborhoods and Southern Dallas business parks. Commercial growth and new construction continue to drive the increasing value of the City’s tax base.  … Add to that a considerable drop in the unemployment rate which has fallen from 8.2 percent in 2004 to a current level of 5.2 percent and it is clear that the City’s financial footing has been much firmer than many municipalities across the country.”

I think we can assume those assumptions are no longer relevant. Yes, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be as bad here as it already is elsewhere, but we’re not going to escape unscathed, either.  The drop in sales tax collections isn’t the only sign. The unemployment rate in the Dallas metro area was 5.5 percent in October, up from 4.0 percent in October 2007. Meanwhile, the number of people receiving food stamps in Dallas County increased from 207,381 in December 2007 to 271,496 in December 2008, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

Which is why the mayor needs to focus on the budget and the economy.  Because the last thing we need is to spend $500 million – plus interest — on the hotel in January while the budget gets whacked in February.

Neighbor Heather Ezell wrote to me recently asking whether Oak Cliff has any dog parks, and if not, what it might take to create one. I posed that question to former City of Dallas Park Board member Delia Jasso (who resigned her position to run for City Council).

Jasso says at the moment, no dog parks exist in our neighborhood, but if she becomes the District 1 City Council representative, she would look at putting one in for future planning through parks budgeting. However, she says, "we would need a concentrated effort from Oak Cliff residents to be advocates so that I could move it forward."

Jasso also recalled that the city was looking to put one in near the new Pinnacle Park soccer complex from the last bond program.

Ezell also provided an Animal Planet website that explains how to start a dog park in your community.

One of the biggest questions about the convention center hotel is its cost. The city has been vague about it, and those who have tried to get some sort of answer have also been frustrated. Really frustrated.

Add us to the latter list. I have spent the past week trying to find a municipal bond lawyer who can talk me through the bond selling process and how it will work for the hotel. And, apparently, no one wants to do it.

After the jump, my hunt for an expert and why I can’t find one:
The first thing to know is that there’s a price to build the hotel, but there is also a price for paying off the bonds. It’s similar to buying a house, says SMU economics professor Mike Davis. The price it costs to own the house, which includes interest, is much more than the price of the house. You wouldn’t buy the house unless you had an idea about the interest rate. But that’s missing from almost every discussion of the hotel, including the city’s voluminous hotel web site and FAQs.

In other words, if it costs $350 million to build the hotel and another $150 million for the land, how much revenue will the hotel have to take in so it can make the monthly mortgage payment?

So I wanted a lawyer to help me with a couple of things:

• How does the municipal bond market look right now? Will the city be able to sell the bonds at the beginning of next year, which appears to be the plan? In Portland, for example, city officials have all but given up on a convention center hotel because the municipal bond market is so fragile.

• If the city can sell the bonds, what will the interest rate be? Is there a way to estimate what the total cost will be?

• How much cash will the hotel have to generate to pay off the bonds?

Then, armed with those numbers, I can call hotel operators and ask them them if it’s feasible, in this economy, for a convention center hotel to do those numbers.

The catch? I can’t find a bond attorney in Dallas who will answer those questions. I’m told (and I need to be a little vague here, to protect a source) that the attorneys who would normally be able to answer those questions don’t want to. They don’t want to take a chance that their cooperation will antagonize the city and cost their firm a chance at future business. I’m trying to track down someone in Houston, but that isn’t looking good either.

What does this say about the hotel deal when lawyers, who will normally talk about anything at any time, don’t want to talk to us — and we’re hardly the New York Times? It says that Mayor Park Cities and his allies are using all their considerable muscle to keep opposition to a minimum, and to keep any possible bad news out of the news until after they cobble together their deal.

Thanks to neighborhood blogger Norman Alston, we know a little more about the fate of structures the city has slated for demolition, as discussed in a post last week, and whether the Landmark Commission will have a say in the process. It looked like this had the makings for a struggle between the city attorney’s office and historic preservation groups, like Preservation Dallas. But it turns out, according to Norman:

"The city attorney’s office and the Landmark Commission have had meetings and have negotiated a new procedure that streamlines the process some and keeps the Landmark Commission involved. Both sides are reportedly very happy."
 
One of the properties on which this decision focused was 104 S. Edgefield, which the Winnetka Heights/Lake Cliff Task Force had slated for demolition (going back on a vote earlier this year to not demolish it). The property caught on fire in 2005, and both this property and another in the 100 block went up in flames again during the week of Thanksgiving. (These fires are not believed to be related to the 15 recent fires in Winnetka Heights set by four juveniles arrested last week.)

