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Can DART Be Saved?

It’s D-Day At Dallas Area Rapid Transit. The Cash Crunch Is Real, The Debate Is Heated, And We’re Staring Down The Barrel Of Traffic Problems That Are Awful And Getting Worse. We Must Come Out Of This With A Rational Plan For Mass Transit. This Is A Call In Arms.
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One bright March morning, Ted Tedesco, DART’s executive director since late last summer, decided to sample the system’s bus service first-hand. Armed with a DART timetable and map, Tedesco planted himself on a downtown corner. Three times he boarded buses that carried him somewhere other than where he wanted to go. Three times he had to get a taxi to take him back to the starting line. The experience led the veteran city administrator to conclude that the DART schedules were “not adequate.”

If Tedesco was mystified by the maze of dots and squiggles that represent Dallas area transportation, it was surely not the first time. Since taking the helm of the embattled DART staff last September, Tedesco has confronted a number of mind-boggling incongruities. First, there’s the problem of money. We’ve spent mightily on the start-up portion of the Final Service Plan approved by voters in August of 1983. And we do have buses. But now we don’t have the cash to begin constructing rail lines or to buy the trains that will travel them.

Then there’s the problem of mode {that’s transit talk for the make and model of rail car). We thought we were going to get something swift and sophisticated called Pre-Metro rail, Now it looks as if Dallas will get something more akin to a street car.

And those two puzzling gaps between assumption and fact are just for starters. In the past year, the DART board and its paid staffers have turned up more problems than solutions: problems with rider-ship, problems with public perception, problems with numbers, problems with political infighting.

Despite the apparent chaos, we can’t give up on DART. There is no single public enterprise more crucial to the future of Dallas. If we overreach for a system that cannot be supported by revenues or ridership, we become another casualty in a long line of ill-conceived transit plans around the country. The Can-Do City with the Little Engine That Can’t.

On the other hand, if the whole DART system is destroyed by political cross-fire (and that appears to be a distinct possibility), the City of the Future becomes a City of the Past. A metropolitan area already aching from growing pains will choke to death if its population can’t be weaned from its cars.

The DART story-past, present, and future-is a complicated, fascinating, and symbolic tale of a city struggling with its new mandate to bring change through consensus. When the courts ordered single-member city council districts in the early Seventies, the door to power was flung open to a new breed of leaders who had been excluded from the closed sessions of the ruling elite. DART chairman Adlene Harrison, former DART board member and prospective mayoral candidate Lee Simpson, and other key players in the transit issue are not part of the inner circle that has run Dallas since the early Thirties. Harrison and her cadre of “backyard revolutionaries” have so far dominated the transportation issue, and questions concerning their performance have raised the hackles of more than a few local business leaders. Yet the very men who have watched warily from the sidelines as non-business types try to run a billion-dollar business must bear some of the blame for DART’s troubles. The business community oversaw the development of an initial transit plan and declared that the numbers would work. Then they walked away. Says Harrison of her critics, “They said the deal could be done and everybody believed them. I’m the one who had to take the numbers and translate them into a doable deal in buses and rail.”

To be sure, there is enormous pressure on DART not to screw up. The word failure is not in the Dallas lexicon. And to be sure, DART is not at the point of no return. Tedesco and his technical staff are now in the process of bringing new recommendations in line with DART’s economics.

How did we get a Final Service Plan that was neither final nor, apparently, of any great service to the future patrons of DART? Why did we think we had money that we didn’t have? Should we continue to press for a system that would rival world capitals like Tokyo or Toronto? Or should we rein in our ambitions and back a plan to try streetcars first?

We must stop, look, and listen before we proceed-even with caution. By way of background, let’s go back to August 1980, when Dallas voters in convincing numbers said thumbs down to the Lone Star Transit Authority.



DART’S ROOTS-and the roots of its troubles-extend deep into the ashes of the LSTA. Six years ago, in August, during the hot, contentious summer of 1980, voters in sixty-four communities in Dallas, Tarrant, and seven surrounding counties went to the polls to decide whether to create a mass transportation authority that would develop and operate a public transportation system for the entire area. All they had to do was say okay to the idea and approve the levying of a one-cent sales tax to pay for the thing.

They turned it down, though, in overwhelming numbers, and for many reasons. The primary reason was that too many voters just didn’t know what the LSTA planned to do. Voters across the political spectrum-blacks, Hispanics, inner-city neighborhoods, North and South Dallas, Pleasant Grove-wanted to know what they were going to be getting for their money, and nobody was telling them. They wanted to see a plan detailing where all those transit lines were going to be running, and they wanted to know what the LSTA had in mind to run on those routes-buses? light rail? heavy rail? monorail?

The LSTA didn’t have the answers to those questions, and they didn’t know how to handle community activists who were less concerned with what they were buying than with preventing certain things-like transit routes through their neighborhoods. Many of those who voted no to LSTA, especially in Dallas, were not opposed to the idea of a mass transit system; in fact, they very much believed in the idea. They just wanted to be involved in its development, and they felt strongly that LSTA’s creators, led by former Dallas City Councilman Dick Smith, had left them out. So they sent the LSTA down in flames.

Walt Humann, the earnest and ambitious president of Hunt Oil Co. who had chaired the Dallas County portion of the LSTA campaign, remembers sitting down at home late on the night of the LSTA disaster and dictating a memo to himself.

“We’d made so many mistakes,” he recalls. “A lot of us weren’t even introduced to other LSTA board members. Everyone went his own way.” That night, he dictated for three hours, setting down his reflections on why the campaign failed. Too many people got involved too late. They needed to build an organization well in advance, not as an afterthought. There were concerns about giving “eminent domain” authority to a transit system. Local public officials needed to be on record early as backing mass transit. Changes should be made in the state law that set up transit systems. And above all, they had to put together a coalition of proponents and opponents.

