About the pandemic, one thing is certain: cable and local news will play this latest outbreak for every rating point it can muster. So it might be helpful to remember that 36,000 people die every year in the U.S. from flu-related illnesses. And yet:
…we in the medical community still have a hard time convincing people to get their flu shots. If you’re not afraid of influenza, then you shouldn’t be afraid of the swine flu. Even in the event that someone gets infected with swine flu, we have medications with demonstrated effectiveness against the strain that’s currently active.
1. So far, there are three probable cases of swine flu in Dallas County. I’d suspect that number will rise in the coming days. But that’s just a guess, based solely on the amount of Dallas bus traffic to and from Mexico. I mean, I don’t work for the CDC (anymore).
2. Early voting begins today and, beyond the city council elections, the convention center hotel is the main issue at hand. Next year at this time, I hope to have a referendum on the ballot that would make sure no more votes are counterintuitive, like voting yes when you’re actually against something, and voting for Tom Leppert when you’re hoping for a mayor that knows how to get his giant paws out of harm’s way every now and then.
3. Speaking of the upcoming elections, Ann Margolin and Brint Ryan, candidates for Mitch Rasansky’s soon-to-open council seat in District 13, kept slugging it out over the weekend. I think I speak for everyone when I say I really hope they open their eyes and see how right they are for each other. It’s not often you find your soul mate right there, underneath your name on the ballot.
The DMN today summarizes its opposition to Proposition 1:
This charter amendment would bar the city from ever owning or financing a hotel under any circumstances, an imprudent ban that would cost Dallas and North Texas millions in convention-related business. The city has made major investments in its convention center and needs a hotel to help it compete for lucrative trade shows and conventions. Even opponents of the current project should be troubled by the sweeping scope of this unwise proposition. Vote no.
I am less troubled than the News would like me to be. That’s because — as the editorial board surely knows –the language of the actual amendment, which does not appear on the ballot, is not as sweeping as the News makes it out to be. Does it “bar the city from ever owning or financing a hotel under any circumstances…”? I quote from the amendment:
Sec. 15 (c): “This section does not prohibit: (i) the adoption of a tax increment financing district or tax abatement agreement in accordance with state law…”
State law, as this provision in the current city code states, would allow the city to establish a TIF district to aid a developer to build a convention hotel, just as it did for Victory Park and countless other projects.
The convention hotel, as currently proposed, is not financially prudent. Anyone who believes it is, including the editorialists of the News, would do us all a favor by publishing the financial projections to prove it. There’s a reason the News has never argued the merits of a city-paid hotel from the numbers. Rosy scenarios tend to fade when put to the test of a simple calculator.
By the way, the city makes it very difficult to see the actual language of the amendment you’ll be voting on. I only found it with the help of techno-savvy friends who were able to plumb the depths the city’s website. It is here in the minutes of the March 4, 2009, City Council briefing. You have to scroll down to page 31 to see the provision I quoted above. (To be fair, maybe the News couldn’t find it?)
It’s a good thing we didn’t secede. Or, now that he got his 48 hours on cable news, is that all behind us?
A football-loving FBer reflects on the Matthew Stafford pick:
The Lions, with the first pick in the NFL draft, took Georgia QB Matthew Stafford, who played his high school ball at Highland Park. I believe he’s the first-ever HP football product to be a #1 pick.
However, he’s not the first HP football product to play for Detroit. The two most famous players to come out of HP were Doak Walker and Bobby Layne in the 1940’s. Doak played at SMU and won the Heisman as a junior, while Layne played at UT. Both, however, were reunited in 1950 at Detroit and led the Lions to a couple of NFL championships. Stafford has nowhere to go but up. Detroit went 0-16 last year.
UPDATE: Another football-loving FBer notes that Stafford’s timing is good in joining the Lions. The Curse of Bobby Layne expired last year.
A few days ago I drew your attention to economist James Hamilton’s research on last summer’s oil spike. Thanks to an alert FBer I now know that two days before, Dallas automotive guru Ed Wallace had used his Business Week column to explore the current mini-spike in prices. Is Goldman Sachs at it again?
“We have come too far to let one man destroy our downtown,” was the headline written by Dupree Scovell, Ben Browder, and Brentt Shropshire when they launched R.I.P Dallas , the pro-convention hotel website, two weeks ago. That headline has since been replaced. Someone must have whispered an embarrassing fact in their ears.
