Or, as Rudy Bush at Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper now calls him, “Yes I’m still” Mayor Tom Leppert.

What will we miss? Leppert’s ability to turn every piece of bad news into another “Ho hum, why are we worrying about this?” moment. The most recent occurred during Wednesday’s discussion of the potential $96 million deficit in next year’s budget. Said the mayor: “There’s no budget process in the world that doesn’t start with a lot more wants than we have resources. And that’s the situation that we have here.”

All we want in Dallas is to fix the pot holes and keep enough cops on the street to worry the criminals a little. Who knew that was “a lot more wants”?

Unfortunately, I’m on a wine trip next week and won’t be able to keep up with all this hilarity. But Wamre has promised to take notes for me, and I’m sure there will be plenty for me to write about when I return.

Of course, he’s the only council member who has officially announced he will run for mayor, but Ron Natinksy already has raised about $76,000 for his campaign, according to the DMN. Finance reports show he has another $116,000 available in campaign accounts.

As we’ve discussed here on the blog, Tom Leppert has said he will not run for re-election, and our neighborhood councilman has been quick to show his interest in taking the seat.

That’s the worst case scenario for 2011-12, courtesy of the city manager’s office and which the City Council will discuss today (click on the link that says “Budget Workshop #2″ for a PDF).

Not to worry, though. The best case scenario is only a $41 million deficit. That’s because, of course, this is The Decade of Dallas. Imagine how much worse it would be if this was The Decade of Altoona, Pa.

It’s too early in the budget process to do more than look at the presentation and hope things get better, in much the same way a poker player tries to draw two cards to a straight when he’s facing three aces. The only thing that seems certain is that the final budget will be somewhere around where it was in 2006-07 — which means we’ve spent five years spending money that we really didn’t have. Which makes my head hurt, actually.

Mayor Park Cities says “I have concluded that it is time to explore other ways I can serve the people of Dallas and Texas. Consequently, I will not seek re-election.”

The rest of his blog post is the usual sort of political tomfoolery — taking credit for Dallas’ vibrant downtown, the improved performance of the DISD, and a bunch of other things that aren’t necessarily true but sound good. The commercial office vacancy rate downtown is around 20 percent; if that’s vibrant, I’d hate to see what less than vibrant looks like.

Right now, the mayoral race looks like a chair-throwing, eye-gouging cage match between Far North Dallas councilman Ron Natinsky, who has officially declared, and M Streets councilwoman Angela Hunt, who has given signs she will run. Why a cage match? Because those two really don’t like each other, if their exchanges during council meetings are any indication.

Leppert still won’t say if he is going to run for the U.S. Senate. No doubt he is waiting for the front-runner, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, to drop out and give Leppert his blessing.

Or so a lot of people are saying. Gromer Jeffers Jr. reports in Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper that Mayor Park Cities won’t run for re-election.

Leppert declined to comment for the story, but most everyone Jeffers talked to said Leppert isn’t going to run — and that they were surprised by the decision. So am I, since I fully expected the mayor to run this spring. A friend of mine, who often hangs out in city big-wig circles, says he has seen Leppert everywhere over the past six months, shaking hands, greeting well-wishers and the like. “He looks like he just eats that stuff up,” he told me when we talked about this last month.

Jeffers reports that neighborhood councilman Ron Natinsky is one of the front-runners to replace Leppert. First, though, Natinsky is going to have to mend his fences south of the Trinity River and in East Dallas, where his staunch support of Leppert over the past four years has not won him many friends.

So why isn’t Leppert going to run for re-election, which he could win easily? Because he has looked at the next four years, and has not seen many opportunities to bask in the political sunshine. The council rebellion over last fall’s property tax rate increase was a shock, and the budget news is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The days of toll roads and convention center hotels are long over, and the next mayor won’t be building anything. He or she will almost certainly be presiding over a council that will have to cut and cut some more. Leppert no doubt wants to be as far away from that as possible.

I know 148 murders sounds like quite a few, but according to statistics released by the city, that’s the lowest number of murders in Dallas since 1967 (our high was 500 in 1991).

Mayor Tom Leppert praised himself and the council for continuing to fund more beat cops even as the city budget tightened, according to the DMN, while city manager Mary Suhm praised the police department for its efforts.

