October 9, 2024- Dallas Observer- by Tyler Hicks
One of three Dallas charter amendments backed by conservatives would force the city to spend more on police. Who does it serve?
He didn’t sleep much, preferring to stay awake in case his daughter stirred or an “intruder” bothered them. But on this particular morning, before knuckles rapped on his window, Ron Campbell had managed to momentarily throw off some of his worries and catch a little rest.
He awoke to the sound of knocking: A person on the other side of the glass was asking if he needed help.
“We saw you sleeping here,” the stranger said, “and just wanted to see if you’re OK.”
At that point, in 2023, the 61-year-old Campbell and his 6-year-old daughter Autumn had been sleeping in their car for about four months. One of their go-to spots was near a park downtown (“just past the eyeball,” he says), though they moved around a lot to stay ahead of cops monitoring the loiterers.
“It took me a while to get homeless,” Campbell says, “but eventually we ran out of money. Believe me when I say it can happen to anyone. You can be on your job for 20 years, then one thing happens, and you’re homeless.”
For Campbell, it was the death of his wife on April 11, 2022. The loss “shattered” him, he says, and he eventually lost his job and his house.
Looking back, he says the stranger at his window could have been sent by God; that’s one way to explain what happened next. He was connected to the nonprofit Family Gateway, which helps families experiencing homelessness, and he and his daughter went from sleeping in a car to staying at a motel. Eventually, they entered a rapid rehousing program and landed an apartment of their own. When interviewed for this story, Campbell was calling from his and Autumn’s two-bedroom home. Their apartment complex has a pool, too, which helps make the place “like heaven.”
“He’s paying the rent on his own after a year in our care,” says Ellen Magnis, CEO of Family Gateway. “That, to me, is a success story.”
Stories like this, she adds, are possible thanks in part to the support her organization receives from the city of Dallas.
While Magnis is quick to point out that the city’s support is “quite variable,” Family Gateway has the benefit of operating rent-free out of a city-owned building. That’s a significant perk for an organization that relies on donations and grants to help people like Campbell and his daughter.
“We need more investments and the right kinds of investments,” she says, referring to city funding of homelessness services. “If money gets pushed out of the budget specifically allocated for other issues, then everyone is getting hurt.”
Yet Dallas residents from wildly different backgrounds worry this “pushing out” could indeed happen, imperiling future investment in homelessness solutions and other services like libraries, parks and infrastructure.
On Nov. 5, alongside the presidential race and the contest for U.S. Senate pitting Colin Allred against incumbent Ted Cruz, Dallas voters will decide on three controversial City Charter amendments made possible by a group called Dallas HERO.
One would make the city manager’s job security and pay increases subject to a community survey. Another would allow any Dallas resident to sue the city for violating the charter. Finally, the most hotly debated proposal would compel City Council to devote at least 50% of Dallas’ new annual revenue above the prior year’s amount to fund the police and fire pension “in the amount directed by the State Pension Review Board and/or city council, whichever is higher.” Any part of that 50% left after the city cuts a check to the pension fund would be used to increase the starting pay for police officers. The proposition would also raise the total number of officers to at least 4,000 (an increase of about 900 cops).
In plain language, cops get first dibs on half of any growth in the city’s income even if the elected City Council sees better ways to spend the money.
These proposals have sparked concern over affordability and a perceived over-investment in police. (Roughly 63% of the city’s $1.9 billion general fund is used for public safety expenses including policing.)
Only recently has an opposition of sorts spoken out against these proposals.
Departing police Chief Eddie Garcia and former Chief David Brown aren’t fans, and neither are former Mayors Ron Kirk and Mike Rawlings. When Garcia announced his retirement from the Dallas Police Department on Sept. 19, council members Adam Bazaldua and Paula Blackmon cited HERO’s amendments as likely reasons for the popular chief choosing to skip town for a new job in Austin.
At an Oct. 2 news conference featuring a slew of current and former city leaders, former Mayor Laura Miller described the HERO efforts as “the biggest threat that I’ve seen in the 40 years I’ve been involved with City Hall.” This group has launched “Vote No Dallas,” an effort which casts the HERO group as “extremists” who “paid to force [the propositions] on your November ballot” and will now defund parks, libraries and other services.