The fact is this. With the possible exception of Ray Hunt, no living person has done more to build downtown Dallas than Harlan Crow. I mean that literally. He –not his father – built the Trammell Crow Building. He built the Chase Tower. He built 2100 McKinney. His family built and endowed the Margaret and Trammell Crow Museum of Asian Art. As the largest of several owners of the parcel, he negotiated with the smaller owners the siting of the Nasher Sculpture Center in the Arts District.
Harlan and I have known each other for 30 years, and we have agreed and disagreed issue-to-issue, candidate-to-candidate, often with humor, sometimes with ferocity. From 1996 until 2003, when I bought him out, he was the lead investor in D Magazine. He knew it was a high-risk deal, and he knew he wouldn’t see a great return if it worked. I’m convinced he did it simply because he thought Dallas needed it. During that period, we continued our pattern of agreement and disagreement, and sometimes it spilled out into the public arena. You’ll pardon me if I have come to believe that editorial integrity is among the highest rungs on the ethical ladder. Never once during our partnership did Harlan Crow ever attempt to influence our editorial policy. He never so much as hinted at it. If he disagreed, he said so, sometimes laughingly, sometimes bitingly (”scurrilous” is an epithet that tends to stick in an editor’s mind, especially when it comes from one’s majority owner). But he always did it after the fact.
I regret that Tom Leppert chose to begin his campaign for the convention hotel by attacking Harlan Crow. If the hotel is a good idea, the mayor should have been able to argue its case on the merits. But as the campaign geared up in its final weeks, I am not surprised that others have followed in his footsteps. The merits are hard to argue. That’s because they are hard to find.
However, I am writing this lengthy post to tell you about the Harlan Crow I know. In my experience, which is long and intimate, he is a man of integrity and sincere devotion to this city. As one small example of his integrity, but one which counts to journalists, when Trey Garrison interviewed him last May for D CEO, the first thing Crow told him was that he had a financial interest in the Anatole and, therefore, in the convention hotel decision. He then proceeded to tell why his ownership gave him an unique insight into the hotel and convention business which had led him to believe this deal is bad for Dallas.
I happen to agree with him, if not necessarily for the same reasons. I believe Dallas needs a convention hotel, but I am dismayed by the city’s decision on how to finance it. The city could have put up $250 million in a public-private partnership, but Tom Leppert and Councilman Ron Natinksy chose not to. Instead, they decided that if the city was going to invest that much, it should invest it all and own the hotel. That was a mistake. I told the mayor to his face that it was a mistake. If Proposition 1 passes — which I hope it does — it will not be Harlan Crow’s fault. It is the mayor and City Council’s fault for trying to ram through a badly conceived financial deal. Harlan Crow will not be the victor. The City of Dallas will be the victor. And, sad to say, Tom Leppert — who chose to personalize this debate from the start — will be the loser.
Remember zanie goaltender Ed Belfour? Here’s how you can play hockey against him. Maybe invite him for a drink afterward at the Mansion.
Jim Mitchell over at the News is up in arms about the stripping of key enforcement provisions from a pension oversight bill in the Legislature. You’d think the New York pension debacle would be a wake-up call to every legislator, district attorney, and attorney general in America. But in the Texas Legislature, apparently it’s not what you know but who knows you that matters.
In his latest Texas Monthly column, Burka excoriates Texas Republican leaders who “refuse to govern, refuse to lead, and refuse to put policy that’s good for Texas ahead of politics that are good for them…”
In the May issue of the “print product,” Zac wrote about the most expensive City Council race in Dallas history: Brint Ryan versus Ann Margolin in District 13. Today comes news out of the Margolin camp that in January 2008, a federal tax lien was filed against Ryan’s house. See the Margolin press release here. There could be a very good reason for why the lien was filed, and Ryan very well might have taken care of the whole thing in a timely and reasonable matter. Still, though. This is Ryan’s Chazz Redd moment. Federal tax lien = shirtless MySpace pic with guns.
Eric, this is in retaliation for the pic of you I put out on Twitter yesterday, isn’t it?
A hockey sweater-wearing FrontBurnervian points us to the news (scroll down) that the Style Network is working on a reality show to be set in Dallas:
Finding big hair and bigger attitudes, The Style Network travels to Dallas with its newest unscripted docu-series exploring the bonds between rich socialite mothers and their debutante daughters in Mothers and Daughters of Dallas.
There’s more description on that site. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Anyone know which mother-daughter duos have been approached?
In forty years, he never lost an election. The S-T obituary is here.