PUBLISHER’S PAGE

The Dallas County Commissioners have disappeared, mercifully, from the headlines. The odds are good that this is only a temporary phenomenon, however, and though they’re now out of sight we shouldn’t let them slip out of mind. After all, thanks to the exceeding generosity of the Dallas electorate, the commissioners now have $215 million in public bond money to play with over the next 8 years.

In a simpler time Calvin Coolidge warned, “Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. Therefore, the temptation is to bestow it on somebody.”

In this case, the somebody is likely to be a road contractor. The most controversial feature of the bond election was the proposition authorizing $110 million in road improvement funds and apportioning these monies equally among the four commissioners’ districts, even though the needs of the districts are obviously unequal. It is no surprise that two of the most outspoken leaders on behalf of the bond vote were Russell Perry, who has served for many years as chairman of the road building lobby’s Central Highway Committee, and Rudy Day, president of Moody-Day Company, which supplies heavy equipment to highway and other industrial contractors. Even though many observers believed the road improvement proposition was bloated and that a good deal of the funds authorized are unnecessary, the voting public apparently didn’t agree. We voted for road improvements, and we’re likely to get them – whether we need them or not. It’s a good time to be in the contracting business.

D Magazine suggested several months ago that the commissioners appoint a blue-ribbon citizens panel to oversee the timing of bond sales and the expenditure of bond monies. This is not likely to happen, however. The commissioners, as the saying goes, are feeling their oats. A blue-ribbon citizens panel would probably have to be drawn largely from the Dallas Citizens Council, which is about as blue ribbon as one can get. The commissioners don’t like the Citizens Council. The organization did not support the bond issue, and it has viewed the commissioners’ individual performances with attitudes wavering between distaste and horror. The friction between the two has gotten to the point of pettiness, and in the long run it is the commissioners themselves who are most likely to suffer from it. Without any watchdog over their supervision of bond monies, you can expect to see them back in the headlines sooner than anybody would like.

One remedy proposed by Citizens Council executive vice-president Alex Bickley is to convert the newly created office of county budget director into a county manager’s post, modeled after the Dallas City Manager’s office. This is not likely to happen, considering the commissioners’ present frame of mind. Even if it did, it’s not likely to work. As Commissioner David Pickett likes to point out, there are now 77 elected officials operating out of county government, from constables (what do they do?) to district judges. How can an appointed county manager instruct an elected official, such as Sheriff Carl Thomas? Dallas needs a wholesale reconstruction of the entire antiquated county government system. But that would require legislative approval and constitutional revision, both of which would entail prolonged fights against rural interests in other counties who enjoy the present set-up because it provides such good patronage.

So county government staggers on,momentarily uplifted by a fresh inflow ofpublic money. As every doctor knows,the major part of the cure is the wish to becured. If that’s the case, the county commissioners and the people of DallasCounty still seem to have a long way to go.