Without taking anything away from our city leaders, of course, the number of murders seems to be falling nationwide in major citiies; some experts credit improved medical care, some point to more cops on the streets (like we have here in Dallas), and others credit a “stabilizing” drug market (the crack dealers have sorted out who’s in charge of what parts of the city, so they don’t need to kill each other as often anymore).

So who is still getting murdered in Dallas? Statistics show that 90 percent of the 148 people murdered were black or Hispanic, 87 percent were male and 65 percent were 34 or younger.

The good news is that home prices in the neighborhood look like they’ve reached bottom, according to several real estate types I’ve talked to this week. The other good news? Our housing bust, as bad as it has been, hasn’t been nearly as bad as that in the rest of the country.

The bad news? Recovery may take another two or three years — and, says, Jim Gaines, PhD, a research economist at Texas A&M’s Real Estate Center, recovery doesn’t mean the prices that we saw at the peak of the boom. Rather, it means returning to the home values of 2004 and 2005, before the boom started.

And the other bad news? City officials are going to have to figure out a way to make ends meet under those conditions. That means more budget cutting, even after the real estate market returns to normal, given that the property tax accounts for about 43 percent of the city’s revenue. So, unless the people downtown can figure out a way to do more with less (something they have not shown any ability to do) or find more programs to cut (and there isn’t much left to cut), we’re looking at the possibility of regular property tax rate increases.

Yes, Gaines’ assessment is quite gloomy — and surprising, actually, given that the city manager and Mayor Park Cities have assured us that last summer’s budget woes were not necessarily permanent, and would melt away in the “Decade of Dallas.” That’s something to keep in mind when Leppert — or any other establishment candidate — starts waxing poetic about revenue in the runup to this spring’s council elections.

In response to the fatal accident on the Katy Trail a couple of months ago, the city has announced a new trail safety plan, according to District 14 Councilman Angela Hunt. Following the accident, Hunt says, she challenged Friends of the Katy Trail, park staff, public works staff and police to come up with an immediate action plan to address trail safety within 45 days. The plan they have outlined will impact not only Katy Trail but also White Rock and all of Dallas’ trails.

Immediate improvements include increased police presence on Katy trail, restriping Katy trail, updating trail-safety guidelines, improvements at street crossings near Katy. For the longer term, a Trail Safety advisory Committee has formed to discuss topics such as width, separation and other design elements on all trails, user behavior regulations, necessary/applicable city ordinances and enforcement. The City will also launch a “dynamic advertising campaign” to promote safety.

I’ve always thought public education was a big part of making the trails safer — we see a lot of simple ignorance of the rules out there — so hopefully something productive will come out of all this. And I saw no mention of speed limits for cyclists, which may or may not make you happy. You can read more about the plan on Hunt’s website/blog.

During a meeting Monday night, the Richardson City Council is likely to vote in favor of a three-month moratorium on commercial development along Spring Valley Road. Only residential projects could go forward, the DMN reports.

Supporters say the moratorium is essential as the city implements its massive redevelopment plan for the corridor, from Coit to Central Expressway. This will allow officials to stop all building permits, zoning changes and other development so they can improve current ordinances and come up with new ones for the redevelopment, which has been on the books for over a year. Dallas joined the discussion to revitalize its side of the corridor in June.

The redevelopment plan would transform the area, removing rundown apartments and increasing property value.

The moratorium would last until March but could be extended even further.

It’s not exactly the shot heard round the world, but neighborhood resident Allen Gwinn is in the news again, this time as he attempts to put together a city ballot referendum to permanently lower city property taxes and require voters to approve future increases.

WFAA reports that Gwinn has put together a website — taxrollback.org — and he’s attempting to raise money to fund obtaining enough signatures for his proposed ballot referendum. According to the story, Gwinn wants to roll the city’s property tax take back from the current 79 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value to 59 cents per hundred dollars — a number Gwinn says is more in line with neighboring suburbs such as Plano, McKinney and Allen.

The website is worth visiting — it will take all of about five minutes to read the entire thing, and his arguments are rationally framed. It also makes Gwinn’s goals pretty clear — roll back the tax rate and ensure that any future increases are on the same ballot with the city council races. Gwinn’s reasoning is hard to dispute: If we’re voting on a tax rate increase at the same time we’re voting on council reps, it shouldn’t take a genius to match which politicians favor tax increases and then vote accordingly.

