Programming Note: Early Voting started yesterday. You can vote early at any Vote Center in Dallas County from Oct 19 to 30th. A map and list of early voting locations can be found here. Vote Early, Vote Often!
A recurring theme of this blog, maybe the one overarching theme of all of it, is a question I keep coming back to: What do we owe each other, living in the same city? I have asked some version of this question over and over again this year, always giving new and partial answers. We owe each other honesty about tradeoffs and what our choices really cost. We owe everyone a voice, but owe no one a veto. We owe this city as an inheritance to the people who will come after us, just like the people who came before us left us something too. The next partial answer of the week is one of the less popular and less satisfying ones.
We owe each other a willingness to lose.
We owe it especially after we have made our case, organized our neighbors, attended the meetings, spoken at the microphone, remained completely convinced that we are right, and still lose anyways. Saying you were willing to lose when you’ve won is only lip service. In this regard, we owe each other the most, exactly at the moment it is hardest to feel particularly charitable to your neighbors or the democratic process.
However, losing is not a bug in the system. Democracy is not an “I get what I want” machine, where if you insert enough quarters and put up enough yard signs, you always get the outcome you want. The more important and defining part of democracy is arguably losing elections, not winning them. When we enter a voting booth, there’s a promise implicit in the whole arrangement, where we’re willing to play along with the notion of voting because we expect the other side will accept the result if we win. Otherwise, why even bother?
Democracy only works when we all first agree on this bedrock principle, and representation, or republican forms of government, requires us to add a second one.
We need a government to do the things none of us could do on our own, or would be done worse if we tried to. We form governments because we have to live together, and living together means making decisions that cannot satisfy everyone. The same dollar bill cannot be used to pave a street, and staff a library, and stay in a taxpayer’s pocket. While city council members are only voting yes or no on an issue, they are never doing that in a vacuum. Every benefit has a cost, every cost has a benefit. Someone has to be responsible for weighing all those claims against each other, including the claims of residents who never attended a city council meeting in matching t-shirts, and even future generations of residents unborn or not living here yet.
When we elect people to make decisions on our behalf, they owe us their best judgment, but not their obedience. As soon as you ask your representative for their obedience, you invite the question, “obey whom?” You can’t obey everyone, when everyone doesn’t agree. Asking our elected officials to “obey us” not only fails in its being impossible, but it betrays the promise of representative government. We elect people who are accountable to the voters for the collective weight of all of their decisions, not just whether one dimension of one vote on one day aggrieved one party. Their decisions will sometimes be imperfect or short-sighted, but the defining feature of our democracy is that we get to tell them that regularly, through elections.
We seem to be actively forgetting both of these two principles in Dallas.
Currently, organized campaigns are seeking to force recall elections of two sitting city council members, District 1’s Chad West and District 13’s Gay Donnell Willis. The organizers of those recalls cite disputes involving recent zoning cases, all of which involve new housing or density, the question of what to do with our current City Hall, but most consistently, a failure to “listen” to constituents. RecallChadWest.com, paid for by the political action committee Dallas Civic Accountability PAC, says he has “become fundamentally disconnected” from his district, and that their mission is to “return power to District 1 voters.” RecallGayDWillis.com, paid for by the Neighborhoods First PAC, leads with the claim that “our families deserve a voice,” and that the councilwoman “consistently ignores concerned constituents.”
Here’s the problem. District 1 voters have power, and District 13’s families have a voice. They have voted to send Chad West to the horseshoe four times and Gay Willis now three. Those elections were conducted, as we speak, less than twelve months ago.
If a council member heard from neighbors, considered what they asked for, and decided that other concerns mattered more, with everything else we require city council members to think about, a budget and the roads and the parks and the cops, would that not still count as listening? Presumably not, since that is more or less the exact sequence of events that has led to their attempted removals.
They are not asking to be listened to. They are asking to be agreed with. They are asking not to lose. What they are asking for is obedience, and their charge against their council members is that he or she thought they were owed something else: judgment.
Neither recall website lists the name of a single individual as an organizer, endorser of the petition, treasurer of the PAC, or any neighborhood leaders or organizers in any capacity. We are being told that there are people who are not being listened to, yet these political action committees are not apparently ready to specify whom. Exactly at the moment when democracy and the will of the people is most invoked, the names of the people doing the invoking are conspicuously absent.