In multiple statements to the Observer, the group’s executive director Pete Marocco pushed back on the idea that the propositions are unaffordable.
“At no point would these measures result in an increase in taxes or require tax cuts,” Marocco says.
Both sides claim they’re fighting for the city’s best interests. Meanwhile, residents, organizers, former politicians and many others who spoke to the Observer on the record or on background have two big questions:
Is it too late to stop these amendments?
And who would they really benefit?
“There is no good faith reason for these amendments,” former council member Philip Kingston says. “It’s a really, really grim vision of the future.”
Kingston believes the proposals were “intentionally designed to destroy city government,” and, when asked if they stand a chance of passing, he’s not too optimistic.
“My guess,” he says, “is it’s a coin flip. And that’s terrifying.”
Scare tactics
Jeff Patterson wasn’t getting the answers he wanted.
It was Friday, Aug. 9, and Pete Marocco was talking about the proposed amendments with the Dallas Firefighters Association, of which Patterson is the president.
The longtime firefighter wanted to know who was backing the amendments, and he says Marocco was “vague,” replying that, as a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization — a part of the tax code intended to shelter “social welfare” groups — HERO is not obligated to share details about its backers.
Patterson would later learn that noted conservative and hospitality real estate billionaire Monty Bennett was providing the group with financial assistance, but by that time, he’d already soured on their efforts.
“We didn’t feel like we were getting the full story,” he told the Observer.
This is a common refrain among HERO critics, particularly because, at one point, a proposed fourth amendment wanted to eliminate the use of police chokeholds. In response to the Observer’s question about why this proposal was publicized on its website in April (then taken down), Marocco said, “More than a dozen propositions were considered by Dallas HERO, but we didn’t move forward on them because we chose to prioritize what truly matters: accountability at Dallas City Hall, empowering citizens and ensuring public safety.”
On that note, Patterson doesn’t feel the group is representative of Dallas.
For instance, he and one of his fellow association members took issue with the fact that Marocco doesn’t live in the city. (“I lived in Dallas for years, but a few months ago, I moved only a few blocks into University Park, where police staffing is adequate for response and deterrence,” Marocco told the Observer. “We looked at other parts of Dallas and just didn’t feel safe.”)
On paper, Patterson might seem like the kind of person who’d favor the HERO proposals. He’s a firefighter who has spent decades serving the city (with burns on 48% of his body), and the amendments promise to flow boatloads of money toward the troubled and underfunded police and fire pension system.
But Patterson is confident the pension issue will be resolved (“They have to fund it, by law”), and as he talks to the Observer, it’s clear he values his association and their opinions over the amendment’s promises.
“We just think it’s bad for fire, and we’re in agreement with the city on it — which is rare,” he says.
Nearly all City Council members have spoken out against the proposals, with Bazaldua perhaps the most vocal opponent. Still, when reached for comment, Bazaldua’s team says he couldn’t share much due to ongoing litigation. (The city manager’s office said the same thing, and the city’s CFO did not reply to a request for comment.)
That’s because of a case the Texas Supreme Court recently weighed in on.
Earlier this year, the council proposed amendments that would give it the final say in how to spend the city’s money while also granting local government immunity from lawsuits. HERO sued, with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton writing in support of the group’s efforts.
“There’s nothing misleading in what the City Council put forward,” he added in a late September interview. “The court invited them to rewrite the amendments in accordance with the court’s guidance, and they don’t have a lot of other things they can do, other than get out there and campaign. I’m a little bit miffed at them for not already doing that.”
Bazaldua has now started campaigning, appearing at the “Vote No Dallas” event, and as the election nears, the group’s efforts will likely continue ramping up. But counter-campaigns like theirs are expensive, and Kingston laments the city’s loss of “good billionaires.”
“The progressive rich people have just kind of left town,” he says. “I was talking to a friend of mine who runs campaigns, and I asked him how much he’d need to mount a campaign.”