Gwinn is using the same electoral process utilized by those opposed to the Trinity Tollroad, those who fought the Downtown convention center hotel and those who favored the recent wet-dry vote. Knowing we’ll vote on tax increases certainly will focus politicians’ attention on how much is getting spent downtown.

My only dispute with Gwinn’s reasoning here is that he seems to base the entire project on his feeling that the council members who voted for the recent tax increase were cavalier with their votes. I still am not quite sure what I think of the tax increase, but I’m satisfied that the people who voted in favor of it put plenty of thought into their decision.

No matter, though — Gwinn is using the system the way it’s intended.

I’m not usually a big fan of high-dollar studies commissioned by the City Council, but one currently being considered could be an exception. A study of city employee pay and pensions, analyzing what’s being paid now and how it compares with the private sector and other public employers, is needed to ensure that we aren’t needlessly burning money Downtown.

Now before you get all cranked up about what I’m advocating, hear this: I’m not suggesting changing anything for employees already employed by the city and promised a certain level of pay and pension.

But I’m pretty sure the study will find two things: 1) the city’s private pension plan is needlessly generous and hideously expensive compared with putting employees in the Social Security plan with most of the rest of us, and 2) we could very well be overpaying new city employees relative to the private sector for similar jobs.

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Plenty of people took issue with the way that the Dallas Housing Authority (DHA) announced plans this spring to move formerly incarcerated and homeless residents into five Dallas apartment complexes. They argued that they were taken by surprise, and that they weren’t included in the process.

I remember reading a DMN story quoting DHA CEO MaryAnn Russ, in which Russ expressed that she wished the agency had talked to neighbors about the plans before the locations were announced. But, referring to neighbors’ responses to the news, she said, “I’m not heartened to believe it would’ve somehow been different.”

True? We may be about to find out. Neighbors in Oak Cliff and Lake Highlands have pressed the DHA and the city to evenly spread subsidized housing residents throughout Dallas and into the suburbs (previous posts in this series explained new DHA efforts in this regard as well as obstacles to the ideal), and to communicate better with impacted neighborhoods.

Russ pledged to do this at the most recent city council housing committee meeting, as reported by the DMN’s Kim Horner, stating that as the DHA seeks proposal requests for 350 more supportive housing units (starting this week), it would notify councilmen and neighborhood leaders early in the process when a program site is found.”One of the things we’re going to try to do is not take anybody by surprise,” Russ said. “At the same time, we’ve got a job to do, and we’re going to do it.”

Russ mentioned to us at last week’s Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce quality of life committee meeting that councilmen Dave Neumann and Jerry Allen were present during the housing committee meeting, but on this occasion, no city officials were calling on Russ to hold up or pull out of housing units.

“It was all sweetness and light,” Russ quipped. The reason? Through permanent supportive housing efforts, both this spring and the 350 that will be announced in December, the DHA is providing homes for 500-plus individuals and families who are formerly incarcerated or homeless. “Everybody realized we have bailed their butts out,” Russ said. “If we didn’t do this, the city would have to, and in this fiscal year, that’s a big deal.”

After we observed Russ at the committee meeting, it became more evident why she may rub some people the wrong way. Her language is a bit spicy, and she has the tendency to append conciliatory comments with defensive statements (see above). She’s a tough cookie — one hint of this was the 25-year-old Lucchese boots she donned with her pantsuit — and she has to be. Russ was hired as CEO of the DHA in February 2009 after a series of money problems plagued the agency. She told the DMN’s Horner that her specialty is fixing broken housing problems, and that “we want the agency to be something the city can be proud of.”

Russ told us she understands that neighbors may be distrusting of the DHA, especially based on past indiscretions. But she said she has a harder time understanding why people get so upset when the agency is trying to do the right thing.

As we’ve mentioned previously in this series, the DHA does not need the city’s approval to give people a roof over their heads. But Russ is not an idiot. She knows it is in her best interest to work with city leaders and communicate with neighbors about subsidized housing projects — and if she somehow didn’t know that before this spring, she knows it now. However, from everything we’ve read and observed, it appears that Russ may be more concerned with the best interests of people who need homes than with how other people — including Dallas councilmen — perceive her.

If the city wants to pressure Russ and the DHA to spread the poor, so to speak, perhaps the best method is via the DHA board — five members who oversee the agency, each appointed by the mayor. Keep reading Back Talk for more on this topic.