Dallas: The City That Doesn’t Work
People who deal with our city government tell me things have come to a standstill. Here’s why—and how to fix it.
Our city is stalled. Seventy years after the reforms of the Progressive Era brought the council-manager form of government to Dallas, here’s how our city now operates. The mayor is campaigning for re-election against the city manager, whom she wants to fire, while most members of the city council—each representing tiny little slivers of the city, gerrymandered by race—are campaigning for re-election against the mayor, although privately admitting that they, too, might want to fire the city manager, except for the Hispanics, who could never vote to fire the city manager because he’s Hispanic, just like the black council members who routinely rally around the police chief for no other reason than he’s black.
In a system like this, when you have a political master like Ron Kirk as mayor, with a decisive city manager like John Ware, things get done. When you have a political neophyte like Laura Miller as mayor, with a timeserver like Ted Benavides as city manager, nothing gets done. A system that depends on personalities is not a good system. The 14-1 council system was imposed on Dallas by judicial fiat and won’t be changed in our lifetimes. The charter review commission can only tinker around the edges.
So we’re stuck.
But the Progressive Era left us another big fat problem, and this one we aren’t stuck with.
Most of government takes place on subterranean levels that TV cameras don’t penetrate and editorialists never see. In the bowels of City Hall, the world is completely different from the world you and I know. Here the normal rules are suspended. Within those magic walls is an entirely different plane of existence governed by two enchanted words: civil service.
Unlike every other major city in Texas, Dallas’ civil service is embedded in the city charter. The Progressive reformers insisted on it. But what civil service means today is a far cry from what those reformers had in mind. Basically, the law in place bestows a “property right” on a city job. That means the most incompetent employee of the City of Dallas is protected under the 14th Amendment. The practical upshot is that nobody can be fired without months and months of work and major expense. When the competent are forced to work alongside the incompetent, Gresham’s Law takes over—bad people drive out the good.
But here’s the good news: civil service is a problem we can fix. Its provisions in the city charter can be repealed by a simple vote. Every recent study shows that abolishing civil service almost guarantees an immediate improvement in city services.
In 1280, the Mongol dynasty founded by the great Kublai Khan abolished China’s famed, but heavily encrusted, centuries-old civil service. A cultural flowering and economic boom followed that has never been surpassed in Chinese history. In 1992, the City of Chicago abolished its civil service. The last decade has seen the biggest boom in Chicago’s history—which is why Boeing chose to relocate to Chicago instead of Dallas. The governors of Hawaii and Massachusetts, the two most liberal states in the Union, this year have publicly committed to abolishing civil service. Texas abolished its form of civil service for state employees in 1985.
Here’s how to tell which candidates in the May election want to make Dallas a city that works. Ask them if they’ll vote to amend the city charter to repeal civil service. Let’s liberate our best city workers—and let them put our city back to work.
