Money to Burn

The owners of the other two consulting firms hired to conduct the study, James Gilleylen and Ray Stanland, are former city employees. Gilleylen is the former director of the city's Department of Housing and Neighborhood Services and one of former City Manager John Ware's associates in forming large-scale neighborhood development plans.

Gilleylen was one of the people behind the Fair Park Gateway Plan, a NationsBank-funded study that concluded, among other things, that the city and NationsBank should acquire 150 acres of property for redevelopment--with Dallas paying $12 million for the first 100 acres.

Why didn't the council members know that the consultants had been hired? Because the money for the Fair Park consultants totaled $45,000--three contracts of $15,000. That's the maximum amount that the city can authorize without approval from the city council, and that's why Laura Miller didn't know the studies had been out-sourced.

Miller won't complain too much; like the rest of the council, she's eager to find a way to crack down on these establishments. (Maybe overeager. At a budget hearing this year she likened them to "cockroaches.") Other anti-liquor and sex-club activists are watching the Fair Park experience to use it as a model to run these establishments from their neighborhoods too.

In the same way these studies are used to run babes-and-booze joints out of city limits, Dallas relies on hired guns to do what the courts said it shouldn't: set racial quotas (called "benchmarks" in cityspeak) in city contracting. To make sure there's enough minority businesses in the community to support the quota, the city, as required by law, must hire an outside firm to survey minority businesses in local industry.

The city's not supposed to be in the race-counting business to begin with. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that cities couldn't set minority contracting goals unless they can prove past discrimination. No one has here in Dallas. Nevertheless, in 1994 the city hired Atlanta-based D.J. Miller & Associates to determine how many minority firms the city could use. The study cost more than $250,000 and took three years.

The study was unveiled in 1997, then dismissed. The study found that City Hall had overestimated the number of active minority firms in the area in setting previous benchmarks. The city council ignored the findings and in 1997 set all but one quota--um, "benchmark"--above those recommended by the consulting firm.

But here's the real kicker: They didn't have to do it at all.

According to Reye Olivas, assistant director of the Office of Minority Business, the city could go to the North Central Texas Regional Certification Agency for a constantly updated list of the certified minority firms in and around Dallas. That agency vets various companies and registers them as minority-owned. The city could just call them, get the numbers, and damn the studies.

Undaunted, the city has commissioned another "availability and disparity study" in this year's budget. The cost for that study: $500,000.

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The park board's meeting is over. Lozada has woken up and Dwaine Caraway has dashed to the bathroom. There is no consensus on how to get the parks' master plan done for a million dollars.

Doing it in-house is not an option. Willis Winters says his department's planning staff has been cut 70 percent since the mid-1980s. "Our planning and design division staff doesn't have the capacity to conduct a study of this magnitude. We don't have the time to do any design in-house, like we did in the '80s," he says. "We'll never get to those levels again."

Winters will go back to Carter and Burgess for more negotiations. It's unclear whether the city will scrape for the $1.7 million or stick with their allocated million.

City staff is getting smaller while the scope and breadth of the city projects is growing. The only way to fill that gap is by hiring experts. This year's budget is the biggest in Dallas history, and 540 staff positions are being cut.

"One trend we've noticed is that you see more and more staff being reduced," says Susan Barron, of Carter and Burgess' marketing department. "For some of the more specialized jobs...they just don't have the staff."

She cited the city's transportation and engineering staffs as ones that have witnessed large cutbacks. The firm has several former Dallas city employees of those departments on staff, but wouldn't let the Dallas Observer speak with them.

David Dybala, director of the city's public works and transportation department, says the numbers of consultants hired has been steadily increasing as the city pushes through bond package after bond package.

"We handle that many more projects and we don't have the staff," he says. "With the amount of work we do now, with the '95 and '98 bond programs, we have to use consultants."

By the way, the city cut another 18 staff positions from this year's transportation budget. Of the 13 employees that received pink slips, all but two are getting new jobs with the city, saving taxpayers nothing. Six of the positions that were cut, members of a city survey team, are being out-sourced to a private firm.

During the park board's meeting, Ralph Isenberg spies two city planning and development department staff members in the audience. At one point he asks the two, "Could we hire you to do this study, and how much would it cost?" Everybody guffaws, but Isenberg is serious. Pressed, the planning department guys tell him that it isn't feasible because of time constraints.

Later Isenberg goes over the daylong meeting, details of the water-park study and upcoming comprehensive parks department study swirling in his head. Finally he says, "We didn't talk about kids much, did we?"