If You Don’t Get Out and Vote Tomorrow, You Deserve To be Hosed by Your Property Taxes! (We Like Ronquillo!)

Casa Rawlings

Tomorrow is the day we make some very important choices for the future of Dallas — we vote for a new Mayor,  14 City Council seats, and the DISD school board. I cannot tell you how vital it is to get out and vote. Polls are open 7 am to 7 pm. Here are all the locations — so really, you have no excuse to not vote, because this is one of the most important elections ever. I don’t understand why people just don’t vote — turnout is expected to be a paltry 7%, while the last two elections churned out only 13%. Would people just rather have a dictator than elect their officials?

Based on early-voting patterns, election officials expect a paltry turnout. And because most contested council races feature crowded fields — there are nine candidates in one southern Dallas district — those races will almost surely go to June runoffs, where turnout is often even worse. “I don’t see us hitting the numbers we had in the last mayor’s race — not that those numbers were good,” said Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole.Four years ago, when Mike Rawlings was elected mayor, 13 percent of the city’s registered voters turned out for the general election. Two years later, with no mayoral race on the ballot, the council elections attracted only 6.9 percent.“These low turnouts are now normal for local elections,” Pippins-Poole said.

By last Wednesday, only about 20,000 had voted early. So many people I talk to are clueless about what’s happening at City Hall, the proposed Trinity Tollroad, the Beasley Plan,  all the drama that’s been going down lately including what sounds like a ridiculous potential felony charge against City Councilman Scott Griggs — I am no stranger to asinine lawsuits — but I get it. We are busy. We are working. We are barely getting the mail in the door and then it’s time to turn around and go somewhere, do something. By the way, Scott Griggs  is not running but this “charge” smells so fishy, I want to get out the Clorox.

We’ll make it easy for you and give you a voting recommendation we think is good for Dallas real estate — but please, get out there and JUST DO IT:

Casa Ronquillo

Marcos Ronquillo is the underdog against a very well-financed Mayor Mike Rawlings, a great guy, but I think we ought to give Ronquillo a chance. I met with him about a week ago and was generally impressed with his take on problems facing our city, like lack of basic services (apparently Mountain View doesn’t even get decent fire and ambulance services), our crappy streets — he based his whole campaign on pot holes — and the 9 billion in infrastructure needs Dallas needs. Then he told me this —

“We really need to get away from a system where our mayors are picked for us.”

No kidding, because that will only make Dallas more attractive to those who have an agenda, it won’t make people want to MOVE here. Or LIVE here. They will continue to choose the suburbs. Consider what a reader emailed me after my post on the Appraisal District raising residential property values more than commercial:

My properties were slammed with $300,000 plus increases in  value in the ‘better ‘ parts of Dallas, the other parts were as usual left alone .

If the people of Dallas had some gumption this would not be allowed, these tax increases should provide a great quality of life and resources for the citizens of Dallas, but sadly that is not the case, it provides a great quality of life for the higher ups and their salaries and waste. I would invest in Dallas if this were not the case.

The housing situation, the report found, forces Dallas residents to choose: Buy less-than-desirable places to live, stretch budgets for something nicer, or flee to the suburbs for a better fit.

5. Create more variety in single family housing options that will strengthen our tax base.