Other local community leaders were thinking about these same problems that night. The voters had sent a message: we’ll go along with the idea of mass transit-we like it, in fact-but we want a seat at the table when the system is planned.

The LSTA campaign did accomplish some good things. It helped persuade business leadership that a mass transit system was important; indeed, that it was the keystone of the future growth of this community. When the business leaders concluded that the voters might still be willing to talk about the subject, they brightened up. Dallas had to have mass transit, they agreed, and if all it took to win over a majority of the voters was the development of a plan that involved the broadest possible constituency, then that’s what Dallas would do. And it did.

Humann hit the streets first, the day after the LSTA defeat. He was convinced that the old Dallas way of doing things in the political arena had finally died. The rules had been changing since the advent of single-member council districts. Now diverse constituencies demanded to be heard, and their demands could not be ignored. The LSTA defeat was conclusive proof of that. So Humann touched base with the neighborhood groups and the environmentalists and the anti-bus and anti-roads people and the monorail enthusiasts and the blacks and the Hispan-ics-anyone who could be identified as “opposition.” The idea was to begin a dialogue, build a consensus that would lead to voter approval of a mass transit authority. To improve the odds, the new effort would involve only Dallas County and whatever neighboring cities seemed likely to support the idea.

As the dialogue dragged on through the summer of 1981, an outline of what was probably acceptable to voters took shape. It helped when the Texas Legislature, which had given cities the right to create such transit authorities, agreed to some legislative changes (sought primarily by suburban interests and by representatives of many inner-city neighborhoods) that amounted to legal assurances protecting any eventual agreement from alterations after the fact, Especially important to some inner-city leaders was the stipulation that no changes in right-of-way alignments could be made without public hearings and approval by the city council. Finally, by November of that year, twenty-one area municipal governments and Dallas County had joined the group to create an interim transit authority: on January 7, 1982, twenty-five delegates from the participating governments met for the first time. They called themselves IRTA–the Interim Regional Transit Authority.

The mission of IRTA was clear, spelled out in Article 1118y of its incorporation document: IRTA would develop a service plan and agree upon a “desired rate of local limited sales tax” to support implementation of that plan. The group wasted no time in getting after it. Officers were elected, committees created, engineering consultants hired, and “community involvement” meetings held to assess the public’s transportation needs. On July 29,1982, a crucial step was taken when the board hired an experienced transit system operator, Maurice Carter, as the interim executive director. Carter, an engineer himself, came fresh from having supervised construction of the “Tijuana Trolley,” a transit line that serves a region extending from San Diego to the Mexican border. His selection was a clear signal that DART’s leaders had already decided they wanted to build a light rail system.

By August of 1982, development of the proposed service plan was well under way. Lines were being drawn to show the voters just where DART’s future rail lines would go. A structure was developed for a permanent transit authority and a formal name with a nifty acronym-Dallas Area Rapid Transit-was adopted in December. Three alternative service plans accompanied by colored charts and maps were developed. (So far there was no recommendation for a rail mode; that would be decided by the permanent board, if the voters okayed the idea). Policy statements on the needs of the elderly and the handicapped, station locations, fare structure, and other issues were adopted. To pay for all of this, a set of financial estimates related to revenues and costs was developed. Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., a prominent financial consulting firm, and various business minds gave the document a close read and said it looked solid.

Finally, on April 14, 1983, at a two-day conference at Union Station (overlooking, appropriately, the railroad tracks), the package of policies and strategies known as the Final Service Plan was adopted by the full DART board and passed along to the individual municipal governments for their ratification. An election was called for August 13, 1983, to decide the same two issues that the LSTA election had raised: whether to create a permanent transit authority, and whether to support it with a one-cent sales tax. This time, though, there was a service plan to show around-a fat. hefty document of more man fifty- pages, with color-coded maps and lots of answers. But the planners tried to be sure that everyone understood that the Final Service Plan was merely an outline, a compass, a guide to the future. They stressed that changes would almost certainly be made.

Actually, it was a pretty good plan, and that helped make it easier to sell. Supporters of the plan hit the streets again, talking it up to anyone who was willing to listen. One interim board member. John Tatum, who was already a member of the interim board’s (and later the DART board’s) inner circle, began the campaign as an uncertain public speaker and logged so many speaking engagements that he’s now a very polished figure at: the speaker’s platform. Others worked just as hard, remembering the LSTA disaster. The business community helped out with a well-financed pro-transit campaign of its own.

The efforts paid off. On August 13. voters in Dallas and thirteen suburban cities opted for the: DART idea (another city, Cockrell Hill, voted to join three months later). DART became official. The cost of the eighteen-month IRTA effort: $831,767,74, a bargain by anyone’s standards.

The trouble with bargains, though, is that you often get what you pay for. Regardless of how large that sum seems to you and me, it wasn’t nearly enough to do the job thoroughly. (Consider this: the North Central Task Force’s plan for the redesign of North Central Expressway cost almost $2 million.) In defense of the interim DART board, it spent only what its member cities were willing to contribute to me effort-twenty-five cents per capita in each community-so it did the best it could with what it got. Nevertheless, DART was leaving the starting line with a faulty map. The numbers were wrong; voters were approving a Cadillac system on a Honda budget.

“I think that everybody who was involved in the campaign had to accept the financial numbers that had been prepared by the consultants and the staff, based upon the facts they had at hand-and that’s the key phrase,” says one business leader who took part in the campaign three summers ago. “Perhaps the amount of money spent on consultants for the financial plan wasn’t enough. The time spent on detailed analysis was not adequate. Some of the precision that you want-nailing down the numbers to the exact dollar-wasn’t there.”



