My primary focus and the reason for not just this run for office, but those of the last 5 years has been to change the culture at city hall. As many have pointed out change for change’s sake should not be the goal or the outcome. I feel that I have, despite my losses, shown a consistent push for this change. Here I will explain my ideas for culture change, and if elected to office, changes I would begin implementing immediately. One small aside, because my focus is mainly on the processes by which we govern ourselves and not change in society at large, I hope the reader understands that much of the change won’t be readily apparent day to day. However, through implementing these changes power will transfer to Citizens and Residents of Arlington.
Regular Town Hall Meetings
The first and easiest of changes to implement is simply to have 45 town hall meetings a year. This works out to 5 town halls per member of the Council and Mayor per year. This would provide the people of Arlington a forum on a near weekly basis to discuss issues of the day with each other and their representatives. With each single district member dealing with the most local of issues, at large members and the mayor would be able to focus on larger scale issues, while still being available to those who receive no purchase from their single member representative. I believe this will be an important step to ending the conception that we elect representatives to decide for us, rather than to listen to us.
Eliminate Council Perks
The second area of change in culture is to end the use of stadium perks to supplement the salary paid to Council and the Mayor. Currently, each elected official receives the use of a luxury box 9 nights a year at the Ballpark, and generally two tickets per event at Cowboys Stadium. Each night at the Ballpark is valuated at $2000. Valuations of Cowboys Stadium luxury box use is currently unpublished. The salaries provided by the city are $200 and $250 per month to the Council and Mayor respectively, or $2400 and $3000 yearly. Two nights in the Rangers box provides more value than their salaries, or put another way: the Mayor receives 6 times the perks, just from the Rangers, than his salary from the city. I feel it fair to estimate the value gained from the Cowboys box as at least equal to that of the Rangers. This means in one 2 year cycle each official receives approximately $72,000 worth of tickets of which to dispose. If you haven’t been to these Luxury boxes, I’ve heard it’s great. I have not been, though I was offered once to attend. There are no records kept of the people whom attend these events despite this being an official use of government property. This does not represent any level of ethical regard by those serving in office. I will instead suggest that we, as a city, use these tickets to incentivize voting by creating a raffle system comprised of those whom have voted in the last year, May or November.
Transparency in Commerce
Third, I will move all discussions of business incentives from executive session to public session. For those unfamiliar with the categories of meetings, this will provide the people of Arlington a view into any and all council level negotiations of tax exemptions, tax rebates, and other disbursements of public funds to either relocating or existing businesses. This will provide an important level of oversight providing the people of Arlington the ability to judge the value of the offers themselves as well as provide adequate time to organize for or against the specifics of any special treatment of a business. This will be the most difficult to implement as corporations and business generally are adverse to discussion of their operations in public, however in this instance if they ask for public funds they must be willing to entertain the accompanying inspection.