I’m writing this before the final vote tally is announced, but the NO people have enough votes already to win the day. It’s hard to be upset with the final decision since it appears that significantly more people voted than were expected to, and since both the early voting and the election-day voting returned roughly the same numbers (check this link for a voting breakdown from Dallas County). The campaign, imperfect though it may have been with the confusing language and slogans, brought out what appears to be more than 15% of registered Dallas voters — sad to celebrate the fact that only 15% or so of voters cared enough to show up, but still not a bad turnout for an election without a mayor, governor or president heading the ballot.
It appears, from my cursory review, that North Dallas went pretty much all-in for the tollroad, while Lake Highlands was a little less positive (but still heavily pro-tollroad) and Lakewood/East Dallas and Oak Cliff were mixed to YES-oriented. I’m sure there will be some parsing of the numbers tomorrow when it will be easy to look at the votes precinct-by-precinct.
But hey, the bottom line is that a decision has been made — twice now — so it’s time to move forward with the project and look forward to seeing that all of the wonderful things we’ve been promised will someday be down in the levees.
Accountability, of course, is the watchword of the TrinityVote people, but we all know what’s going to happen: In five or 10 years, when the project is complete enough to take stock of it, very few if any of the politicos who pushed the deal through will still be around to be accountable for the inevitable changes that will occur.
A final note: Having been on the wrong side of this issue (or at least, the losing side), here’s hoping that Angela Hunt isn’t buried by her council cohorts under an avalanche of revenge and punishment. She saw something she didn’t like, used the political process as it was intended to be used to ensure that voters had a chance to pass judgement on the project, and took an enormous personal and political risk (assuming she wants to stay in politics, that is) to do this.
Knowing how things tend to work around here, she can probably kiss her political future goodbye; it’s too bad that’s the way winners tend to treat losers, but as someone told me that other day while discussing this — "You pick the losing side in politics, you get buried. That’s just the way it works."
