This week’s beginning of filing for the May city council elections didn’t reveal any great surprises. Most of the people who said they were going to run (which we’ve covered here, here and here) are still going to do it.

What I was curious about was if there would be any sort of anti-mayor faction lining up to oppose the mayor’s allies on the council. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Some of Leppert’s most reliable supporters, like Jerry Allen in Lake Highlands, don’t have an opponent yet. In fact, if anything, one of the members who has every once in a while opposed the mayor, Vonciel Jones Hill in District 5, may have an opponent. That’s former Dallas Park Board member Tiffinni Young, who is an ally of councilman Dwaine Carraway, perhaps Leppert’s biggest supporter on the council.

When the filing season ends in March, I’ll take another look at this and try to figure out what the next council could look like.

A roundup of stuff that wouldn’t necessarily make it on the blog, but is worth noting:

• Think your electricity rates have increased substantially over the past decade? You’re right – they have, according to a new study by a coalition of more than 100 Texas cities, including Fort Worth and Arlington. The 82-page study said that 10 years of electricity rate deregulation in Texas have “have increased by a greater percentage than in any other deregulated state with retail competition.” This is not news here, of course. We’ve suspected that prices were surprisingly high for quite a while.

• Wamre wrote about the success of the city’s 311 program last week, and his experience looks even better compared to New York City. In New York City, it takes a year to fix a street light. Or, as the New York Times described the effort: “But the story also illustrates the hair-pulling frustrations ordinary citizens often experience in getting potholes filled or obnoxious noises silenced and even, to a degree, what the mayor faces in trying to improve New York’s quality of life, or light.”

• The 25th annual Ray Bradbury Contest will feature the author’s legendary Fahrenheit 451, his tale of a world where firemen burn books. You can win $100 by writing a two-page essay or creating visual art or a multimedia piece detailing what you think of the book. The contest is sponsored by the public library (see the contest rules) in Waukegan, Ill., where Bradbury grew up. Bradbury, of course, also wrote The Martian Chronicles, another landmark in modern American fiction.

• How does the Dallas library system solve its financial woes? Charge people for books, of course. “This is your tax dollars at work, and I can’t think of a better deal," says the woman who runs the program for the system. Only in Dallas would we make people pay for something that their tax dollars support. Or, to paraphrase the otherwise obscure Robert Goodloe Harper, “Millions for convention center hotel bond interest, not one penny for the library.” Still, I suppose it could be worse. The oldest free public library in the country is broke and will likely close at the end of the year.

• A two-year British study found that many problems children face are caused by parents who push their kids to be successful. It calls for a new value system based on helping others for the larger public good rather than pursuit of “excessive individualism” for private advantage. Said one of the contributors: Society has become "tone-deaf to the real requirements of children… in a climate where the mixture of sentimentalism and panic makes discussion of children’s issues so difficult."

• And the previous item may explain this one: About one third of U.S. children and teens take vitamins, even though most of them probably don’t need the pills. Meanwhile, kids in fair or poor health with the worst eating habits — who could most benefit from them — were the least likely to take vitamins. The study’s lead author noted that some parents and teens may mistakenly think that taking a daily pill makes up for a lousy diet.

This is a true story: I came home for lunch the other day and drove through two potholes in the space of about 30 feet right in front of my house. I was especially perturbed because the city had re-asphalted the street just six months ago, so having potholes already appearing wasn’t too encouraging.

I picked up the phone, called 311 (the city’s non-emergency all-purpose fix-it line) and pleaded my case. The fairly friendly operator told me I’d hear back from someone fairly soon, within 48-72 hours is what I think she said. Whatever it was, I wasn’t holding my breath. But when I came home at 6 p.m. later that same day, the potholes had been repaired. The same day!

I’ve heard a fair amount of griping about 311 over the years, but this was my first experience, and you won’t hear any griping from me. Thanks to whoever at the city took care of the problem. Quickly.

Apparently, it’s not enough for the City Council to regulate dog droppings and smoking, and to go ahead an build and purchase a downtown convention center hotel just for us. Now the council’s public safety committee is considering expanding the city’s current juvenile curfew (11 p.m.-6 a.m. Sunday through Thursday; 12:01-6 a.m. weekends) to 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. on school days, acording to the DMN. Now there’s nothing wrong with keeping juveniles off the street, especially when they’re supposed to be in school, but how many initiatives can the city really afford to police these days. With three people (and $165,000 or so) being added to the city budget to police the newly enacted no-smoking-in-bars ordinance, do we really have the money and the civic will to stop every juvenile wandering the streets to see what they’re up to? It sounds like a great idea, but how much policing can the city afford to get involved with when it comes to individual liberties?

The compromise struck between developers and neighborhood groups had been in question, with some changes proposed by city staff. But yesterday the City Council’s housing committee passed the compromise agreement unanimously.

