It’s an interesting question: You’ve been elected to the Dallas city council, so how much power do you have?
Apparently, a few of our council representatives take their position as elected city leaders seriously enough to suggest courses of action to city department heads (particularly police chiefs) when they see a problem occurring in their district, according to a recent News story. For example, Lakewood/East Dallas councilman Sheffie Kadane asked for police assistance to patrol the area around Sanger Elementary for parking violators. Pretty quickly, it seems, a police officer was staked out at the school mornings and afternoons for a week, even though Kadane later said that he just intended for the officer to "drive by" the school. And he’s not the only councilman picking up the phone when he wants something done: the News highlights several other new council members who haven’t been shy about trying to make something happen. (I didn’t see Jerry Allen’s name in the story, though.)
The Dallas city charter prohibits council members from directly ordering city department heads to do anything. Meanwhile, however, these same city department heads know who approves the budget for their departments — that’s right, it’s the council! And honestly, who can blame a councilman for trying to get something done in his/her district? That’s what they were elected to do, right? Solve problems, make the city bureaucracy work for their constituents, be decisive?
This is a blog post without a obvious solution, I’m afraid. Council members have a right to feel as if they’ve been elected to get something done, and even an innocent request at City Hall probably can be blown into something pretty big pretty quickly. On the other hand, it’s not fair to a city department head to have 15 or 20 bosses; that would be a good recipe to restrict department effectiveness, I think.
Any thoughts out there?
