The people of Arlington, Texas, are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore!
We’re all fed up with Republicans shoving legislation we don’t want and didn’t support down our throats, popular attitudes be damned. Well, the people of Arlington know this better than you’d think, despite how blood-red this part of Texas is on electoral votes. Years ago, when the city “won” the privilege of footing half the bill for Jerry Jones’ spectacularly expensive monument to his own greatness (it masquerades as a football stadium for most of the year), taxes were raised to pay for it in a fairly typical “bilk the citizens to pay for a stadium someone else will profit from” story that, if you follow new stadium stories, you’re painfully familiar with by now.
Next, the city had been promised that, after building a gorgeous ballpark for the Texas Rangers, no new ballparks would be built or considered, and the beloved exterior of the stadium would be left alone. However, that promise was swiftly broken when the wealthy powers-that-be decided it was high time a new ballpark was built, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to the taxpayers of the city.
Still, this sort of thing happens with regularity when you host a pro sports team (and Arlington now boasts two), so the grumbling and anger were kept at manageable levels. That is, until the city was approached by a French natural gas company, Total, that wanted to drill some more gas wells in the city. The people came out in force to oppose it: they pointed out that air quality in North Texas is already the worst it’s been in decades, the destruction that fracking and drilling cause to local groundwater, the increased danger of asthma and respiratory illness, and the fact that the city already has a number of well sites and the last thing it needed was more of them, polluting their air and water.
The city council heard their complaints, listened to their numerous experts, and….voted to approve the deal. The residents had insisted on a 600 foot limit on drill sites (no closer than 600 feet to a residential area), the council voted for 300 feet.
If you think that’s pretty brazen, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The Progressive Women of Arlington, a local activist group started by a pair of liberal Texas women who figured there HAD to be more than just them in the entire city (and were incredibly correct in that assumption), decided something had to be done. The group has been working to get money out of politics for some time now, but has struggled to find a way forward in the face of a city council whose members have served for decades with no threat of removal, no real challengers, and no interest in listening to the voters. Well, if the leaders aren’t working, time to change them. They decided to back a term limits proposal, and get it on the ballot for this November.
Now, I know that opinions on the left about term limits aren’t uniform, but the city of Arlington is a textbook case of what happens without them: city leaders are entrenched and, after years of cronyism and business-friendly dealing, have all the money and influence they need to win time and again, drowning out challengers and swamping them with advertising. They lost interest in the average voter, because they stopped serving them years ago.
It might surprise you to know that, in this matter, the PWA found an unlikely ally in their fight: local activist and devout Tea Party Republican Zack Maxwell. Desperate times make for strange bedfellows indeed, but Maxwell is no ordinary MAGA-hat wearing “Drain the Swamp!” chanter: he is as disgusted with his own party’s locally-grown swamp creatures as the progressive women of the PWA, and in fact the term limits proposal was his idea initially, a ballot measure he’d been trying to get petition signatures for at the time. Both sides put aside their distrust to unite for the common cause of ensuring the people of the city are once again heard by their government, and getting career politicians out of office so dedicated civil servants could once again take the reins. They worked hard, eventually bringing in over 11,000 signatures on petitions to have their measure placed on the ballot.
The city council did all it could to stop this effort in its tracks: angry letters to the editor were written by members of the local Chamber of Commerce (pro-business allies of the council), detractors appeared where petitioners were gathering signatures to try and provoke them, and the council even changed a part of the charter limiting the number of possible ballot measures via petition to one per election (the PWA had hoped to also put forth a petition for campaign finance reform, but in light of the change it had to be tabled for another year). Still, in spite of this opposition, they won. Great news, right?
Not so fast, there! We’re talking about the entrenched holders of the reins of power versus some ordinary citizen activists, the fight isn’t over that easy! The mayor called them in to negotiate a compromise bill: instead of three 2-year terms (retroactively effective, so anyone with over 6 years service is out at the end of their current term), the council proposed an alternate ballot: three 3-year CONSECUTIVE terms (so, after 9 years, you drop out for a term and can come back for another 9 years, rinse and repeat as desired), no retroactive measure. The PWA counter-offered: they would accept all that, if the ballot measure included the means for citizens to force a recall of council members so they could be removed before their term was up.
The council considered this offer...and decided they would put their measure on the ballot as-is, compromise be damned.
Now, the council can put a proposition on the ballot after two readings at two separate meetings, and meetings must be 72 hours apart. Since the council had not had those meetings, Zack Maxwell (our Tea Partier who started this endeavor) sued to block it from being placed on the ballot, and a judge agreed, issuing a temporary restraining order on the grounds that the two meetings had not been held per charter rules. Also, the deadline to get it on the ballot was 8/20, and there wasn’t time to hold two meetings before that deadline. Victory at last! Right?
We’re talking about Republicans in the age of Trump, of course it wasn’t THAT easy. Instead, the city council announced it would be having a meeting, on 8/19, to vote to suspend the charter’s rules so they could have one meeting that night, read it the first time, vote, then immediately read it again at a second meeting on 8/20, vote, and put it on the ballot, effectively forcing their own competing measure in via gross disregard for the rules.
Locals rushed to the meeting on Sunday night to voice their extreme displeasure with the city council for this brazen attempt to ramrod their own legislation down the voters’ throats and ignore all the rules so they could do as they please. Finally, after hours of this aggressive shaming from their constituents, the council finally agreed not to suspend the charter’s rules. Thus was their measure killed once and for all: the PWA/Maxwell ballot measure will be the only one appearing on the ballot this November, and if the outcry on Sunday is any indication, a lot of city council members are going to need to update their resumes the day after election day.
Source: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
It’s easy to get discouraged, to believe in the face of such brazen corruption and overwhelming Republican entrenched power that we cannot hope to defeat them. But, as these tenacious women proved Sunday night, long odds do not always mean defeat. If we stand together, stand up for what is right, we can win the long fight against corruption and abuse of power.
Stay strong, resisters. The fight has only just begun.