DART IS MORE than a story about numbers, though. It’s a story about politics, and about how the Dallas area has changed in the last dozen years. Virtually all of the “new” constituencies were present at DART’s creation. There was die business community, of course. Its leaders listened when people like Humann and former assistant city manager Dan Petty, now an executive with Woodbine Development Corporation, tried to explain the importance of mass transit to the city’s economic growth. Since the Forties growth in “auto-friendly” Dallas had been predicated upon the development of a system of streets and freeways that welcomed more and more cars. But the system had become so congested by the late Seventies-and Dallas was “booming” then, too, remember?-that desperate measures were clearly needed. If nothing was done, Dallas streets would one day reach gridlock; people would get fed up and leave; new businesses would quit coming; and the old businesses would wither if their clientele could not easily reach them. So mass transit was the answer. Buses first, then rail.

The solution pretty much had to be mass transit because one of the groups at the table wasn’t going to allow anything else. These were the inner-city liberals, as they came to be called by some of the suburbanites who fought with them over DART. The label, a slight misnomer, refers to what is essentially an information-sharing coalition of people concerned about the environment, women’s rights, neighborhoods’ rights, and minority rights. Among their leaders:

●Lee Simpson, a former city councilman (who also served on the DART board until late last year), a yuppie attorney and dedicated inner city-ite who established his credentials as a tough and smart political fighter when he helped kill an unpopular plan to widen streets in his East Dallas district;

●Adlene Harrison, one of the toughest politicians in town (she had to be, to push for some of her constituencies-women, minorities, historic preservation-at a time when those issues were almost unknown on the public agenda

●Ned Fritz, a stubborn, red-headed attorney and widely respected environmentalist who once fought the City of Dallas in court, and won, over his right to grow wild native grasses (“weeds,” said the city) in his front yard;

Lori Palmer and Craig Holcomb, current members of the city council, both products of neighborhood politic;

Elsie Faye Heggins, for years a dedicated anti-establishment leader in South Dallas who found a forum for her constituency’s views on the Dallas City Counci;

Dan Weiser, a scholarly strategist and political demographer by avocation for a variety of causes and groups such as the Women’s Issue Network, Save Open Space, and the local Democratic part;

Max Goldblatt-’Mad Max,” “Monorail Max’-a longtime gadfly who became a pop hero to many citizens once he reached the city council and began espousing his cause.

These people and others like them are links in a communication network that has developed into a sophisticated political machine since the early Seventies, one that works efficiently given its lack of money. If you had to generalize about the group’s personality and priorities in August 1983, when voters approved DART’s creation, you’d have to say it was anti-roads, pro-rail transit, anti-numbers (many of them came from professional backgrounds and were more used to dealing with ideas than spread sheets), and probably anti-staff, because of its frustrations over the years in dealing with professionals at Dallas City Hall from a position of weakness. The inner-city liberals were determined to flex their muscles to influence the City Council’s appointments to the DART board. With their people in place on the board, they would have a strong hand in building the mass transit system.

Then there were the suburbanites, from towns like Carrollton, Irving, Garland, Piano, and Richardson. The list totaled thirteen names, each with his or her own agenda. Some, like Piano Mayor Jack Harvard, were extremely influential in the development of the DART service plan and in getting their citizens to support the DART idea; they were feeling the effects of urban sprawl, and they agreed on the need to do something about transit. Others had narrower, more political agendas. They wanted to see that their constituents, who had agreed to pay the one-cent sales tax for DART, got something for their money, and got it at the same time as everybody else. Some of the suburban members were suspicious of the Dallas delegation and vice versa. Some were suspicious of each other and very protective of their turf. No one should have worried-as some did- about a “suburban coalition” ever taking over and running DART.



THAT WAS THE political scene in the summer of 1983, with the three major players-the business community, the inner-city liberals, and the suburbs-eyeing each other warily. (Racial minorities, particularly blacks, were included, but never in enough numbers to affect DART’s agenda.) The voters had approved DART, and come January 1, 1984, it would begin operating. But nobody expected it to be easy-and everybody was right.

To begin with, the business community pretty much took its ball and went home, leaving the running of DART to the liberals and the suburbs. DART was going to take up a lot of time, said members of the business community, and that’s one thing that’s in very short supply for wealmy men running their own empires. So, no thanks, said the moguls. We’ve done our job. Now let someone else run the show.

The liberals had already looked around the DART board, counted heads, and seen an opportunity. They realized that although they were small in number-seven or eight votes out of twenty-five- they had more clout as a bloc than anybody else. So they were able to elect Adlene Harrison, one of their own, to the board’s chair, just as they had on the interim board. It was a significant act, for it represented the first time that the inner-city liberals had effectively taken over a policy-making public body. They hadn’t yet gained control of City Hall, but they were out to show what they could do with DART.

Adlene Harrison, perhaps the central character in the DART drama, was reluctant to take the role. “I was not too keen about going on the board when I was called.” Harrison said recently. “Because I could see the problems. Finally, I said, okay, I’ll try it.” Wes Wise, a former Dallas mayor and Harrison ally who was then an at-large member of the Dallas City Council, used his appointment to name her.

“Adlene was first elected [chair in 1983] with the help of the suburbs,” says one political operative with close ties to Harrison. “She understood that the suburbs were the stepchildren of the system, and no one was organizing them. So she did. She wanted to get DART rolling.”

