Why is my city in a hotel bed with the NRA?

Imagine what would happen if the ninth-largest city in America worked out a deal with Planned Parenthood to host a weeklong convention in city-owned facilities and gave them a $927,000 discount.

Conservatives and anti-abortion churches would lose their ever-loving minds. There would be hell to pay. Someone would be fired. Politicians would fall over each other apologizing.

Something just like that did actually happen in the city where I live, which is, in fact, the ninth largest city in America. Except it wasn’t Planned Parenthood that got this sweetheart deal from the City of Dallas; it was the National Rifle Association.

Yep, that’s right. The NRA put on its annual convention in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas and paid — wait for it — only $5,000 for the event space and services.

The total bill should have been $931,990.

How do we know this? Not because city officials wanted us to know but because some dogged reporters at our local public radio station filed a Freedom of Information Act request and got the contract — which city officials did not want to come clean about and still don’t want to talk about.

That resulted in a blockbuster story published and broadcast by KERA here in Dallas.

As a taxpaying citizen, this news concerned me. Actually, it made me quite angry. So I wrote an email to my city councilor, who is someone I know and respect. She assured me it probably wasn’t as sinister as I thought but she would ask some questions and get back to me. Six weeks passed, and I got no further response.

So I wrote to her again and reminded her she had promised me some answers. Her response was that she would ask her staff what was going on.

More than a week passed, and once again I got no response. So last Thursday, I wrote to her a third time and said I thought this was now something I needed to write about for our national publication because it was obvious no one at City Hall was concerned about this issue that a whole lot of Dallas citizens are upset about. I also wrote to the media manager for the city council with a small set of questions.

Two additional events

In the intervening two weeks since my first email to my city councilor, two things happened that in my mind escalated this inquiry.

The first is that our mayor — who last year got reelected as a Democrat in a Democratic-majority city and only a few weeks later announced he had become a Republican — gave a speech at the Republican National Convention.

“He used his 4 minutes to take personal credit — as a Republican, of course — for reducing crime in the city since he first was elected in 2019 as a Democrat.”

Mayor Eric Johnson was given a prime time slot at the RNC, right before the introduction of vice presidential candidate JD Vance. He used his 4 minutes to take personal credit — as a Republican, of course — for reducing crime in the city since he first was elected in 2019 as a Democrat. What arrogant pish-posh.

Other members of the City Council were not amused with the mayor — whom many of them now disdain as an opportunistic turncoat — taking sole credit for something that was accomplished as a collaborative effort.

Here’s what I thought about the whole thing: Crime in Dallas and everywhere else would be greatly reduced if there weren’t so many guns on the street, if we didn’t have so many urban cowboys packing heat in their big-ass pickups they back into parking spaces at Target.

The second thing that happened is that last week a former school police officer from Uvalde, Texas, was arraigned on charges of abandoning the children at Robb Elementary School he was responsible to protect from a crazed gunman in 2022.

The Associated Press put it plainly: “Adrian Gonzales was among the nearly 400 law enforcement personnel who responded to the scene but then waited more than 70 minutes to confront the shooter inside the school.”

As a result of that failure, 19 children and two teachers were murdered inside the Uvalde school.

“There were 400 ‘good guys with guns’ who uniformly failed to protect the children and teachers in their care.”

At last Gonzales had the courage to show up for the arraignment. The only other official charged, Uvalde Schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo, waived his arraignment and entered a not guilty plea without showing in person.

In case you’ve forgotten what happened in Uvalde, here’s a recap from another AP story: “More than 370 federal, state and local officers converged on Robb Elementary, but they waited more than 70 minutes before confronting the shooter, even as the gunman could be heard firing an AR-15-style rifle. Terrified students inside the classroom called 911 as parents begged officers — some of whom could hear shots being fired while they stood in a hallway — to go in. A tactical team of officers eventually went into the classroom and killed the shooter.”

Consider this: There were 400 “good guys with guns” who uniformly failed to protect the children and teachers in their care.

Blood on the NRA’s hands

As guilty as they all are — why did not even one officer of the law storm that classroom and save the children? — the other guilty party is the NRA. It is because of the NRA’s aggressive lobbying, brainwashing, lying and free-flowing money that neither the state of Texas nor the United States has a ban on assault weapons.

“School shootings would not be happening so frequently, and would not be so deadly, if the NRA did not oppose every common-sense gun control measure put forward anywhere.”

The NRA is the main perpetrator of the lie that these rapid-fire weapons — the same kind used in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, by the way — are needed for sporting purposes. Pish-posh again.

There is no reason an average citizen needs access to these kind of assault weapons. They are made not for hunting but to kill people. Which is why they keep getting used over and over in every school shooting — to kill people.

So yes, the NRA is partly to blame for those 22 deaths in Uvalde. Just as they’re partly to blame for the 413 school shootings in America since Columbine. School shootings would not be happening so frequently, and would not be so deadly, if the NRA did not oppose every common-sense gun control measure put forward anywhere.

Yes, the NRA has blood on its hands.

And that’s the very group my city invested nearly a million dollars in supporting with tax money.

Misplaced priorities in Dallas

KERA reported that of the $931,990 cost of the space rental at the convention center, the NRA first got a $482,000 “discount” and then was given another $445,000 subsidy.

