| James Ragland: Pay issue limits pool for council 02/12/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News
My mayor and my City Council member are at odds on what long has been a controversial issue in Dallas – council pay.
One wants to pay council members a salary. One doesn't.
Mayor Ron Kirk and a majority of council members say it's time for Dallas to join the ranks of virtually all other big cities and pay its council a yearly salary. As much as I hate to admit it, he's right.
Mr. Kirk, a downtown lawyer, says that serving on the council is a full-time job that demands a respectable paycheck instead of the $50 a meeting that each member now gets. He says it's time for taxpayers – me and you – to pay council members at least $35,000 or so a year.
Alan Walne, who represents the Lake Highlands area where I live, is among a minority of council members against the idea. Mr. Walne, president of an auto body shop, worries that paying council members a salary would weaken, if not destroy, the council-manager form of government that has served Dallas for seven decades.
Under that system, council members are supposed to come down to City Hall a few hours each week, weigh in on policy matters and leave day-to-day operations to the city manager.
An imperfect system
It looks good on paper and, in a lot of respects, it has worked. But the truth is, it has never worked as cleanly as some would like to believe, not even before the council was expanded and district lines were redrawn a decade ago. "There always have been council members who have come down here and tried to run City Hall," said the mayor.
The mayor knows. He was a paid lobbyist for the city back in the 1980s, when I was covering City Hall.
Mr. Walne is not callous, and he's not opposed to giving council members a little more money. He favors boosting the payment per meeting to $250, maybe even twice that.
But he believes that rewarding council service with a salary will give rise to career politicians who will try to usurp the city manager's power. He's afraid that the ward-style politics of, say, Chicago, may take root in Dallas.
Mr. Kirk doesn't think that's a problem. "The firewall against that is that these people still have to be elected," he said. "To me, it's all about expanding the pool [of candidates]."
Here's the deal: Even without council pay, Dallas has had its share of career politicians, those who run time after time for office, even when they've run out of ideas or the wherewithal to get anything done. Term limits and voters still can root out the nuts and zealots.
More could serve
Like the mayor, I believe a salary would simply allow more ordinary folks – not just those who are independently wealthy or have generous employers – to serve.
I remember a teacher telling me in the late '80s that she wanted to run for the council but couldn't. Her husband was a police officer or a firefighter, and they just couldn't afford to give up her income. She was smart, cared about the city and had no political ambition beyond wanting to make City Hall work better.
I wish everyone could afford to serve as freely as Mr. Walne, but the fact is that a lot of potentially good candidates are turned away by the long hours and almost nonexistent pay. Four current council members are lawyers, six are retired or unemployed, one is self-employed and three others work as consultants.
Mr. Walne is the only businessman on the council, and Mr. Kirk calls him a "vanishing breed." That means fewer and fewer folks like him are willing to fight your City Hall battles for free. Or, they simply can't afford to.
James Ragland can be reached at 214-977-8270 or at .
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