I love my neighborhood and the City of Dallas, and serving them as the District 10 representative on the City Council is indeed an honor. But due to the events with Al Lipscomb, and earlier with Paul Fielding, I am indeed troubled by what the average citizen must be thinking.
Let me assure you that, by far, the Dallas City Council members feel as I do. We are there as your servants. As such we are always mindful of your best interest – not ours.
What bothers me more now is that it seems that two other issues have surfaced as part of this embarrassment, which I believe have nothing to do with the situation at hand. Those two are the ethics commission’s policy and Council pay.
We need to adopt a revised ethics policy, but what Mr. Lipscomb and Mr. Fielding did was against federal law, which carries a much stiffer penalty than anything in the proposed policy. I do not believe the proposed policy as written is what we need.
One example: Board and commission members would have to fill out a 16-page financial disclosure; also, a Council member owning any amount of stock in a company would disqualify himself or herself from voting on a issue before the Council.
I do not believe that my owning five shares of AT&T stock should create a conflict of interest for me in voting on the upcoming cable franchise but, under the proposed policy, it would. The proposed policy treats a Council member the same as a board and commission member, which I do not think is reasonable.
We need to fix what is wrong with our current policy for sure, but I don’t want to create a situation where no one wants to serve. We will pass a revised policy before this summer, and I would appreciate any input you might have.
The second issue, Council pay, will require a charter election to change. I do not believe Council pay would have necessarily kept Mr. Lipscomb or Mr. Fielding out of jail. There are many people who make good salaries in other cities who have been convicted of peddling influence.
Council pay should be decided based on whether the job that Council members do is worthy of a full-time salary, not on anything else. My personal thoughts here are that the City Council needs to restore some faith in the public before asking for a raise.
In closing, I want to congratulate Mike O’Hern and the men’s choir at Lake Highlands High School for the group’s recent trip to San Antonio to perform for the Texas Music Educators Association. They were fantastic and made our community proud. We are indeed lucky to have them.
