There have been three pivotal moments in my professional life: the glorious day I was hired to work as a totally unhindered, gloves-off investigative reporter at the Dallas Observer; the day I went from being the hunter to the hunted when I switched from journalism to politics; and the day I went from representing 1/14th of the city as a councilmember to the entire city as mayor, causing an unexpected and nearly instantaneous broadening of my perspective.
Case in point on No. 3: I couldn’t stand the Trinity River Project when I was a councilmember. The plan as passed by voters in 1998, on the same ballot where I was a new council candidate, had been designed by road engineers, and they had made the miscalculation of giving me a detailed briefing on the project right before the election. At the end of their two-hour presentation, I had only one question: “Where’s the water?” So I voted against it, even though my husband told me I should vote for it because we lived in Oak Cliff, which would benefit if the river was improved. If I were lucky enough to get on the City Council, he said, I could add water later.
Well, I’m glad Mayor Ron Kirk got the project passed, in retrospect, but I never did get to work on it as a councilmember. For those three and a half years, the City Council spent almost no time on it; the environmentalists sued the city over its lack of river attributes; and the unsavory centerpiece of the project—an eight-lane, high-speed Trinity River toll road, split four lanes on each side of the river—reigned supreme and intact. When I ran for mayor in 2001, I was an ardent and vocal opponent.
In the club of Dallas mayors who have served under 14-1, there are only four: Steve Bartlett, Ron Kirk, me, and Tom Leppert. But only I have had the unique experience of going from being a 14 to a 1. The difference is jarring—and instructive.
Within days of my election, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison took me out for coffee at La Madeleine. She said, “I’ve worked hard for years getting money for the Trinity River Project. Are you going to support it?” Reasonable question. A few weeks later, City Manager Mary Suhm, who was then the No. 2, told me it was time to go on the city’s annual trek to Washington, business leaders in tow, to ask Congressional members for federal money for the project; I balked and didn’t want to go. Suhm said fine, but if the mayor was a deliberate no-show for the first time ever, no elected official would support funding us. Did I want the Trinity Project to stall, overnight? Another reasonable question.
Single-member district councilmembers don’t have to worry about such things—it’s not in the job description. They can question and criticize big projects all day long and still sleep well at night, knowing that somebody else—the mayor, the city manager, the councilperson from the district where the big, messed-up project is located—is the one ultimately responsible for carrying the burden. And if you’re a maverick councilmember—and I was one of those, full of passion and principle, short on the art of political tact—the Ultimately Responsible People don’t want you anywhere near them or their problems. Which causes mavericks to get publicly sidelined and even more resolute in their opposition.
My fundamental change of opinion on the Trinity Project was due to the very thing that had made me realize that my days of stalking City Hall officials with reporter notebooks were over: I had switched jobs. And there was nothing subtle about it. It was guttural and felt urgent.
We convened an all-day meeting of the City Council just to openly dissect the project. After an honest and thoughtful conversation, we all agreed we had no idea how to proceed. Some of us wanted an even bigger, wider highway right down the river bottom; others wanted no road at all; everybody wanted more water.
We had no money. We had a worried business community, a hopeful environmental community, and a skeptical city staff.
So we raised $600,000 in private money to redesign the project without delaying it. The first $200,000 came from arts supporter Deedie Rose, the last $118,000 from oilman Boone Pickens. Similarly diverse folks with an interest in the project (i.e., road lovers and road haters) were assembled to interview and hire urban planners from outside Dallas (to avoid bias either way) to create something we could all love. Former Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson (the revered cool head and road proponent) and I (the quixotic new mayor who preferred a donkey trail) became the official “clients” of the redesign, so if both of us blessed the result, it signaled a real truce.
The eventual plan adopted by the City Council in December 2003 was negotiated by all the relevant parties: city of Dallas, Dallas County, TXDoT, North Texas Tollway Authority, Dallas Institute of Humanities, North Central Texas Council of Governments, the Dallas Plan, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
For those who argue the merits of the project today: the first thing we asked the urban planners to do was move The Road, an important traffic reliever for the Mixmaster, out of the river entirely. It didn’t work. What worked was a much narrower, four-lane road on the downtown side, inside the levee, which is the key to preserving the water and park elements.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed off on the road compromise, along with the rest of the plan. And the Corps met with city officials weekly for the next four years to begin implementing it. How then did the Corps suddenly pronounce the project unwise, unsafe, and undoable last year? In my opinion, if their internal rules regarding levees changed after Hurricane Katrina, then it is their burden and their responsibility to find a way to make this project work. Just like the Dallas City Council did in 2003.
The lesson learned from my long relationship with the Trinity River Project is simple: every journalist should know what it’s like to be in public office, and every councilmember should know what it’s like to run and serve citywide.
And since those two things will never happen, I’ll just be grateful that, somehow, I got to do both. Hopefully, it made some small difference.
Laura Miller was mayor from 2002 to 2007.