Her election as chair was indicative of what was to come. “What happened is that the ruling group of seven or eight or nine would always be able to pick up another three or four or five votes or more, depending on the issue,” says the political operative. “It’s not that Adlene didn’t have some support or some loyalty in the other camps, it’s just that those other groups were so weak that they couldn’t put together a coalition.”

One of the problems that Harrison had identified earlier about DART was the size and diversity of its board (“twenty-five people, with twenty-five separate agendas,” says Dick Smith, a former Dallas City Council member and DART board member). Even her long-time critics shudder when thinking about the difficulty of the job that Harrison tackled.

Harrison used to insist that nothing-nothing-in her long and rugged political career was tougher than the situation she inherited in 1977 when she became the regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. Included in the five-state Southwest region were 75 percent of the nation’s oil refineries, 60 percent of the petrochemical plants, 50 percent of the nation’s important wetlands, and the Houston ship channel. Add to that a tradition of regional hostility to government regulation and/or “interference” and you get some idea of what Harrison faced. During a fourteen-year career on the City Plan Commission and the Dallas City Council, fighting for women and minorities and neighborhoods and environmental issues long before they were fashionable, Harrison was tough enough and savvy enough to win her share of battles. But the EPA job was harder than anything she’d encountered.

Until DART. The EPA job was “a piece of cake,” she now says flatly, compared to what she has had on her hands since becoming chair of the DART board. “There’s not an armchair general out there who’s lived through anything like this,” she says in a jab at some business leaders who’ve been critical of DART’s performance.

It’s important to understand that virtually no one in the local political and business communities disputes Harrison on that point. Try to imagine a city council made up of twenty-five single-member districts, each with an agenda of its own; add to that a notoriously impatient citizenry and the life-in-a-fishbowl environment of DART, and you begin to get an idea of the difficulty of the job.

“We’re dhe easiest game in town,” Harrison says. “We are a dart board-I field darts every day.”

She’s right. Where it was once fashionable to be pro-DART, today it’s fashionable to be a critic and doomsayer about Dallas mass transit. At least two Dallas City Council members have muttered (not for attribution, of course) that the city ought to call a referendum and vote to disband the DART board.

“They’re all good public servants, and having them on me board is a positive.” a Dallas political figure says about the “inner-city liberals” who have led DART. “But having them on the board running the show has produced what we have today. Some of them grew up and served in political environments where they could not get the staff to do what they wanted. They felt the staff was devoted to other causes and partial to other constituencies, so they developed a native suspicion to start. With DART, they saw the opportunity to finally run the show their way- and that’s what they’ve done.”

The top priority of the DART board has been to deliver on political promises, and as soon as possible, says Tom James, an attorney and veteran political worker for the business community. He served on the DART board as Dallas County’s representative-and he is, incidentally, an admirer of Harrison (“I love that lady, and I do not find it at all enjoyable that she is being subjected to the kind of criticism that she is receiving. She has the same attachment to DART as she would to a child”).

“Lee Simpson, Dick Smith, John Tatum, Tom Taylor, Adlene. .. they were all saying that we have got to build the system quickly, because they had spent a year selling this program to the voters. They believe that we’ve got to get a rail line started up as soon as possible so the people can see how a rait system is going to work,’1 says James, who sees the DART service plan as a “carefully honed document” that protects homeowners in general and East Dallas in particular. James and others believe that the inner-city liberals are looking after their first priority: the commitments made to people there and in other areas-such as along the MKT railroad line through Oak Lawn and along North Central Expressway. It was the determination to meet those commitments and introduce rail transit as soon as possible that fueled DART in the fall of 1983 and early 1984 as it began the work of implementing its service plan.

The DART board’s goal, as set out in the service plan, was to construct a “model mass transit system over the next twenty-six years,” at a cost of $8.75 billion. It would begin with an expansion of the existing bus system and its introduction in the suburbs, a program that would double the size of the existing bus fleet by the end of 1986. Meanwhile, technical planning would proceed for the eventual construction of a rail transit system that by the year 2010 would extend 140 miles throughout the county like a metal cobweb. Carter had been told to start hiring for some key positions, and board members were starting a round of out-of-town trips throughout North America and to Europe to look at various rail systems. They were spending money.



Today, almost three years into the DART experience, it’s almost impossible to find someone who will point a finger and say who was responsible for drawing up the financial plan that was to support all this. It’s not hard at all, though, to find people who say they became suspicious of the numbers almost immediately.

“There was a separate document called the financial analysis with the Final Service Plan that few people ever saw,” says Bill Freeman, DART’s current finance director and one of the system’s senior staffers. Before joining DART in May 1985, he was director of financial services for the Texas Municipal Power Agency, a part-owner in the exorbitantly expensive, still-incomplete Comanche Peak nuclear power plant in Glen Rose-which is where, he says, that he learned never to trust an engineer again.

“The most striking thing about it is that the policies that were espoused in DART’s Final Service Plan are incongruent with some of the financial analysis.” The analysis, he says, was based on the transit system in San Diego, while the service plan wasn’t.

Today, when Freeman flips through pages of numbers and compares them with the Final Service Plan, he comes across lines that say it will take “more than one hundred buses to serve the suburbs.” Actually, it has taken more than 204 buses, more than double that estimate. The plan called for fares to be increased at a gradual rate that would enable DART, in the year 2000, to collect 50 percent of its operating costs from the fare box. “The numbers show that it’s somewhere near 65 percent. That’s pie in the sky,” Freeman says.

Freeman says some of the financial people working on the DART project knew in November or December of 1984 that there was a serious problem with the numbers; it’s conceivable, given the heavy board involvement in DART’s management, that some of the board members did too.