I don’t think you have to perfectly agree with either council member’s votes on zoning cases or any other issue to find this objectionable. You can think they have exercised poor judgment, or prefer someone else, or help that person run against them in the next election. However, the claim here is actually far narrower. Disagreeing with me makes you unfit to finish the term you were elected to serve. The burden of proof is on the recall organizers to explain to all of us why their disagreement should carry more weight than the thousands of votes that put these council members in office in the first place. Those people, those voters, were constituents and neighbors too, even if they have not formed a political action committee and raised money to remind everyone.
The Willis recall organizers, for example, have publicly announced a $50,000 fundraising goal to pay professionals to collect petition signatures and to get their message out. If that sounds like a lot of money, it is. That is roughly double what was spent by Willis’s most recent opponent, Diane Benjamin, in the 2025 city council election, according to campaign finance records. The recall organizers also specifically have asked for individual donors willing to give $5,000 to their PAC, which is five times the donation limit allowed to candidates in a normal Dallas city council election, though to be clear, that limit wouldn’t apply to PACs in any case.
There is nothing inherently wrong with raising money to persuade voters. I would be walking a very narrow line by defending elections while objecting to people paying for the mailers, signs, or campaigning that elections tend to involve. However, it is worth asking what this money is actually intended to purchase. The organizers are raising money to force everyone else to revisit a choice we all already thought we made, before the next occasion on which we all thought we agreed to reconsider it.
City wide, the Save Dallas City Hall Coalition is pursuing something that looks different, but I think is much closer to the recalls than its supporters would care to admit. Currently, they are collecting signatures on a petition that if successful, would mean voters will see a city charter amendment on their ballot on an upcoming election day in 2027. That charter amendment, in its own words, would require the “city-owned municipal building at 1500 Marilla Street designed by I. M. Pei & Partners” would be used as the “permanent official city hall and seat of municipal government of the City of Dallas.”
The proposed charter amendment would require, among other things, that relocating or demolishing or leasing the building would require another charter amendment and election. But further, under Article 11, Section 5 of the Texas Constitution, no city charter may be “altered, amended or repealed” more often than every two years. So, if passed by the voters, the measure would also freeze the current City Council from taking any steps to relocate for another two years after this election. And, for that matter, would freeze any charter reform on anything at all, including reform to 2024’s Prop U, or Strong Mayor-oriented reforms.
Regular readers know where I stand on the building. I have argued for relocation, and when a suitable plan emerges, demolition and redevelopment. You are free to see my enthusiasm for others’ accepting of defeat, at a moment my own opinion has a 9-6 majority on council, as suspiciously convenient. I digress.
Our elected officials have decided, repeatedly, that they think the city should continue to take steps that would allow for an eventual relocation from City Hall. The Save City Hall petition organizers are free to not like that decision. However, their ballot proposition, attempting to wrest away control on this issue from a council the rest of us all voted into office, has the exact same effect as the recalls. What connects both is an impulse that their disagreement should undo an arrangement the rest of us agreed to. Like the recall organizers, they want to revoke the right to use judgment we gave our elected representatives, because they cannot accept how those representatives used it.
What bothers me even more about the petition is how little of what we are actually voting for would appear on the ballot. We elect the city council to consider the cost of repairing the building, the cost of moving, what either option would mean for Downtown, and what else we could do with the money or the land. We have the privilege to judge them on their record of balancing all of those things, consistently, for years. The ballot petition would only ask whether we want to stay in City Hall. It would not ask us to approve a particular repair budget, or say what we are willing to give up to pay for it, or say what tradeoff we would be willing to make for preservation. In two years, the charter amendment and its organizers will have no seat to keep, no voters to face, and no record to defend.
Most people on the Save City Hall side of the debate would tell you, publicly or privately, they think the estimated costs of staying and repairing the building are badly inflated. They could be absolutely right.
For the purposes of their charter amendment, this is completely beside the point.
