While his potential successors have started jockeying for position, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert has remained mum on his re-election plans, as the DMN’s Rudolph Bush reports today. So at yesterday’s big hoo-ha for DSO white knight Bill Lively–after Roger Staubach introduced the mayor to the crowd as “Senator Leppert”–we asked Hizzoner whether he wouldn’t like to just state his intentions now and clear up all the confusion. “No, no, no,” Leppert said with a laugh, walking away. “I’ll make an announcement in a couple of weeks.”
UPDATE: Gromer’s reporting that Kay Bailey won’t seek re-election to the U.S. Senate. So Tom may not want to waste much time making the big reveal.
2 comments
Please Mayor big hands, leave the city whenever you want. Thanks for the one bridge you got started and the useless plans for a toll road in the levee.
Can we please have a grass roots mayor, who has an eye on not only developing the city, but not forgetting things like pot holes and urban blight.
The sooner Leppert gets out the better– given the havoc he has wreaked on the City of Dallas:
1) Continuing to pour tens of millions of dollars down the Trinity River toll road sinkhole (all the while telling all sorts of “whoppers” about its prospects— i.e. the Corps has approved it; the NTTA is going to fund it, etc., etc.);
2) Saddling the City with “moral” obligations associated with the $500 million, bond-financed convention center hotel (which faces dismal operating prospects);
3) Potentially burdening the City with huge additional payments to the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System by encouraging its $200 million investment (equal to 7% of total assets) in the development of Museum Tower (a speculative real estate development with highly questionable economics);
4) Neglecting levee infrastructure and other critical urban transit needs (heck, really all the mundane nuts and bolts details that come with running a city) by obsessively focusing on the toll road and convention center hotel to the exclusion of all else.
The mayor who follows in Leppert’s footsteps in going to find himself in the unenviable role of having to figure out how to pay the deferred tabs for the hotel and Museum Tower and how to fund to the levees repairs (the cost of which could be astronomical). That’s before dealing with the chronically dysfunctional city management system under Mary Suhm and the associated deterioration in basic city services.
It is truly a sorry legacy that Leppert will leave.