Just Plain Wrong Headed

Give all the explanations you want, either side, for why the convention center hotel should or should not be built. But there's one that's been floating around that opens up a slippery slope - and one that could very well defeat the exact reason the Vote Noers say we need to build the hotel - to drive business and development to downtown. Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price is the most recent proponent to use this bite-you-in-the-butt reasoning, per DO scribe Sam Merten's paraphrasing:

Price, who Haynes referred to as "our warrior," said the person who has the most to benefit from killing the hotel doesn't even have a vote because he's not a citizen of Dallas (italics mine).

OK. So are we saying now that people and businesses owners who are not Dallas citizens (and therefore cannot vote) do not have any say in what happens in the city they do business in? Are we going to take their tax money for our coffers, but deny them any say? I think that this is what the original, Colonial-era tea partiers had in mind when they threw their protest. So are we now going to travel down this slippery slope where we tell businesses the only time we really want to hear from them is when they write that check to pay taxes? Nobody denies that Harlan Crow has a dog in this hunt. But you know, there are plenty of people on either side with ulterior motives. It's what drives politics, and you'd have to do a complete blood draining followed by a transfusion of pure O neg to get that to change. So let's just drop this particular argument, and go to the meat and potatoes. I mean, is it really all that necessary if the Vote No group's quiver is as full of fully delineated arrows as it claims?