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Local Government

Morning News Ed Board Calls Kingston’s Conspiratorial Allegations a ‘False Narrative’

But are they? In the race for District 14, let's look at who is really funding it and attempting to grab influence.
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There’s a curious editorial on page 14A of today’s Dallas Morning News, highlighting the fact that Dallas ISD Trustee Dustin Marshall has joined with the two opponents he felled last year to support council hopeful Matt Wood. I can’t find it online or I’d link to it.

Wood is challenging the ever-divisive Philip Kingston in District 14, which includes the prime territory of East Dallas and Uptown and downtown. That geography, coupled with Kingston’s not-always-polite abrasion toward the status quo, has attracted big names and big dollars — a well-funded Super PAC run by the woman who helped elect Mayor Mike Rawlings, Kingston’s arch rival, has launched a mailer and online campaign painting the incumbent as a disrespectful stooge. Kingston says the effort to oust him is proof of his effectiveness, evidence that he’s uprooted the moneyed establishment that has so long controlled what happens at City Hall.

With that context, let’s return to that editorial. The News travels back to the battle for Dallas ISD’s District 2 trustee seat, when Marshall won over Suzanne Smith and Mita Havlick. “It was a hard-fought, but refreshingly clean race, in which Marshall prevailed,” it reads. “Issue-focused, no name-calling, a race that educated and energized constituents to get involved in DISD.” They say they’ve talked to folks in District 14 who have told them that Kingston “is not getting the job done” and they felt the need to speak up in favor of Wood.

The kicker of the editorial is what raised some eyebrows; it shrugs off Kingston’s allegations of “an evil rich-guy cabal” that’s risen up to knock him from the horseshoe.

“The Smith-Havlick-Marshall endorsement — and others, say, those of former state Rep. Harryette Ehrhardt and recently retired Dallas Police Chief David Brown — undermine this false narrative.”

Wood, whether he’s tried to or not, has become the de facto candidate for the folks who Kingston has railed against. He’s also got much of the backing from the era of Dallas leadership Kingston has tried to move beyond. In addition to Brown, Wood has attracted the support of the Dallas Citizens Council and folks like former Mayor Ron Kirk. And so, let’s strike the words “evil” and “guy” from that News sentence and just focus on “rich.”

Both the city and the state keep detailed databases of campaign finance reports for candidates and political action committees. Super PACs are barred by law from coordinating directly with campaigns, but they can certainly funnel money in ways that impact messaging with the public. For Our Community, the Mari Woodlief-run PAC mentioned earlier, has certainly done that. And it’s funded by a bunch of rich people. It has raised $271,000 in 2017, (see: this and this) and the only candidate it has registered with the state as opposing is Philip Kingston. (Wood is the only challenger it’s backing. It is a registered supporter of incumbents Monica Alonzo, Rickey Callahan, Casey Thomas, Tiffinni Young, and Erik Wilson.) Wood has decried the PAC’s hyper-negative messaging; his campaign manager told me last month that “we had absolutely nothing to do with the creation nor implementation of that website.”

Okay, let’s look at whose money is keeping this thing afloat, starting with affiliates in and of the Hunt family, famous for oil and pivoting into commercial development. Ray Hunt gave For Our Community $25,000. John Scovell, who formed the $1 billion-plus Woodbine Development Co. with Hunt in 1973, also added $25,000. Al Hill III, the oil heir and great grandson to the late eccentric billionaire H.L. Hunt, tossed in $10,000.

Shifting over to the Crow family, Trammell Sr.’s daughter Lucy Billingsley added $5,000. Deedie Rose, widow to former Texas Rangers owner Rusty, gave the PAC $25,000. Jack Matthews, he of Matthews Southwest and leader of the redevelopment in the Cedars, gave $25,000.

Members of the Dallas Citizens Council gave a whopping $101,000. Deep breath here: Ambit Energy’s Jere Thompson Jr. added $25,000; Beck Group’s Peter Beck gave another $25,000; developer and wine enthusiast Craig Hall added $25,000; Hart Group’s Mitch Hart added $15,000; Ernst & Young (or, I guess technically it’s EY now) Partner Clint McDonnough added $5,000; retired Dean Foods chief Pete Schenkel gave $5,000; and Melissa Fetter, the wife of Citizens Council member and Tenet Health chief executive Trevor Fetter, gave $1,000.

Now, let’s turn our eyes to the city’s database and look at contributors to Matt Wood’s campaign. The News touched on this earlier in the month, on the news side, away from editorial. Again, that’s unrelated to the PAC. He’s raised about $55,000. A bunch of that comes from smaller contributions; there are a lot of $25s, plenty of $10s, and a fair amount of three-digit donations. But more than half — about $30,000 worth — comes from donations of $1,000, a good chunk of which derives from folks affiliated with the Citizens Council and/or For Our Community. They include Craig Hall — with whom Kingston last year fought with over a parking garage near his Arts District tower — and his wife Kathryn, Ron Kirk, Deedie Rose, the Citizens Council itself, the Real Estate Council’s PAC, current Parks Board Chair Bobby Abtahi, and past Parks Board Chair Max Wells.

(Kingston has brought in about $73,000 in contributions through April 28, according to the city’s data. And, full disclosure, Coalition for a New Dallas, the super PAC started by D Magazine owner Wick Allison, has endorsed Kingston. Wick also gave $1,000 to Kingston’s campaign. The magazine and the Coalition operate independent of one another.)

So, why type all this up? I’m not as comfortable as Jim Schutze is in calling these folks the “Forces of Evil.” And I’m certainly not comfortable calling them outright evil. Getting technical, to the News’ point, they’re certainly not all “guys.” But they are rather rich. And there is a bevy of documented campaign contributions that detail how their money has flowed into a super PAC that’s been spending a lot of it on spreading a narrative about Kingston’s “disturbing truth,” saying that his “track record of contempt, disdain, outright bullying as a Dallas City Councilman” makes him unfit to return to office.

Here’s the deal: Kingston’s abrasive. He has said things that have offended plenty of folks plenty of times. But there’s an underlying narrative here that shouldn’t be tossed off in the pages of our city’s only daily — that while there’s (probably) not a cabal of chubby rich men twirling their mustaches and stubbing out cigars, scheming on how to knock Kingston from office, there is money flowing like a spigot from outside District 14 that is affecting the race. It is going into an organization that has literally registered in opposition of Philip Kingston. That’s something worth at least mentioning in the editorial.

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