The Mayor wants to do a little re-decorating at City hall, spend about $180,000 in new office digs for himself and staff. That’s a pretty modest re-decorating budget, but Rudy Bush at The Dallas Morning News says this is not a great idea because it’s symbolic of a power shift for the Mayor of Dallas, giving him more Wheaties, but without input (or permission) from us:
The mayor pro tem and deputy mayor pro tem soon will not share space with the mayor and his staff. They will move a little to the east, into newly designed offices that will be separated by two walls and a lobby from the mayoral suite.
The mayor’s office will be much more spacious as a result. His top staff members will get offices instead of cubicles. His secretary will have a large space just outside his office. There will be a nice seating and receiving area for those who would have an audience.
More important, what’s said and done in the mayor’s office will be a far more private affair. The people in that suite will work for the mayor. Access to that office will be at the pleasure of the mayor. That isn’t insignificant.
Rudy says “the government of the city of Dallas was designed to diminish the influence of individual elected officials and maximize the power of the bureaucracy. The last thing this government was built for is to install a frothing, demagogue of a mayor who might take the wheel and steer the city into a ditch.”
I don’t know, seems we have plenty of those to steer into right now on Dallas streets.
I, for one, might want to see a stronger Mayor of Dallas who could and would decide on what’s best for the city as a whole, not protect individual fiefdoms.
But the office of the Mayor should be more transparent, accessible to everyone. None of this cloistering stuff. Because that’s the job you sign up for, right?
And please Mike, get bids, multiple bids. Don’t make this another TXU deal.
