{"id":184208,"date":"2025-08-29T09:08:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T09:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/184208\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T09:08:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T09:08:13","slug":"dallas-state-lobbying-spending-needs-a-reset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/184208\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas state lobbying spending needs a reset"},"content":{"rendered":"

An unexpected debate broke out at Dallas City Hall on Wednesday over how the city handles its state lobbying efforts. <\/p>\n

The points of contention: whether the only woman on Dallas\u2019 state lobbying team is paid fairly relative to the two men and whether the city\u2019s lobbyists as a group are actually earning what the city is shelling out. <\/p>\n

Good questions, and in a rare moment, Mayor Eric Johnson actually weighed in on the policy debate, making some strong points on pay disparity and whether Dallas has any influence in a GOP-dominated state. <\/p>\n

The conversation began when council member Adam Bazaldua raised concerns that lobbyist Lorena Campos is underpaid compared with Kwame Walker and Randy Cain, the other two state-level lobbyists whose contracts were up for renewal. <\/p>\n

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Cain, who has represented the city since 1995, is the most senior of the three. Council members approved his contract at a maximum cost of $504,000 for a four-year period. <\/p>\n

Walker\u2019s contract was then approved at a maximum of $480,000 for a four-year period. He has represented the city since 1998. As proposed, Campos\u2019 contract was set to cap out at $372,000 over four years. <\/p>\n

Campos has represented Dallas since 2018. Her LinkedIn profile shows December 2018 as the point she started her lobbying firm. Before that, she worked for a political consulting firm for four years.<\/p>\n

Bazaldua proposed increasing Campos\u2019 cap to $457,000, arguing that women have historically been underpaid for doing the same work as men. That sparked a back-and-forth about how much experience each lobbyist has, and what pay parity really means. <\/p>\n

Council member Cara Mendelsohn pointed out, reasonably, that Campos hadn\u2019t asked for the rate increase that Bazaldua proposed. Johnson weighed in that personal characteristics like gender shouldn\u2019t be the measuring stick for pay. <\/p>\n

Bazaldua later told us he was just trying to bring Campos closer to the pay of her male colleagues, based on experience and not simply gender. <\/p>\n

His proposal failed in a 14-1 vote, and the council unanimously approved Campos\u2019 contract as originally presented.<\/p>\n

If all of this sounds like much ado about nothing, it\u2019s not. It raised two serious areas the council needs to be thoughtful about \u2014 how race and gender play into contracting and how the city determines it\u2019s actually getting value for costs. <\/p>\n

Pay disparity is a real issue, and the council should be mindful of historical problems. But it shouldn\u2019t raise a payment based on that factor alone. And from where we were sitting, that\u2019s what it sounded like Bazaldua was trying to do. <\/p>\n

Johnson, meanwhile, was right to ask the bigger question. Does City Hall have lobbyists who can influence the state\u2019s Republican power base? Johnson doesn\u2019t think so, and council members on the left we\u2019ve talked to agree. <\/p>\n

If that\u2019s the case, no one should be getting a raise. The question the council should be asking instead is how we can assemble the most effective team for the lowest cost to make sure Dallas\u2019 priorities are heard in Austin.<\/p>\n

What was troubling about the debate Wednesday was that it didn\u2019t seem to have occurred to anyone at City Hall, except Johnson, to ask that question at all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An unexpected debate broke out at Dallas City Hall on Wednesday over how the city handles its state…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":156264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,1596,14840,14841,6083,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-184208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-dallas-city-council","11":"tag-dallas-city-hall","12":"tag-editorials","13":"tag-texas","14":"tag-tx","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115111271217132711","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}