Neighbor Christopher Roberts, who lives four houses down from the fire, snapped this photo and a few others, that can be found on his Picasa website. Here’s what Christopher had to say about it:
"The fire consisted of two home on the corner of Edgefield and Jefferson. There was a 3-alarm fire involving 2 vacant two-story houses at 100 S. Edgefield. Although this is an arson fire in the same general area as the others, we do not believe the fires are related. The suspects in this case are adults, not juveniles. Initial reports from witnesses were that two adults were seen speeding from the scene in a truck. This is one of the houses that was already slated for demolition."

The good news is that now we know who pulled the plug on citizens’ broadcast comments at the end of City Council meetings — none other than our consensus-loving mayor, Tom Leppert. When the DMN asked who censored the commenters a couple of weeks ago, no one at city hall owned up to it. Today, however, people showed up to protest against being muzzled, and Leppert decided to step forward and take the rap. Leppert’s defense, according to the DMN, was that his decision didn’t keep citizens from commenting at the council meetings; it only blocked WRR and the cable channel showing council meetings from broadcasting the comments. Interestingly, Leppert made the decision without seeking approval from the council; it turns out some councilmen seem to value the First Amendment a little more dearly than the mayor. In particular, Dave Levinthal of the News talked with Angela Hunt and Vonceil Jones Hill, both of whom voiced their displeasure with Leppert’s unwillingness to let a few mouthy citizens have their 30 seconds of fame every week or two. Bottom line; At least Leppert admitted his involvement and has heard the complaints, promising to "bring a revised policy back" to the council in January. Maybe Leppert’s next move can be installing a gong he can ring when someone says something he doesn’t like during a council meeting …

Any neighbors who have a blue recycling roll cart (or two, according to Kris Scott’s recent post) have for months been able to co-mingle their paper, plastic, aluminum, glass and other recyclables into one container for pick-up. But those of us who aren’t lucky enough to have blue bin pick-up have been driving all over the neighborhood in an attempt to protect the environment — one location for newspapers and magazines, another for plastics, another for glass (and usually different bins according to color), another for aluminum, another for cardboard, and so on.

Until recently, when the city swapped out all of those different containers (including the igloos) for new neighborhood recycling dumpsters — appropriately blue. I discovered them this past weekend when taking my glass to my normal recycling location, and discovering that I also could leave my aluminum cans and plastic bags (and any other recyclables, for that matter).

The blue dumpster cited greendallas.net, and its recycling page contains a list of what you can and cannot place in your blue roll cart or in the blue dumpsters. The city is officially calling them "Big Blue containers", and the sanitation site gives a list of the drop-off locations in various sections of Dallas (mostly churches, rec centers and parks).

The Austin Bike Blog picked up on Oak Cliff resident Jason Roberts’ online tiff with City of Dallas Bike Coordinator PM Summer when the words started flying a couple of weeks ago. We reported on the back-and-forth, both on Summer’s Cycle Dallas blog and on Roberts’ Bike Friendly Oak Cliff blog. (Roberts, for those who don’t know him, advocates for many things, among them the restoration of the Texas Theatre, the return of streetcars to Oak Cliff, and his latest, amenities to make our neighborhood more friendly for cyclists. As he explained to me last week, all of these intertwine along a common theme — creating an environment for community living.)

Last week, the Austin Bike Blog stepped out and proclaimed that, as a result of the argument and some of the statements Summer posted on his blog, it would be removing Cycle Dallas from its blog roll.
The Austin Bike Blog also had some harsh things to say about Summer, including that it is "completely unacceptable for a major metropolitan city like Dallas to have a bicycle coordinator who doesn’t want to seriously work to increase cycling as transportation" and that he is "is a social Darwinist of sorts who believes that only the most elite cyclists deserve to even survive on Dallas roads." The blog instead pointed to Bike Friendly Oak Cliff as a good site to visit, describing it as "a group of cycling advocates who are trying to fight this insanity."

Summer was a bit kinder when bashing the city of Austin’s "silver standard" bike lanes in a recent post, making a case once again as to why he disagrees with bike lanes. Posted prominently on Roberts’ blog is a quote from Summer along these lines: "As long as I’m the bike coordinator for the city, Dallas will never have on-street bike lanes."