Part 1: WHITHER GARLAND? Fixing a Broken System Must Be Key Beyond Current Central Park Dilemma

 

Unbalanced tenant ratio in apartments at old bank site threatens downtown rebirth, which needs more nearby residents with money to spend.

"We have met the enemy and he is us," said the wise cartoon character, Pogo.

Too often Pogo's words apply to our hometown of Garland.

All too often, when yet another project either fails or gets badly mangled and bungled, I think of Pogo and his famous line.

Pogo's maxim has been on my mind these last few days in light of last Tuesday night's gut-wrenching, eye-popping City Council session, which culminated in Mayor Doug Athas announcing that he plans to resign.

The tensions on council have been steadily climbing for several years now, growing increasingly ugly during the past year with tempers flaring and incendiary remarks being made—forcing the city to look closely at the Open Meetings Act to determine what has to be by law aired in reruns and on public TV itself.

When you think things can't get any worse, they suddenly do. Now the whole DFW Metroplex and beyond knows Garland is in a state of political turmoil and facing a complex political dilemma that isn't going away any time soon.

Athas' plans to resign without a specific time-frame or date of departure and clear delineation for a path forward, along with his and his friends' public campaign against his six opponents on the City Council, leaves the city in a severe political crisis.

As it has escalated over the past year, the turmoil on council has resulted in numerous projects in the city being thrown into a state of confusion—sometimes into the trash can.


To name a few:

1. The Tinsley-Lyles House debacle (covered in a previous blog, "A Tale of Two Historic Garland Houses");

2. The Central Park makerspace/dog park/skate park/armory (and other related issues there) circus;

3. The so-called "Bankhead Triangle" (Highway 66 entrance into Garland where it divides into West Avenues B and D in the heart of one of Garland's remaining African-American communities) fiasco;

4. The Eastern Hills Country Club stalemate;

5. The potential powder keg looming on the horizon because 70 percent of the new apartments slowly being carved out of the old Bank of America site will very likely mostly be reserved for Section 8 (lower-income) tenants—in a location that desperately needs to draw inhabitants with extra money to spend in the developing cadre of restaurants and stores downtown.

When I focus on just those five (four of which are less than two miles of my home in District 2), I want to shake my head in disbelief. It is simply incredible that things have been allowed to get so out of hand. It's like a horror movie that runs nonstop.

Will Eastern Hills Country Club continue as another casualty of city government crisis?

Then when I think about the new city contract—two years in the making—to purchase the old Hypermart building site after the current owner tears the building down, I wonder whether it, too, will join the list of failed projects because it still has many roads to travel to redevelopment.

As I look around and see the huge economic and building boom occurring all over Dallas and most of the other DFW area cities, I cringe with fear that Garland—the second-largest city in Dallas County, the 12th-largest in Texas, and the 87th-largest in the U.S.—is going to once again miss out and lose the moment.

Instead it will be like the orchestra on the sinking Titanic insistently playing our city's old "Happy Days Are Here Again!" refrain about the good things happening along our northern rim surrounding the George Bush Freeway, in the old Raytheon site at Miller at Jupiter, and finally (after a 2.5-year wrangle with the city's red tape) what's going to happen on the former Wyrick Farm at Jupiter and Buckingham (which was not a city initiative but private enterprise at its best). While those developments are positive, they cannot cover up the difficulties that threaten our city at the moment.

No wonder no one, except in jest, mentions Garland as a potential site for Amazon's huge expansion that our sister cities in the area are busy trying to woo!

We need solutions to our issues, not political fights. We absolutely do not need a political civil war polarizing and destroying our city and turning citizens against one another—which is already happening.
  
Without fixing the broken system, however, the problems will perpetuate, only with new faces in the picture frames.
 
(Tomorrow I'll write more about the heart of the issue facing the city in its current crisis.)

The Tinsley-Lyles House debacle is one of five messes that needs to be fixed.