As a Council Member, She Was a Consensus Builder

Harriet E. Miers’ career as a politician was brief: a two-year stint on the Dallas City Council. And it was not altogether happy, in part because of a redistricting battle that consumed city politics at the time, as well as racial tensions that culminated in a physical confrontation between a black county commissioner and a white police officer here for which Miers offered an unusual apology on behalf of the city.

But her decision not to run for reelection also seemed to highlight a point of agreement among her colleagues and even her friends: In the freewheeling, glad-handing business of Dallas politics, many found Miers an odd fit.

“She was a very quiet, very private person ... quite unusual for a politician, actually,” Al Lipscomb, a council member during Miers’ term, recalled in an interview. “She was smart as all get-out, but not exactly the outgoing type.”

Though Miers opted not to run again, her 1989-1991 council service highlighted her consensus-oriented approach to solving city problems and won her high marks even from liberal Democrats who did not share all of her political views.

“She really, really reached out, really extended a hand,” said Diane Ragsdale, then-deputy mayor pro tem and one of two African Americans on the council, which had 11 members at the time and now has 15.

“She listened. She attended a lot of town hall meetings, which is more than can be said of a lot of her predecessors. Usually, for them, it was all about the north, the north, the north,” Ragsdale said, referring to predominantly white north Dallas, “but she spent a lot of time listening to people in south Dallas.”

While Miers listened, she appeared to spearhead few bills and demonstrated a certain distaste for politics, at least at the city level.

Her decision not to run again for the City Council came as she was being selected the first female president of the Texas Bar Assn.

She was elected to the post at the 55,000-member group’s annual convention in June 1991. In her victory statement, Miers said she believed that lawyers could “help instigate and promote basic systemic changes” to society’s problems.

“Lawyers are an integral part of the community, and they ought to be involved in promoting changes,” Miers added. “They are advantaged financially. They are educated. They are in, in many instances, powerful positions. They ought to be using that wherewithal to address issues.” She urged lawyers to do more pro bono work.

Miers had entered the council race in 1989 for an at-large seat -- one representing the entire city. At the time, the council consisted of three such positions, including one held by the mayor, and eight geographically based district seats.

Touting her experience running a major Dallas law firm and as president of the Dallas Bar Assn., she placed first in the four-candidate race and won a runoff a few weeks later.

She advocated an overhaul of the council that would establish 14 “single member,” or geographically based, districts, leaving only the mayor as a citywide elected position.

She had a split-the-difference approach on gay rights, saying on a campaign questionnaire issued by a gay-rights group that she favored equal civil rights for homosexuals but that she supported a state law, which has since been overturned by the Supreme Court, that made sodomy illegal. (The questionnaire did not specifically ask about issues that are on the front burner today, such as domestic-partner benefits, civil unions or gay marriage.)

The campaign was low-budget, and seemingly the only controversy was an accusation by one of her opponents, an insurance executive named Jim Garner, that her campaign had illegally placed dozens of signs along a major expressway.

She said overzealous supporters might have put the signs up, not knowing their placement was against the law, and the signs quickly came down.

Miers ultimately prevailed over Garner and her two other challengers, one a stress-management consultant and the other a former Common Cause of Texas director.

In advocating the council overhaul, Miers pleased many advocates in the African American and Latino communities here, who said it was the fairest way to increase minorities’ representation on the board. (Dallas elected its first black mayor, Ron Kirk, in 1995; it has never had a Latino mayor.)

The ensuing court battle over the single-member plan consumed much of the city’s political oxygen during Miers’ term, along with a 1990 confrontation between a black Dallas county commissioner and a white city police officer. It was the latest in a string of incidents that sparked tension between the African American community and the city’s largely white police force.

The commissioner, a longtime critic of the police force, said the off-duty officer had shouted a racial insult at him as he jogged past the commissioner’s home one day; the officer said the commissioner had pointed a gun at him without provocation. Witnesses provided conflicting accounts. With tensions inflamed and more than 1,000 protesters jamming a council meeting demanding the officer be fired, Miers was one of those who tried to calm the waters.

Miers “apologized to the crowd on behalf of the city,” calling the officer’s actions “an unprovoked and inexcusable attack” on the commissioner, according to a Dallas Morning News account at the time.

Miers told the Morning News she had apologized because “it was clear to me that the community felt that when the officer acted out against Commissioner Price, it was an act against the African American community. I felt like someone needed to say to the African American community that this officer did not speak for the police force, that he did not speak for the city of Dallas.”

On the other hand, Miers had joined in the widespread denunciation of the same commissioner, John Wesley Price, just a few months before, when Price said that residents should “go to the streets with arms” if the city selected a “good old boy” as its next police commissioner.

Said Miers at the time: “I don’t think Americans of any ethnic background respond well to threats or blackmail.”

Lipscomb, who along with Ragsdale was one of the two African American members on the council, said that in both instances Miers had worked behind the scenes to coordinate a united council approach and calm the waters.

“If things ever got at all out of hand in our public meetings, she’d be the one asking for a recess and then taking everybody behind the scenes to see if we could work it out,” said Lipscomb, a Democrat. “She’s very much the conciliator.”

Merrie Spaeth, a friend of Miers’ here who was a communications official in the Reagan White House, said Miers liked that role. “She does like getting everyone to the same page,” said Spaeth, who said she and Miers belonged to a loose network of Republican women in Dallas who jokingly called themselves the “pushy broad network.”

Miers “prides herself in her ability to sit in a room with a lot of people with different points of views and huge egos and get them all together with a lot of them thinking it was their idea to begin with,” Spaeth said. “And she’s a very, very good listener.”

Referring to support Miers has received from the Senate minority leader, Spaeth added, “I think that’s why Harry Reid adores her.”