Since eight city councilmen sit on the housing committee, neighbors feel like this will be a strong base to get the final ordinance through at the Feb. 25 City Council meeting. The committee also added an amendment to review the implementations of the ordinance 18 months after it goes into effect.

To understand more about form-based zoning and the importance of this compromise to neighborhood residents, I keep going back to neighborhood resident and former city councilman Sandy Greyson’s column.

Today and Saturday from 10-4 p.m., Reunion Arena will become the dump site for old TV sets and computers. The city is holding the "e-cycle" event to prevent them from going to landfills and illegal dump sites.

Of course, the digital TV transition is coming up on Feb. 17, so lots of people are planning to get rid of their old TV sets. I spoke recently with Jeff Jacoby of Texas Campaign for the Environment‘s Dallas office, and he told me that each non-recycled television would amount to 4 to 12 pounds of lead, "so we’re looking at a potential public health catastrophe."
Jacoby and others recently traveled to Las Vegas to interrupt he Consumer Electronics Show in an attempt to try to convince the creators of these products to "take responsibility of the end-life care." He encouraged owners of non-digital TVs to call the manufacturer and ask about their recycling programs; some have them (such as Sony, LG, Zenith and Samsung) but many others don’t, and Jacoby believes the phone calls would send a message to these companies, and encourage them to start creating products that they can later recycle.

Jacoby also had high praise for the city’s recycling events, which will take place at Reunion Arena this weekend but will continue through March 31 at four Dallas drop-off locations:

Northeast (Fair Oaks) Transfer Station
Sunday, Wednesday or Saturday
7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
7677 Fair Oaks Avenue
(214) 670-6126

Southwest (Oak Cliff) Transfer Station
Sunday, Wednesday or Saturday
7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
4610 S. Westmoreland Road
(214) 670-1927

Northwest (Bachman) Transfer Station
Sunday – Saturday 7:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
9500 Harry Hines Blvd
214-670-6150 or 214-243-2670 weekends

Customer Convenience Recycling Center at
McCommas Bluff Landfill
Monday – Saturday 5 a.m. – 8 p.m.
5100 Youngblood Road
214-670-0977

Ever spent an evening trying to decide for yourself which Dallas city councilman has the hottest web site? Well, let’s just assume you haven’t and skip right to Dallas Morning News city hall reporter Dave Levinthal’s in-depth comparison of each councilman’s web presence — or, in a few cases, lack thereof. Top grades: Mayor Tom Leppert, Dave Neumann, Sheffie Kadane and Angela Hunt. Clocking in with grades of "F", according to Levinthal: Vonciel Jones Hill, Steve Salazar, Jerry Allen, Linda Koop, Elba Garcia and Mitchell Rasansky. To judge for yourself, check out Levinthal’s blog item, which appears to be the same story referenced above except with live web links to all of the websites.

Mary Suhm is a very smart, very savvy administrator. On Saturday, the city manager was quoted in Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper that, in terms of the budget, “everything is going to be very tight for us.”

Why does this make her so smart, given that so many of us have been wailing about this for months? Because she probably already knew on Saturday that November’s sales tax collections were almost 7 percent better than budgeted. This is a vast improvement over the October numbers, which were a disaster – 13 1/2 percent below budget. (Our handy chart, with the budget projections, is here.)

So, when she briefs the council today on the financial situation, Suhm will be able to look very wise and in control. Yes, things aren’t good, she will say. But trust me – we’re only 3.4 percent down for the first two months of the fiscal year. I have things well in hand.

And the council, being the council, will believe her, despite the economic gloom and doom that everyone else sees.

This fall, Mayor Park Cities gave a speech in which he outlined his vision for Dallas:

“But if we’re not willing to invest in the city, then in essence, we’re throwing up the white flag. The greatest risk is that we don’t move forward, that we don’t invest, that we accept mediocrity."

No one, not even the mayor’s harshest critics, will argue that Dallas needs to stand still. We do need to invest in the city. We do need to make this a better place to live. I don’t even know that the issue is over what the mayor wants to invest in – big-deal projects like the $2 billion Trinity River effort and the $500 million convention center hotel — or the smaller, day-to-day things the rest of us want — fixing pot holes, upgrading city services and cutting crime. Reasonable people can disagree.

The disagreement is over leadership, because that’s where Leppert is failing. He is fiddling, promoting his projects, while the city budget burns. In October, the first month of the city’s fiscal year, sales tax collections were 13 1/2 percent below projections. The mayor should not be spending his time strong-arming the council to get the hotel funded before next spring’s referendum. He should be working to avoid the big-time budget cuts that are coming in February if the sales tax numbers continue to decline this dramatically.
We’ve put together a handy chart so you can follow the sales tax figures, including what the budget says we need to collect, a blank to insert what we collect each month this year, and what we collected last year. I’ll update it every month, and you can see for yourself whether it’s time to worry.  Because, frankly, I think it is.