Freeman says personnel from Goldman Sachs and Peat Marwick put together a proforma as part of some financial work to sell cash management bonds. The premise behind the numbers was to borrow a lot of money in the first five years to get construction going. The calculations show mat the debt service would have been so enormous the system could not have been completed, he says.

“Goldman Sachs was the voice of reason,” Freeman says. “They said you can’t borrow this much this early without handicapping yourself long term.”

A formal report containing the numbers and addressed to the DART Board is in Freeman’s files. Says Freeman of the board members; “They either didn’t believe [the report] or didn’t pick up on the trend.” Freeman adds, “The fault hasn’t been all the board’s. A lot has been the staff not putting it in the right context.”

Tom James, who is remembered by DART board members and others as a lonely voice in the wilderness during his board tenure, is blunt about his suspicions. “They [the DART staff] knew the numbers were flawed,” says James, who regularly found himself on the short end of 24-1 votes. “I think they knew that we did not have the financial capability to build the system.”

Other DART board members echo James’s words, and it’s clear that they believe Executive Director Maurice Carter was the one who should have reconciled the DART dream with the fiscal reality. Time and again, they say, they expressed to the staff what board member Dick Smith called “very widespread unease” about the numbers and the long-term effects of their spending decisions-and got no answers. So when Carter resigned, says Adlene Harrison, the board concluded “almost unanimously” that his successor needed strong financial skills.

It wasn’t just the numbers that had some of the board members uneasy. Carter was slow in pulling together a staff, for one thing, and that only made some of the more aggressive board members anxious. Their style-direct, sometimes abrupt-became apparent early, too. They wanted to get on with the job, and they were leaning on Carter to move faster.

“Maurice was an engineer, not a manager,” says one DART veteran. “He was a good engineer, too. He would have been a great project director. But he didn’t have the ability to assess the situation. I don’t think he realized the magnitude of the job, and some of the board members saw that right away.”’

Finally, on June 19,1984, only six months into DART’s official life. Carter resigned. The board knew what it wanted in a replacement-a skilled and experienced manager with some financial experience-and it set out in search of that person. It also assumed the actual operating authority for DART, through a system of committees; George Bonna, a quiet and unassuming professional who had headed the technical team under Carter, became the interim executive director, but everyone knew that the real power lay with the board.

“George couldn’t make any major decisions and he wasn’t able to provide any staff leadership for that reason,” says one veteran DART observer, “Adlene didn’t like the staff, and once she said something insulting about the staff, then the other board members felt as though it was okay for them to say the same things. The staff was working twelve hours a day, but they were being eaten up and spit out in public by the board.”

“The communication wasn’t good,” says one political leader who has been involved with DART since its creation. “The staff was leaderiess, its morale was bad, and so the staff started doing mediocre work. Board members recognized it and jumped them even harder.”

Word about staff-bashing at DART, particularly by some of the inner-city liberals, got around pretty quickly, as did a general impression that DART was not a pleasant place to work. “The board was looking aggressively for a top-notch executive director and some good transit people, but those are pretty small professional communities,” says one transportation specialist. “It didn’t take any time at all for the stories about how the staff was being treated to get around-and I’m talking about getting around the world, you understand. The worst aspect of the situation here, though, was that no one in his right mind wants to work for twenty-five bosses. The longer that the search lasted, the more the board wanted to run the show, and that only made their own situation worse.”

Meanwhile, there was a transit system to build and operate, and the board was marching ahead with determination. The bus program had been introduced on January 18, 1984, the first day the system began collecting the one-cent sales tax, with a series of fare reductions. By August the system had been beefed up through the introduction of new off-peak service and additional buses. Construction had begun on a giant bus maintenance and operating facility near Bachman Lake. A month later, nonstop express bus service between downtown and nine suburban cities was introduced.

September was also the month that the board decided upon a form of light rail called Pre-Metro as the mode of rail that DART would use in its more than 140-mile system. Pre-Metro is the most sophisticated and expensive form of light rail existing today; it is the last step up the ladder before heavy rail. The target date for the beginning of construction was early 1986, so the board’s attention turned to the critical decision of how best to do it, in a manner that would please the broadest constituency and still keep to the schedule that was promised to voters.



The pace was almost frantic. Gorman Gilbert, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a consultant to DART in 1985, recalls me pressure: “Everything was being done at one time, at a very fast clip, in a ’do-it-today’ time frame. There was a lot of concern [on the part of DART board members] that the public was getting concerned over when they were going to start seeing results.” The board, says Gilbert, was determined to prove that DART was not going to be a public-sector boondoggle, and they kept pushing the staff to move faster.

The staff had problems of its own. “[The board members] were dealing with a situation where everybody was new,” says Gilbert. “It’s easy to forget that some of the new staffers were new to Dallas, not just to DART. Almost everyone there was trying to find his place in the system and respond to the board at the same time.”

By late 1984, the numbers were beginning to look funny, especially those related to the bus system. “By the time we took all of the routes on the Final Service Plan and put them in the street, it took more miles to do it.” savs Michael York, a senior DART staffer. “When we got to the technical level of scheduling service, that’s when it began to fall out.”

DART needed a strong executive director in the worst way, but the search dragged on into 1985. More than 180 potential successors to Carter were approached, but none would commit. More than ever, the board was involving itself in the minutiae that otherwise would have been left to the staff-selecting uniforms for bus drivers, for instance, and personally picking out seat fabrics for the buses. Board members were complaining, too, about the clumsiness of the committee system; some felt that they were isolated from information, while others said they weren’t comfortable with what they were hearing.

