The people of Dallas vote to elect city council members that will represent their interests in government, and these elected officials are supposedly accountable to the people who elected them. When they fail to do the job they were positioned to do, voters have the right and responsibility to voice their concerns, hold them accountable, and when necessary, remove them from office at the ballot box.
Yet, our current Dallas City Council has repeatedly shown that they do not actually care what you, nor your fellow voters, have to say beyond the election. In fact, they would rather use government force in the form of manipulative policies to mute the voices of Dallas’ citizens and businesses who attempt to address vital and pressing issues in the presence of those they elected. The members of the city council don’t care about their constituents, just themselves and their own comfort level.
Under the protection of our current city charter, residents of Dallas are permitted to speak about anything that concerns them at city council meetings. However, Mayor Eric Johnson and other council members want to restrict, or outright eliminate, the ability of Dallas residents to be heard on matters that are uncomfortable for the council, in order to avoid shedding bad light on the city’s failures or forcing awareness of topics of accountability into the public eye.
Discussions that began in June around this issue of censorship have produced a number of alarming “solutions” for silencing the public: limiting the number of meetings residents can speak openly at, restricting speech to only “approved” subjects on the meetings’ agendas, and creating new subjective rules on “disruption” to empower the council to silence and remove residents voicing their concerns from meetings.
In essence, these “proposals” would give the council full control over what you are allowed to speak about. This sounds less and less like a representative government, and more like a socialist democracy.
The mayor says these measures would prevent so-called “trolls” from disrupting meetings, but in reality, residents of Dallas are deeply frustrated with the actions of their city council, and this proposal is simply a way to silence them. The council wants to defund the police, ignore the vagrancy crisis, and give themselves shady pay raises without residents being able to say a word in protest.
Dallas was once a great city. For nearly two centuries, residents and businesses have worked to make it one of the most desirable locations in the nation to live and work, but rising crime and unchecked homelessness have placed Dallas on a dismal course to become exactly like the cities that have experienced large exoduses in recent years. If circumstances continue trending at this pace, our city will soon look like San Francisco, Chicago, or a number of other once-great American cities.
While this decline has been disturbingly persistent, Dallas’ demise is only inevitable if we do nothing. We can save Dallas, and it starts with holding our city council accountable. Dallasites must act and contact their councilman and tell them that these proposed ideas are unacceptable.
As community members of Dallas, we must not forfeit our constitutional right to speak freely before our elected officials. We are the taxpayers who fund their municipal projects. We are the voters they made commitments to uphold the best interests of Dallas’ economy, safety, and legacy for future generations to come. We deserve better.