To Understand Brouhaha, Follow the Money
Jacquielynn Floyd and Ed Housewright, on The Dallas Morning News Metro blog, both lament "the foolishness over street names in Dallas." Housewright says:
" 'Community leaders' (of any race) start yammering about changing a street name to honor an important dead person. How about spending your energy on an issue that will actually help people."That's a valid criticism as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. This "brouhaha" over renaming Dallas's Ross Avenue didn't spring from the ground up. It wasn't manufactured by "community leaders." Remember, this all began when the Dallas City Council held an online poll to pick a name for Industrial Boulevard along the redeveloped Trinity River. And remember, that happened at the same time the City Council was hatching a plan to commit the city to build, own, and manage a convention center hotel, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The brouhaha over street naming effectively distracted Dallasites' attention while the hotel was being slipped quietly under the voters' noses.
Community leaders can be blamed for falling for the political tricks played by the city power brokers, but the root cause of not working on matters that will actually help people can be traced back to the Dallas City Council itself and their desire for a $500 million dollar taxpayer-financed hotel.
P.S. Do the quotes Housewright uses around "community leaders" indicate that Housewright buys into the McCain/Palin disparagement of "community organizers?"
Who Would Drop $500,000 on LEGO?
If you guessed "only an idiot," read on. Tim Rogers, in Frontburner, takes aim at Jim Schutze. Schutze has championed the public interest in the fight against the Trinity Project, a developers' dream of building "a high-speed, multi-lane, limited-access throughway between the flood-control levees, right along the river." Schutze predicts the "stupidly dangerous idea" will never be built, because it's "sort of like building an orphanage on top of a dam." Oh, and because the cost overruns are going to be astronomical.
So, what does Rogers dispute about Schutze's column? It's Schutze's logical conclusion that the continued pursuit of this folly must mean that we have "idiots" steering the ship. Rogers doesn't rebut any of Schutze's premises, nor his reasoning, but is offended at the logical conclusion that the people behind this bad idea might just be idiots.
Jim Schutze isn't the only Trinity Project critic that Tim Rogers takes aim at. Rogers also attacks The Observer's Rob Wilonsky for criticizing this week's grand unveiling of a new model for the Trinity Project. Rogers extols the detail of the model, with a six-inch Renaissance Tower containing 600 feet of fiber optics, and 40,000 model homes, each "an exact replica of the real thing." Rogers gushes that the unfinished model cost $500,000 to build so far and is a "phenomenal work of art," while leaving open the possibility that it still might not accurately depict "what we'll wind up seeing in earth and water and trees and roads." That Rogers thinks a half-million dollar, unfinished, possibly inaccurate, phenomenal work of art is somehow evidence that idiots are not in charge might be a sign that Jim Schutze's search for idiots needs to cast a wider net.
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