Freshman Dallas City Council member Maxie Johnson is shaking things up. He opened his new District 4 Community Office Aug. 12 where the people of his district are, in the historic Glendale Shopping Center. Next door to Pan-African Connection and within the walls of the former For Oak Cliff headquarters, he got the space running just a couple months after receiving word that he won the election.
Photo courtesy of Sharron Jackson.
“The reason why I opened it in August is also (because) I was a trustee of Dallas ISD. This is my area,” Johnson says. “I had the South Oak Cliff area. I had the Roosevelt area and pretty much District 4 sits in the heart of District 5 as a school board trustee.”
His team is rooted in education experience, too. Chief of Staff Edward Turner served on the school board and helped with Johnson’s campaign. Sharron Jackson, who Johnson calls “the jewel of the office,” is a former principal who came out of retirement to serve as district director. Derrick Battie joined as council liaison. He previously worked at South Oak Cliff High School for 25 years, has been an avid community advocate across city lines and previously served on the mayor task force to reduce crime.
“What’s so special about it is everyone in this office has strong community roots. We’re all community organizers,” Johnson says. “We’re all community driven and we understand transparency and accountability and making sure that we are accountable to those that we serve daily because we’ve been serving them daily for the last 10 years.”
When walking around the shopping center, Battie says a year ago this would not have been possible due to public safety. Johnson echoed that perception of the area, sharing that his oldest son was killed a couple streets over from the D4 office due to gun violence.
“I lost a lot of kids from South Oak Cliff because I was a football and baseball coach, community liaison at my first school in Dallas ISD. I was a community liaison right here at Clara Oliver, so I knew the area. And so I was intentional because we have to clean up this community,” he says.
This approach to serving a Dallas district as a city council member is unique, just like Johnson’s educational service background. Rather than making the trek to a government office downtown, Johnson says he is bringing city government back to the community.
“Soon as I got into office, this is the first thing I thought about,” he says. “Where am I going to place a community office that is a central location? That no matter where you are in District 4, it only takes you no more than seven minutes to get there without going through (and) getting on the freeway.”
Photo courtesy of Sharron Jackson.
Johnson is in office at the Glendale Shopping Center Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. When he’s in Downtown Wednesdays for City Council meetings, Battie is in the office every day.
The D4 Community Office is open five days a week, but it’s not just Johnson’s team that uses it. The space is partnering with Code Compliance, the Dallas Police Department and members of Dallas Area Rapid Transit.
“The reason why I brought these resources in is No. 1 to help with response times,” he says. “When our community calls for DPD and to make sure that if Code is partnering with us in the office and they’re here, then they’re able to see the blight and some of the things that we need to clean up. It shortens the response time, and it builds a strong partnership with our community and our City office.”
People were shocked by the announcement of Johnson staying local, particularly due to the violence in the 75216 ZIP code, he says.
The Superblock is a neighborhood sectioned off by certain boundaries like streets or highways. For our neighborhood, that includes 75216 where the District 4 Community Office is located.
According to For Oak Cliff, the 75216 Superblock has 7.9 incidents of violent crime for every 1,000 residents of the ZIP code, including 4.4 instances of assault. The Superblock also has the highest number of individuals incarcerated compared to any other ZIP code in Dallas.
“This to me is saying that I see the problem. We’re going to be transparent and accountable. We’re not going to hide it,” he says. “We’re going to clean up District 4, and when you sit here and see all the things that go on, you see some of what I call ‘deplorable conditions’ in our community. And here, I’m going to look at it.”
With the campaign motto of “building the community, with the community,” Johnson says he aspires to do just that together through this new space, such as opening the office to interns currently attending law school in Townview.
“We brought city government to the community and we made it so accessible. And they come, people come,” he says. “They walk up, they talk. A lot of things are impromptu. If they need me, I’m available.”
For example, community kids are able to walk up to the office if they have any problems.
“I have some kids raising their siblings, so we’re making sure that we have resources to help them,” Johnson says.
As for future goals of the new office, Johnson and his team are working on programming for the community space, including the National Night Out that took place in October and a Veterans Day program coming this month. They are also working to offer classes to help strengthen resumes and provide training for Microsoft Excel.
“Educational inequity leads to poverty, and poverty leads to violence. We have to fix the poverty,” he says. “And if we want to fix the priority of the violence, we have to fix the poverty. And the only way to fix the poverty, we have to educate our community and our kids, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
Photo courtesy of Sharron Jackson.