The friend told him “a quarter of a million.”
Others say it’d be much higher.
Soft targets
Chris Harris helped defeat an effort that bears striking similarities to the HERO proposals.
In 2021, Harris, now a leader with the Texas Civil Rights Project, was part of an Austin-based coalition that mounted an education and outreach campaign against Proposition A. Had it passed, the city would have been forced to hire hundreds of new police officers.
This proposal was the work of Save Austin Now, a group led in part by far-right Republicans who, mere months earlier, had successfully advocated for a ban on homeless encampments.
“Save Austin Now took the same sort of tactic Dallas HERO is taking,” Harris says, citing both groups’ insistence that the city could afford the new requirements. Harris is something of a city budget expert, and he tells the Observer that the HERO group is conveniently forgetting the presence of other city employees. At minimum, those employees need cost-of-living adjustments.
“Unless they plan on not giving any city workers any additional raises, it’s not clear how they do this without cuts,” Harris says. “The other piece of the budget puzzle is the city needs to grow.”
That means additional staff members and additional services.
“Ideally, the city would be able to have additional park space, libraries, economic and workforce development initiatives — those are the things that come along with more people,” Harris says. “Even stagnating with some of those things means you’re serving less people over time, and it’s not clear what additional money or revenue will be left.”
Harris doesn’t remember exactly how much money was spent fighting Prop A (and, as reported by the Texas Tribune, George Soros’ Open Policy Center kicked in half a million.) Coupled with the fact that Dallas is bigger than Austin (and the media buys are more expensive), Harris says the people organizing against HERO have their work cut out for them.
It’s not clear to what degree — if any — HERO’s critics are coalescing, aside from the statements made by some former and current city officials.
Patterson says his association will likely join the fray, though he is not sure what that will look like — and many members of the fire association still resent the way Rawlings handled their pension funding, making an alliance with him unlikely. In an interview with the Observer, the Dallas Democratic Party said it is circulating talking points against HERO but also focusing a lot of its efforts in support of Allred and Sam Eppler, who’s running against GOP incumbent Beth Van Duyne in District 24. Unlike Harris’ efforts in Austin, there has yet to be a coalition of organizers joining hands, though Changa Higgins, a longtime organizer, says he is going to change that in the days ahead.
“Sometimes you just have to be the convener,” he says. “I’m on the police oversight board, and the most trouble with crime is happening in South Dallas, where we already have a high police presence. So I gotta ask, ‘Who are the police for?’”
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, says an effective education campaign is “crucial” to the success or defeat of amendments like these.
He also thinks these efforts will become more common.
“We’ve seen a rise in the number of organizations that are politically motivated and trying to implement their wishes,” he said. “These policies are soft targets, because it allows someone who has a lot of money to engineer a change, and so few signatures are needed.” (HERO needed 20,000 voters to get each amendment on the ballot, and it received over 169,000.)
Like others interviewed for this story, Rottinghaus says the absence of a local, high-dollar donor certainly hurts HERO’s critics. He grew up in Dallas, and he remembers phone-banking at the law office of Fred Baron, a major fundraiser for the Democratic Party.
“There have been people historically who are ultra-wealthy and on the left wing in Dallas, but not so much anymore.”
Further, he cautions anyone who thinks Democrats will immediately reject the ballot measures. For one, they’ll appear far down on the ballot, by which point many voters may not read carefully. Secondly, without an aggressive education campaign, Rottinghaus says many voters may see the blurb about additional money for police and fire and not think too much about what it portends.
“People may see that and think it’s a no-brainer,” he says. “But, obviously, the long term could be a bit complicated.”
Campbell, the 62-year-old father who lost his wife, didn’t know too much about HERO. His daughter’s upcoming birthday was much higher on his list of priorities, especially because he now has a place to host it. That apartment complex pool may come in handy, and he’s thinking about sending out invitations, making it a full bash.
He’s also thinking about giving back.
He wants to share his story, maybe volunteer at Family Gateway and help others in his shoes.
As he repeated often when chatting for this story, people like him just need a little help.