In May 1982, Frank Bodzin was arrested for criminal trespassing in front of a Skaggs Albertson’s, where he was collecting signatures for a City Charter referendum to force Dallas to give homeowners the full 40 percent homestead tax exemption allowed under state law rather than the 5 percent recommended by then-Cily Manager Charles Anderson. The store manager called the police, who arrested Bodzin. A judge later threw out the case, Bodzin sued the city for false arrest, and a jury awarded him $10,000. But, Bodzin says, the presiding judge threw out the award and told Bodzin and his attorney not to tell any of the jurors that the award had been thrown out. “That’s when I found out,” says Bodzin, ’”that the constitutional process doesn’t apply in Dallas.” That incident was the first and only time that Frank Bodzin, now seventy-three, has ever been arrested. But i( wasn’t the first time, or the last, that he has gone hardhead-to-hardhead against the city of Dallas.
Bodzin moved to Dallas thirty years ago to found the Dallas Hosiery Company. He sold the company in 1979 and retired. That’s when he picked up his “hobby” of being a council gadfly and the village crier for tax reform. He won the homestead exemption battle of 1982 by gathering enough signatures-almost 70,000-to force the council to honor the 40 percent homestead tax exemption (it since has been lowered to 20 percent by state law). Bodzin opposed DART from the beginning, and last fall he filed a petition to recall Mayor Annette Strauss because she didn’t fire City Manager Richard Knight or City Attorney Analeslie Muncy over the Starplex contract mess. Bodzin says the lack of supervision by Knight and Muncy over the negotiations of the contract proves that they’re incompetent and ought to be fired. In 1983 he ran for an at-large seat on the council and got 4 percent of the vote. He’s not sure if he’ll do it again.
“Frank is not a screwball,” says City Council member Jerry Rucker. “He’s a little bit of a one-noter. He’s got his mind made up when he comes down to City Hall, but he certainly doesn’t abuse the privilege of addressing the council.” But do council members ever listen to him? “Well,” says Rucker, uncharacteristically hesitant. “I guess they could if they wanted to.” Bodzin, however, says they never seem to listen to him. He’s even stopped his public speeches to ask for the attention of the council. “But I don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t expect to.”
Bodzin sees himself as a one-man crusader against governmental greed and political apathy in the city. He says that the educational system is falling apart, that drugs and poverty have taken over South Dallas, and that [he city is still being controlled by the white businessmen of the Dallas Citizens Council. “I think the City Council goes along with everything the Dallas Citizens Council wants.” he says. “That may have been the right thing to do ten years ago. but it’s not today. I think the council means well, but this isn’t a dictatorship.” Bodzin’s latest battle is with the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce, which, he says, is taking money from the city and DISD and doesn’t account for it. “They won’t tell me how they spend it,” Bodzin says. “I’m the only one who ever questions it. I’m the only one who seems to care.”
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