The community was also showing signs of uneasiness. Business and civic leaders who were trying to keep abreast of DART’s progress were not encouraged when they heard stories about the board members’ depth of involvement in operating the system. Taxpayers who read stories about suburban buses running virtually empty began to | complain about wastefulness. The black community was bothered by the board’s preoccupation with expansion of the suburban bus system, while South Dallas buses were running full and often crowded. The news media’s honeymoon with DART was coming to an end.



Finally, on June 25, 1985. the DART board agreed upon a successor to Carter-a combative and experienced city administrator named Ted Tedesco, a deceptively mild-looking man with an East Coast-blunt ’ style who at that time was an administrator at the University of Colorado. Tedesco looked perfect. It had taken a year to find him, however, and the cost in terms of local support was considerable. “That situation was inexcusable,” says one Dallas political leader. “It was explainable, certainly, but still inexcusable-the best people in the industry turned Dallas down again and again, because of the way the board members treated people who were already here. The DART board created its own problem.”

Tedesco arrived just in time to witness the watershed event of DART’s young life-its | fall from grace, the moment when the public image of DART finally turned from positive to negative. It occurred at a workshop on July 19, 1985, at the Dallas Sheraton Hotel. The board and staff had gathered there to hear a presentation on two crucial plans- the rail system plan for downtown and the rail linkage to that area from North Central Expressway.

Freeman, who’d been on the job only a few weeks, decided that it was his job to run the numbers to see how well DART was doing and report on the results. So, a couple of nights before the workshop, he sat at his computer terminal in the DART offices, called up the appropriate program, and began plugging in numbers from DART’s months of operation. He was shocked by what he saw.

“It cratered,” Freeman says, recalling the evening. “The first time I tried to run the program with data from our operations, the computer collapsed. You had to plug in additional revenues just to get it to run. I was questioning what was going on, it was so incredible. The computer showed that we were borrowing long-term money for current operations. It’s the sort of deal where your debt service [the cost of borrowing money] goes up, which eats into current operations. So it starts compounding itself-you can’t borrow money fast enough. It’s like a pyramid scheme.”

Freeman’s report was not well-received around DART headquarters, primarily because of its timing. After many tense conversations, it was decided that the best thing to do was release it at the workshop.

The North Central tunnel and the downtown plan were supposed to be the centerpiece items of discussion (and outside scrutiny) but sure enough, it was Freeman’s report that grabbed everyone’s attention and the headlines: according to Freeman, DART was facing a $1 billion budgetary shortfall beyond the projections included in the Final Service Plan. Suddenly, the DART board and the citizens, many of them already suspicious, were being told that there probably wasn’t enough money to introduce the rail system that had been planned.

The DART board had been spending money according to a plan that was faulty, and now it was faced with the consequences. Why, though, if so many board members had been suspicious and uncomfortable with the numbers all along, did they continue to press ahead with the implementation of the system, especially the bus system? Furthermore, the board had a finance committee that was supposed to be getting answers to questions about long-term impacts and making recommendations to the full board. What had it been doing? As always, answers and villains were hard to find.

“We knew or suspected strongly long in advance of last July that the numbers were far less than what was on the Final Service Plan, what we had committed ourselves to build,” says Tom James. “That meant we either had to face up to the fact that we couldn’t build the system, or that we had to face up to the people and start making adjustments. At that point, though, it was just politically unacceptable. The board was simply unwilling to tell the public we had made a mistake.”

But others were quite willing to point out DART’s mistakes, Handicapped citizens began to press their demands for easier access to all buses. Blacks became even more vocal in insisting upon improved service on the inner-city lines, Taxpayers were anxious for some signs of economic restraint, but what they got instead were stories about DART spending $850,000 on a board room and suburban DART representatives continuing to press for expansion of a suburban bus system that was obviously wasteful.

None of those events had the impact, however, of the news from the July 19 meeting about the budget shortfall. It rattled those people who had had confidence in DART up until then, and it only served to fuel the “we-told-you-so” talk that had been pretty much confined to me sidelines since the August 1983 election. The wolves began to gather at DART’s door, and they haven’t stopped baying since.



Still, while DART richly deserves its critics, things could be much worse. Incredible as it may seem, DART has not yet made any irrevocable mistakes. The July 19 meeting was not the end of the DART dream: rather, it was the beginning of a recasting of the dream to fit it to the real world of Dallas, 1986.

Although Ted Tedesco had not yet officially reported for work at that fateful summer meeting, he was on hand to hear the presentations. He listened quietly and then told board members, the press, and public that whatever the DART board decided it wanted, it was his job to procure it. He would study the numbers and make them work.

Tedesco couldn’t have come at a more opportune time (though he might not care to depict it that way himself-he’s had some clashes with the board and he’s threatened privately to walk away from it all.) What DART needed was someone to ride to the rescue, and observers say that Tedesco, with his strong management skills, is the person to do it.

“He’s not responsible for the history, to begin with,” says one veteran DART observer. “He doesn’t have to defend either the staff or the board. If he can avoid being drawn into the ’blame game’ that the staff and the board members are playing, then he’ll be okay.”

Tedesco went right to work figuring out what was wrong. He began to look behind every figure that went into the 1983 Final Service Plan and the pro forma that supported it. He walked the preferred rights-of-way for the rail system, he looked at the chosen technology, he examined the station sites, studied the bus system. He also paid attention to the nuts and bolts of management. He looked at who had power and who didn’t.

Finally, in December, he grimly told the press of his conclusions: DART could not build what it said it could-the Pre-Metro system, on the rights-of-way designated in the Final Service Plan, with all six routes accomplished in the ten-year time frame-and continue bus service at the level the DART board had committed to. DART could not do it all at once. Bill Freeman, the boy wonder finance officer, was right. Something would have to give.