In case you don’t have a calculator handy, that’s a total gift to the NRA of $927,000.

Where is the outrage? Why has the City Council not at least said something about this? Why has no one been held accountable?

Well, part of the excuse is that the $445,000 subsidy was paid by Visit Dallas, a nonprofit organization that has a contract with the City of Dallas to attract tourism to the city. Visit Dallas gets its money from hotel tax fees paid by hotel guests. That’s still public money, still tax funding, regardless of who’s paying it.

There actually are two intertwined organizations that make this happen — Visit Dallas and the Dallas Tourism Improvement District — which office in the same spot and share staff.

The DTID website explains: “Hotels levy a 2% assessment on sold hotel rooms at hotels within Dallas city limits that have 100 rooms or more. The hotel recovers the cost of that assessment by charging it to guests as a hotel room night charge. The funds are collected by the city of Dallas and returned to the Tourism PID to be used to market and promote Dallas as a convention and tourism destination.”

Please note: “The funds are collected by the City of Dallas,” meaning as a public tax that ought to have public control. DTID in turn funds Visit Dallas, which says it is “an independent, not-for-profit sales and marketing organization contracted with the City of Dallas to promote Dallas as a premier business and leisure travel destination.”

Ultimately, the money flowing through the DTID to Visit Dallas — and in this case to the NRA — is tax money collected by the City of Dallas. It is public money.

The City Council has control over how tax monies are doled out. Neither of the tourism promotion agencies has the power to levy a tax. They exist at the will of elected city leaders who are turning a blind eye to how these tax funds are used.

Dallas faces budget crisis

At the same time all this is playing out, the City of Dallas now faces a $38 million budget shortfall and city leaders are thinking up ways to punish the poor to balance the budget. One of those ideas is to close all the city’s public swimming pools.

“City leaders are thinking up ways to punish the poor to balance the budget.”

As in most American cities, it is not the rich kids who use those public pools in the 100-degree heat. It is not the kids who have swimming pools in their backyards or the kids whose parents are members of the dozens of elite country clubs all over town.

Public swimming pools have been called the “first line of defense for young people to stay out of trouble.” There is a direct correlation between providing public recreational facilities, such as pools, and reducing gun violence and other crime.

If Mayor Johnson really wants to tout his record in reducing crime, he should have opposed spending nearly $1 million to bring the NRA to town. If our City Council really wants to take credit for that shared accomplishment, they should apologize for letting this happen and take some steps to ensure it won’t happen again.

But they have not. They are silent. They do not want to answer questions.

Response from City Hall

Naively, I thought someone at City Hall would be concerned about Dallas tax dollars funding the NRA. But apparently, I was wrong.

I finally did get a response from my city councilor, who sent me a paragraph of financial analysis from somewhere in City Hall that extremely contradicts what KERA reported and what the signed contracts they got hold of demonstrate.

So I thought perhaps KERA had been wrong. Maybe their story had been challenged. Maybe there had been a retraction. Nope and nope. No challenge. No retraction.

And it turns out the Dallas Morning News wrote an editorial critical of the city’s secrecy around how public funds are spent for tourism in light of the NRA revelation. The title of that editorial: “Dallas’ Deal with the NRA Belongs to the Public.”

My city councilor, Kathy Stewart, offered this explanation to me July 26: “This decision was not something we voted on at a council meeting or a committee meeting. … I encourage you to reach out to others, but Visit Dallas is ultimately who you will want to engage.”

Apparently, Visit Dallas does not want to be engaged. My email inquiry to their communications person went unanswered. Not even a no comment. Just crickets.

Same for the official communications person at City Hall: Silence. Not so much as a “we received your email.”

I doubt these communications professionals are so incompetent as to not know how to answer emails. Which leads me to the conclusion they just don’t want to talk about city funding for the NRA.

But talk about it we must.

I’m struck by the admission that our City Council has not discussed this at all. That in itself is a form of tacit approval of the sweetheart deal.

We share some blame

Despite how horribly I believe our city leaders have handled this dubious partnership with the NRA, the rest of us bear some guilt too. We have not protested loudly enough. We have not demanded answers. We have not attended City Council meetings to speak truth to power.

“The NRA gets its way in city after city, state after state and in the halls of Congress because not enough people stand up to their bullying.”

Neither have our churches. Lord knows, most of us are too busy feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, binding up the brokenhearted and trying to keep books from being removed from school libraries to have time to run down to City Hall.

Yet this is an issue that matters. The NRA gets its way in city after city, state after state and in the halls of Congress because not enough people stand up to their bullying. Yes, they are bullies. They have bought off more elected officials than the tobacco industry.

So here in Dallas, I’m going to bang the drum loudly. If you live here, too, I hope you’ll join me. Pester your City Council member with questions about the immoral deal the NRA got. Seek to have public money used for better public purposes — like community swimming pools — than subsidizing violent groups like the NRA.

And if you live somewhere beyond our fair city, I hope you’ll join the fight too. The NRA should become persona non grata in every city in America. They should not be able to book a convention center anywhere.

In fact, I’d suggest they hold their annual meeting in a closed school or church that was the site of a recent mass shooting. They ought to feel right at home there.

 

Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His brand-new book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.

 

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