Mayor Park Cities brings out his bucket of tar

I tried to give the new mayor a chance. Honest. I really don't want to write this. But, sadly, he apparently has no interest in meeting anyone half way.  It's his way, and everyone else is not just wrong, but a criminal.

How else to interpret Tom Leppert's decision to ask the district attorney to investigate potential fraud in some Trinity River toll road referendum petitions? If you can't beat 'em, smear 'em. This extremely carefully written article in Dallas' Only Daily Newspaper doesn't say there weren't enough valid signatures. Leppert and his cronies know they can't win that fight anymore. But what they can do is discredit TrinityVote in the run-up to the referendum. They figure: Throw around some innuendo, some half-truths, some guilt by association, and who knows what will happen?

This insults all of us who signed the petition. I will be more than happy to go down to city hall and show the mayor my signature and each of the signatures I gathered. Like the guy who owns my dry cleaner. Like the guy who owns my bar. Like the guy who owns my breakfast joint. (And Mr. Mayor, just in case you can't figure this out, these are all small businessmen and women, the kind you claim you're so eager to help.)

Finally, many of us reacted with outrage when Leppert's opponent threw around the same kind of mud during the mayoral run-off. I'm glad to see Leppert is rewarding those of us who defended him by doing the same thing to us.

Comments

[Michael Mosteller]

I can't believe I voted for this clown (I would use another word that ends in hat but this is a distinguished blog) . But I guess he has to do his master's bidding now. This is going to blow up in his face. It should have exactly the same reaction with others that it had with you, Jeff.

So Mayor Park Cities and his cronies at Save The Trinity(TOLL ROAD) are calling us frauds. Those of us who petitioned our city for redress of grievances, we are essentially frauds because we disagree with the powers that be. Do they honestly think this tactic is going to work? If anything it emboldens me to make sure I get more people to vote against this thing now. The lengths they will go to are amazing. But I guess you have to do that when you have such an uphill battle as trying to convince people a toll road would be great going through your park. Parks are always made more enticing by having cars flying by at 80 mph. Mudslinging is their only real tactic. That and fear, hence the project will die mantra they keep throwing out.

Bring it on, Mayor Park Cities. We're ready for a fight.

[Rick Wamre]

I was disappointed in Leppert's apparent leadership of this "fraud" initiative, too. He seemed like a guy who was willing to listen and then make a decision, but it's hard to believe he has really had time to look at all sides of the Trinity already, given that's he has only been in office a few weeks and wasn't exactly a political heavyweight before that. The whole point of the referendum, to my way of thinking, is to open the floodgates to some informed discussion and a review of the project's facts - it's not necessarily a repudiation of all that has (or hasn't) been done yet. I am still looking forward to hearing more about the project, which has the potential to be a major plus or minus for us here in Dallas. But to start everything off with some vague innuendos about fraud is going to do exactly what Michael and Jeff have just said it will do: rile up people who signed the petition, encouraging them to become even more anti-Trinity. That's a pretty short-sighted way to run a campaign to support the Trinity project: See how many people you can hack off before the campaign even starts.

[East Sider]

The pro-tollroad crowd increasingly looks like the Bush administration writ small. Clearly, these are people who are not accustomed to not getting their way. When their strong-arm tactics turn out to be transparent, they flail like spastics and point fingers and call people names.

This is gonna be fun to watch.

[Farinata X]

I've written before that people would see the real Leppert in the run-up to this referendum. So here he is, folks. Like what you see?

[IBW]

If we should get riled up about fraud and the Trinity project, it should not be at Hunt and the everyday citizens who are attempting to correct a perceived wrong. Rather, it should be the fraud inherent in the secret land purchases made by various members of the anti-referendum group (including at least one mayoral candidate) and others who have a personal yet undisclosed financial interest in seeing that the toll road stays put. Those people are in a position of trust yet intentionally blurring the line between what is good for them personally and what is good for Dallas.