The sales tax accounts for about 21 1/2 percent of the city budget. The other major component is the property tax, which I think accounts for about half of revenue. That’s because deciphering the property tax numbers is much more complicated, but I’m working on it.

So why do we need to worry? Because the sales tax numbers have missed budget projections for the last three months – by less than 1 percent in August and 1.4 percent in September to close out the last fiscal year, and by a whopping 13.5 percent in October. The October tax collection was the smallest in some two years, based on figures from the state comptroller. (You can see historical sales tax figures on the comptroller site, but there’s a two-month lag between what the city gets and when it’s posted. That means that the figure you see in February 2008 was actually the number for December 2007.)

This year’s budget, wrote city manager Mary Suhm in August, was predicated on continued “economic development and growth, especially in expanded downtown neighborhoods and Southern Dallas business parks. Commercial growth and new construction continue to drive the increasing value of the City’s tax base.  … Add to that a considerable drop in the unemployment rate which has fallen from 8.2 percent in 2004 to a current level of 5.2 percent and it is clear that the City’s financial footing has been much firmer than many municipalities across the country.”

I think we can assume those assumptions are no longer relevant. Yes, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be as bad here as it already is elsewhere, but we’re not going to escape unscathed, either.  The drop in sales tax collections isn’t the only sign. The unemployment rate in the Dallas metro area was 5.5 percent in October, up from 4.0 percent in October 2007. Meanwhile, the number of people receiving food stamps in Dallas County increased from 207,381 in December 2007 to 271,496 in December 2008, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

Which is why the mayor needs to focus on the budget and the economy.  Because the last thing we need is to spend $500 million – plus interest — on the hotel in January while the budget gets whacked in February.

One of the biggest questions about the convention center hotel is its cost. The city has been vague about it, and those who have tried to get some sort of answer have also been frustrated. Really frustrated.

Add us to the latter list. I have spent the past week trying to find a municipal bond lawyer who can talk me through the bond selling process and how it will work for the hotel. And, apparently, no one wants to do it.

After the jump, my hunt for an expert and why I can’t find one:
The first thing to know is that there’s a price to build the hotel, but there is also a price for paying off the bonds. It’s similar to buying a house, says SMU economics professor Mike Davis. The price it costs to own the house, which includes interest, is much more than the price of the house. You wouldn’t buy the house unless you had an idea about the interest rate. But that’s missing from almost every discussion of the hotel, including the city’s voluminous hotel web site and FAQs.

In other words, if it costs $350 million to build the hotel and another $150 million for the land, how much revenue will the hotel have to take in so it can make the monthly mortgage payment?

So I wanted a lawyer to help me with a couple of things:

• How does the municipal bond market look right now? Will the city be able to sell the bonds at the beginning of next year, which appears to be the plan? In Portland, for example, city officials have all but given up on a convention center hotel because the municipal bond market is so fragile.

• If the city can sell the bonds, what will the interest rate be? Is there a way to estimate what the total cost will be?

• How much cash will the hotel have to generate to pay off the bonds?

Then, armed with those numbers, I can call hotel operators and ask them them if it’s feasible, in this economy, for a convention center hotel to do those numbers.

The catch? I can’t find a bond attorney in Dallas who will answer those questions. I’m told (and I need to be a little vague here, to protect a source) that the attorneys who would normally be able to answer those questions don’t want to. They don’t want to take a chance that their cooperation will antagonize the city and cost their firm a chance at future business. I’m trying to track down someone in Houston, but that isn’t looking good either.

What does this say about the hotel deal when lawyers, who will normally talk about anything at any time, don’t want to talk to us — and we’re hardly the New York Times? It says that Mayor Park Cities and his allies are using all their considerable muscle to keep opposition to a minimum, and to keep any possible bad news out of the news until after they cobble together their deal.

The good news is that now we know who pulled the plug on citizens’ broadcast comments at the end of City Council meetings — none other than our consensus-loving mayor, Tom Leppert. When the DMN asked who censored the commenters a couple of weeks ago, no one at city hall owned up to it. Today, however, people showed up to protest against being muzzled, and Leppert decided to step forward and take the rap. Leppert’s defense, according to the DMN, was that his decision didn’t keep citizens from commenting at the council meetings; it only blocked WRR and the cable channel showing council meetings from broadcasting the comments. Interestingly, Leppert made the decision without seeking approval from the council; it turns out some councilmen seem to value the First Amendment a little more dearly than the mayor. In particular, Dave Levinthal of the News talked with Angela Hunt and Vonceil Jones Hill, both of whom voiced their displeasure with Leppert’s unwillingness to let a few mouthy citizens have their 30 seconds of fame every week or two. Bottom line; At least Leppert admitted his involvement and has heard the complaints, promising to "bring a revised policy back" to the council in January. Maybe Leppert’s next move can be installing a gong he can ring when someone says something he doesn’t like during a council meeting …