Tedesco said he would go back over the numbers and the plans and come up with something new, a revised dream, something that would work.

Meanwhile, Tedesco was moving on another front to reshape DART’s management to his liking and to take back for himself and his staff the power that he believed the board had usurped during the long search for a permanent executive director. Although Tedesco has won most of his points, it will be a continuing battle for him to regain administrative control, and his success is anything but certain.

He won a key vote allowing him to spend up to $10,000 without board approval. He got the board to disband its committees, and he got the board members to recognize that they had to look at the numbers more closely and juggle their plans if necessary.

But he lost some ground too, as the DART board recently resurrected its finance committee, appointing seventeen of its twenty-five members to it. Too, board members have sniped at Tedesco for such things as putting together a “blue-ribbon” advisory panel of business leaders to counsel him- but not them. The panel’s presence has reassured the business community but angered some board members who have been reluctant to relinquish the authority they once had in running the staff. Relations have been strained, to put it mildly, and it’s taken a lot of “counseling” with Tedesco and board members by various political and business leaders to keep tempers below the boiling point.

Which brings us to the present. Even though the revised plan has not yet been approved by the DART board, its theme is clear. Costs will be pared back in both the bus and rail operations and staging will be stretched so that the system pretty much pays for itself as it goes and keeps its borrowing to a minimum.

The bus operation, particularly in the suburbs, won’t be as extensive as the board had originally expected. Already, Tedesco has convinced the board to give the new suburban bus service just six months to prove itself. DART, he said some months ago in introducing his scheme, had set “what most transit professionals say is an overly ambitious passenger-per-mile standard,” and he intends to bring it into line.

Stewart Scott, the DART rail planner who’s helped build systems in Singapore and elsewhere, is responsible for designing the system. He says there is nothing necessarily wrong with the Final Service Plan except the tight time frame.

Some $3.5 billion to $4 billion will do the job, Scott explains in his Scottish accent-but not if it’s done with borrowed dollars. The interest would eat up most of the money. So, to squeeze more service out of the first few dollars, Scott and Tedesco are tinkering with a lower mode, like “featherweight” rail. It’s more like a trolley and it runs on the public streets and utility rights-of-way, thereby avoiding enormous outlays of money to purchase existing railroad lines.

Featherweight rail would save us about 10 percent and some DART staffers like the idea, because it could mean service would come to more areas more quickly; everybody would be made happier sooner, in other words. But that doesn’t go down well with staff members, inner-city liberals, and other citizens who are still insisting oh a quality rail system. They see featherweight as more suited to a suburban environment, not a densely populated inner city. They still want Pre-Metro.



Tedesco’s attention since he arrived last September has been directed at one moment-the workshop held in May in which the DART board and the public got the status report on DART and his recommendations about what to do next. What will the reaction be? As D went to press, insiders were betting the proposals would trigger another debate and vote on the subway plan for Central Expressway and the downtown rail interconnect. There will be another agonizing debate over the Pre-Metro rail mode, too. And there will be a struggle over rights-of-way changes, including public hearings and votes by city councils.

Even more importantly, there may be demands that the board ask the voters to approve any bonds before they are issued. The law doesn’t require such approval, but some people may insist on it as the ultimate litmus test of the community’s resolve to push forward with mass transit after initial stumblings and embarrassment.

Such a bond election could prove fatal to DART. It would open all of the system’s previous commitments, political deals, and detailed planning to debate-something DART might not be able to survive. DART itself, in other words, could collapse or unravel. It’s a house built of political commitments-to the suburbs, to the inner-city neighborhoods, to all voters-which the DART board has tried to meet while dealing with a faulty set of numbers.

Stewart Scott has blunt words of advice: bite the bullet. Leave no assumption unexamined. “One thing we should do quickly is get started on it, whatever it is, so we can get some real figures,” he says. “At the moment, we’re all adjusting things without getting much more information than we did six months ago. The one thing we are really missing here is hard information, and we won’t have it until we do something.”

He adds that DART should be prepared to introduce the rail system more slowly than originally planned. “A major project takes time to get into it far enough to enable you to see if it all works,” he says.

Scott is advocating patience, in other words, and so are others across the political spectrum. Walt Humann reminds critics that plans are just that-plans, put together with the expectation that some things will likely change. Dallas and its suburban neighbors can still get to where they decided in 1983 they wanted to go, these voices are saying, but we need to talk about it now, plan in more detail for it now.

The DART service plan is not the only thing likely to change soon. Dallas Mayor Starke Taylor, for one, says he sees a need for closer involvement and communication-jawboning, maybe?-between the Dallas City Council and its DART appointees, and he’ll be calling a joint workshop meeting of the two bodies once the DART board’s May workshop on the service plan is finished.

Taylor is meeting with other mayors, too, informally and through the Metroplex Mayors Committee, to see if a joint strategy on DART issues can be developed. “It’s not easy,” he says. “There are some tradeoffs to be made. But we’re all in this together and we’ve got to cooperate at every level to accomplish the goal.” (Apparently, the mayors’ group means business. Earlier this year, when several of the suburban DART representatives were pushing for implementation of the next stage of the suburban bus system, the mayors unanimously urged its postponement. The board ignored the message and introduced phase two of the suburban bus plan on April 21-but the mayors had let it be known that the folks back home were going to be paying a little closer attention to DART than before.)

Taylor also hopes to persuade the Texas Legislature to make some changes in the appointments process that puts members on the DART board. The DART terms are only one year in length, while all other municipal board and commission appointments are for two years, “It takes a DART board member at least six months to Figure out what’s going on,” Taylor says, “and by then they’re halfway through their term, with no guarantee of being reappointed. I’d like to see them have two-year terms.”

