Dallas Mayor Faces Texas-Size Challenge

DALLAS —  Laura Miller had a reporter’s notebook in her hand at the City Council briefing last week.

But she wasn’t using it to write one of her famously scathing critiques. The former journalist was taking notes in her new role as mayor of Dallas.

After 15 years of digging dirt as a reporter and nearly two terms as a City Council member, Miller has made an amazing transformation from muckraker to mayor.

This woman, after all, once demanded access to elected officials’ cell phone bills for a story on wasteful spending.

She has called former Mayor Ron Kirk a “soap salesman” and written that council members were “dupes . . . controlled by arrogant bureaucrats.” She described one councilman as a “pompous ignoramus.”

Her mission, she once wrote in a column, was to print “the truth about the sleazy, stupid things that people in power do in Dallas.”

Now that Miller’s in power, she says she’s ready to clean up City Hall, literally and figuratively.

Less than 24 hours before she was sworn in as mayor Feb. 20, Miller was moving into her office, juggling interviews and preparing to pick up garbage and dead animals in one of the city’s most neglected neighborhoods.

“I am obsessed with cleaning up the city,” said Miller, 43, a slim woman in a tailored navy-blue pantsuit and pearl necklace. “I want everything clean and tidy.”

Her campaign for mayor was anything but clean, as she and her runoff opponent, business establishment candidate Tom Dunning, traded allegations of endorsement-buying and vote fraud. Although she won support from 55% of the voters, only one council member endorsed her--a testament to her frosty relations with her colleagues during her 3 1/2 years as a councilwoman.

Some voters said Miller’s fervor will serve her well in the mayor’s seat, where she hopes to push through a back-to-basics platform of repairing streets, improving parks and reforming the city’s code enforcement and animal control operations. But although the mayor has the power to set agenda items, she casts just one of 15 votes in Dallas’ weak-mayor form of government.

She must work to make amends with council members, said Julie Lyons, editor of the Dallas Observer, the alternative news weekly where Miller was an award-winning columnist.

“If you’re an investigative reporter, your instinct is kill, kill, kill,” Lyons said. “That’s not conducive to building a consensus. She’s going to have to change that.”

Right away, Miller got some criticism. Her order to clean up the trash in a poor section of the city irritated the councilman for that district because he wasn’t told beforehand.

“I had to see it on the television,” said Councilman James Fantroy. “That’s not a good way for her to start her relationship with me and my community.”

Fantroy said the new mayor may find it tough getting majority support for her agenda.

“She has to have eight votes,” he said. “She can’t do that disrespecting council members.”

But Miller says she’s confident of council cooperation, especially with the departure of her predecessor. Kirk quit the mayor’s office with 14 months left in his four-year term to run for the U.S. Senate.

Miller Opposed Predecessor’s Projects

Miller publicly opposed some of his projects, including tax breaks for downtown developers, a city subsidy for the millionaire owners of the city’s new arena called the American Airlines Center, and the now-failed bid for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

In return, Miller said, Kirk shut her out of key committee chairmanships and interrupted her during meetings when her time to speak had expired.

Frustrated, Miller sometimes would start shouting.

“My goal as mayor is to make sure none of the council members feel like that,” she said.

“Her persevering nature” will make her effective, said Donna Blumer, a former councilwoman who was often one of Miller’s only allies.

Her hardest challenge will be to satisfy the various constituents who supported her candidacy, Blumer said.

For example, although Miller found surprisingly strong support in some conservative neighborhoods, Blumer said she may lose ground there with her recent promise to push for an anti-discrimination statute protecting gays and lesbians.

Miller’s upbringing was not among the poor and disenfranchised she’s pledged to help. The daughter of retailing executive Philip Miller, she grew up in Concord, Mass., and Stamford, Conn., before moving to Dallas as a teenager when her father took the helm of Neiman Marcus.

After majoring in journalism at the University of Wisconsin, she became a writer at both the Dallas Morning News and the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald. Frustration over city support of a costly new arena spurred Miller to trade her job and six-figure salary with the Dallas Observer for a run at a City Council seat in 1998.

Not long after winning her first two-year term, she began battling breast cancer. In a very public way, she overcame chemotherapy, hair loss, radiation and emotional upheaval. Her cancer is in remission.

At her swearing-in ceremony, Miller promised to “shine a bright light in every nook and cranny of City Hall.”

Details of Botched Drug Arrests Sought

Among the first to step into the spotlight will be the city manager and police chief. She has asked both men to explain publicly to the council details of a series of botched drug arrests. The FBI has launched a public corruption investigation.

Council members, who were never briefed on the matter, should not have had to get information from the evening news, Miller said.

“I want accountability,” she said. “It is in my blood and my marrow that we are open and responsive.”

Miller also has pledged a pay raise for police and firefighters, even as sagging sales taxes have siphoned millions of dollars from the city budget. It’s an ambitious platform to carry out in 14 months.

“As mayor, she has to have an agenda for all the issues facing the city of Dallas,” said Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson. “Her style has been to pick an issue, study it in depth and stick with it until she’s satisfied. That’s sort of the terrier chasing the car. Now she’s caught the car.”