The requirement they want in the charter is not tied in any way to them being proved right about the costs to stay in the building. There is no built-in, takesies-backsies if major building systems fail, if structural problems turn up, or a clearly better use for the building comes along. We’ll all just have to fight again then about whether those numbers are inflated. It is about as close as we could get to writing a blank check. Even if all fifteen council members later agreed that it should become a free public art museum, relocating would still require another charter election.
In effect, we would not be asked: “Do you want to keep City Hall?” The ballot proposition instead asks us to say, “I am willing to stay at Dallas City Hall regardless of the cost.”
Those are two different questions. I could like to do all kinds of things until someone tells me what it means I am giving up. That is most of what choosing things consists of.
Compare this instead with Dallas County Proposition A. The ballot language identifies that it is a $0.024 property tax rate increase, and then names the purposes: “reducing homelessness and encampments, improving access to mental-health treatment, and supporting stable housing.” Both the tax and what it would fund appear side-by-side in the same question.
We can think that is a good or a bad deal. We are free to think the programs will work or that the county spends enough on homelessness already. However, we cannot vote for the proposed benefit without at the same time also voting on the exact cost. That is what the Save City Hall proposal leaves out. It would only settle the part about keeping the building, while leaving out the actually difficult part of figuring out exactly what that’s worth to voters, instead letting some future generation or some future council figure it out.
Of course, recalls and charter petitions are available to us for a reason. There are reasons to remove someone that is truly unfit to serve the remainder of a term, and reasons to put a question directly to voters. However, the existence of these powers does not relieve us of having to explain why this specific disagreement requires them. “We did not get what we wanted” cannot be sufficient, because somebody will be able to say that after every decision a city makes.
If everyone acted on that basis, we would spend most of our time just fighting about whether to undo the thing we had just done, or removing the people who had done it. The elected officials who survived those efforts would learn which groups were expensive to disappoint and which people could safely be ignored. That would be a very peculiar result for campaigns ostensibly organized around the claim that everyone deserves a voice.
The most likely outcome, at least, one that can’t yet be ruled out, is that these recall elections go absolutely nowhere. Each requires organizers to collect signatures from 15% of the registered voters in a district, roughly 10,000 in District 13 and 7,000 in District 1. Again, if that sounds like a lot, it is. These are council elections where only 7,000 people voted last time around in District 13, and only 4,000 in District 1. Here’s the second catch: they only have 60 days in which to collect them, a clock that is actively ticking on both efforts.
Save City Hall’s petition can be signed by any voter in Dallas, so despite requiring a higher threshold of 20,000 signatures, it may well make. This petition would not have a 60-day shot-clock on it either, though if they want to make it in time for the May 2027 election, they would have only roughly 100 days to turn in their signatures. It’s likely no accident that all of these petitions, despite having been floated all year, waited until closer to the November midterm elections, when lots of registered voters will all be in the same places at voting centers, to help them get over the signature collection hump.
But I’m not writing this essay to tell you what to do when someone hands you a clipboard, or to handicap the odds of the petition taking. I’m writing because the very impulse, the yard signs, the Facebook posts, the websites and political action committees are killing our city. Regardless of whether these recall elections amount to anything at all other than a great deal of wasted time, money, and emotion, it is the impulse, the way of thinking behind the petitions that is toxic to the project of living with one another.
What makes this behavior so hard for me to stomach is that it depends precisely on other people being willing to do exactly what the organizers will not. Lose. If they win, they will expect the rest of us to recognize that a vote was taken, accept the result, and get on with living in the same city. They will want their victory to carry a meaning that they do not think their defeat does.
This is why losing matters more than winning. Winning asks you to accept an outcome you already wanted. Losing asks whether you really believe other people have the same right to a voice that you want for yourself, even when they use it to choose something you dislike.
Living with other people means that they sometimes get to help decide what happens to you. That is a considerably harder proposition to accept than the general observation that everyone deserves a voice, but it is the flip side of the exact same coin.
So, I’d ask the organizers one question. When there’s a conflict between what you and your neighbors want, somebody has to be disappointed. Who should it be, and why? If the answer is always them, you aren’t asking for a voice. You’re asking to be the only people in this city who never have to lose.
And your whole idea of democracy depends on the rest of us being better at losing than you are.
love/hate/other to Kirk P. at: onemansdallas@gmail.com