And Taylor also says that council members should consider more than political payoffs when making appointments to the DART board. “I think you’ve got to consider politics in terms of your appointments. But the council needs to know that there are other considerations of extreme importance when it comes to this particular board,” he says. “There is no more important appointment that a council member can make than the one he or she makes to DART, and we’ve got to understand that,”

Those are encouraging words indeed to those who think DART has not yet run off the road and still can get to where it says it plans to go.

“That’s what I want to hear” says one worried Dallas business leader. “We’ve got to get involved on our end, we know that, but we’ve got to have the opportunity to serve. To this day, the business community is still not totally understanding of the complexities and importance of a public transportation system. If the Dallas City Council and the other city councils don’t see the importance of this in terms of the appointments that they’ll all be making this summer, then they deserve the blame.”

Key Players In The Transit Game



1 ADLENE HARRISON-scrappy populist trailblazer whose attachment to DART goes beyond civic duty. DART chairmanship is the mayor’s office that she never ran for. 2 MARY ELLEN DEGNAN-a “’histo-presso’” (historical preservation) enthusiast who owes her political career to Adlene Harrison. 3 JOHN TATUM-Stanford man who wants Dallas to be Boston. As a key developer in Deep Ellum, he would benefit if the trains ran his way. 4 TOM TAYLOR-an engineer’s engineer who sees DART as the toy train set he never owned. A key supporter of Adlene Harrison. 5 LEE SIMPSON-former law partner of Democratic honcho Bob Strauss who hopes to spring from DART (and past service on the city council) to the mayor’s office. 6 DICK SMITH-a compulsive public servant with rare transportation know-how; one of the only links to the ill-fated LSTA.

7 TOM JAMES-a North Dallas lawyer, Harrison admirer, and more often than not, “a lonely voice in the wilderness” of the DART board. 8 RAY NOAH-former mayor and present high priest of Richardson who headed up DART’s critical-and often-criticized-finance committee. 9 DAN MATKIN-former mayor of Irving; vice-chair of the DART board and the board’s strongest advocate of the suburban bus plan. 10 HOWARD PUTNAM and 11 AL CASEY-the Dallas business establishment’s best and brightest hopes for the DART board; neither stayed long enough to warm up their chairs. 12 J.B. JACKSON-the voice of the minority community and a close ally of former Dallas city councilwoman Elsie Faye Heggins; tried to throw a monkey wrench into the Final Service Plan in an attempt to wresle more concessions for South Dallas.

The DART Index Of Crucial Numbers



A comparison of DART’s original financial projections with blunt reality offers indisputable proof that somebody, somewhere, screwed up.



Number of new buses in the 1983 Final Service Plan: more than 100.

Actual number of new suburban local buses: 204.



Projected cost of bus service for 1986 as listed in 1983 DART pro forma (revised upward for inflation): $82.6 million.

Revised projected cost of systenwide bus service for 1986: $118 million.



Fare income projection for year 2000 from 1983 Final Service Plan approved by voters: 50 percent or more of operating costs.

Fare income projection for year 2000 from accompanying 1983 pro forma: 66.8 percent.

Fare income projection for 1997 from same pro forma: 61.2 percent.

Fare income for 1986 projected in Final Service Plan: 45 percent.

Fare income for same year projected in accompanying pro forma: 38 percent.

Fare income projection for 1985 from 1983 pro forma (adjusted for inflation to FY 1985): $28.35 million.

Actual 1985 income from fares: $25 million.



Rail construction cost from 1983 pro forma. 160 miles (adjusted for inflation to 1986): $4,238 billion.

Revised rail construction cost including upgrade to Pre-Metro rail mode (147 miles): $5 billion.



Administration costs from 1983 Final Service Plan: $2.36 million each year.

Administration costs, budgeted for 1986: $14 million.



Grants from federal government projected in 1983 pro forma: $594 million.

Grants from federal government from 1985 projections: $188 million.



Interest expense through year 2010 from 1983 pro forma: $228 million.

Interest expense from 1985 revisions for same period: $1,390 billion.

What We Must Do To Save DART

1. Break up the ruling cabal. We must have a board that is better balanced between “bean-counters” and visionaries; we need more business minds and fewer backyard revolutionaries.

2. Support the efforts of Executive Director Ted Tedesco, in public and in private. If Tedesco is pushed to the point of resigning, we’ll be back to square one, looking for a leader who can manage a billion-dollar business.

3. Abandon any effort to lobby the legislature for a smaller board. Yes, the twenty-five-member body is unwieldy and politicized. But to do away with it would be to open a Pandora’s box and further delay the real business of DART

4. Buy as much quality as we can afford. Let the trade-offs come in staging. In other words, if it’s going to take twenty years to build Pre-Metro rail instead of ten, we’ll wait.

5. Keep the staff small, but don’t skimp on in-house superisors for paid consultants and engineers. The lean and mean concept sounds good, but only to a point.

6. Disband the board’s finance committee. Let the staff run the financial operation and let it run the numbers at least once a month. DART could have saved itself a lot of grief had it done that from the start.

7. Continue to keep the bus system in line with demand. Auto-driven Dallas doesn’t need a bus service that exceeds every other major metropolitan area in the U.S. Especially when it jeopardizes the pursuit of rail.

8. Don’t cut back on marketing. We’ve learned the costs of failing to capture the public’s imagination the hard way.

9. Stop the “staff-bashing.” The board’s role is one of setting policy and maintaining thoughtful vigilance.

10 Look locally for engineering, architectural, construction, and other expertise. What better way to build support for DART than by giving Dallas-based businesses a financial stake in its future?

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