Political theater on Cedar Creek Lake

You go to the lake house for a week and do the normal lake house routine. You fix things. You have a beer. Then you have another. It’s good that you fixed things.

In the morning, you get the boat all ready and  you take off for a round of fishing. You come home, your luck was worse than poor. You take a nap. You get up. The wife has the ribeyes all thawed and you are ready to fire up the old grill. You eat. You sit out on the porch and enjoy the lake sounds, the loud outboard motors, the drunks next door, the loud music from across the lake. It’s time for bed. So much for the first full day. But what about tomorrow?

Well, if the lake where your home is located is Cedar Creek Lake, some 60 miles southeast of Dallas, then you might think of going to catch a performance of the Seven Points City Council. It seems there are always fireworks there, perhaps you might see someone get arrested there or even shot.

Seven Points is a town of 1,334, according to the 2009 U.S. Census estimate. It’s grown somewhat over the years with Cedar Creek, a reservoir built on the Trinity River, being a fishing and recreation haven for both East Texans and those from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It also seems to have a history of the worst that comes out of small town politics.

A political donnybrook of epic proportions, proportionally speaking, erupted in 1997 when then-Mayor Marian Hill was removed from office by the city council for a number of zoning law violations and some matters over purchasing a pager and copying machine. Hill had divorced earlier that year. Keep that in the back of your mind.

Not long after she was removed from office, Hill was prosecuted for a number of the zoning law violations, something that had never or rarely had been done in that town.  Hill later claimed in a lawsuit that her ex-husband, the town’s police chief, zoning official and some other city council members had cooked up a scheme to “run her out of town,” according to an ultimate ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Read it and good luck following it.

I remember reading about all of this and my thoughts returned to Cedar Creek Lake this weekend. A group of my college friends and I got together at some friends’ place near Fort Worth. One of this group of friends had access to a lake house when we were in college, as his parents owned the very pleasant getaway. When one or more of this group of friends or I were there we would generally be the ones making noise, fueled usually by keg beers or playing “quarters” with what kind of “bear in a bottle” that was handy.

This afternoon I decided to look at some newspaper Web sites of towns in the Cedar Creek area and I came across a story in the Cedar Creek Pilot that made me think I was just reading a continuation of the Marian Hill story in some form or fashion.

The extremely thorough and often hilarious news story written by the Pilot’s Art Lawler told of the hijinks of the now former mayor in which the ex official engaged in a tirade in the city council chambers after a quorum for their meeting failed. The failing quorum, caused by three members missing, seems to be a serial occurance there since this made the fourth-straight failed meeting since a new mayor was elected.

Now, just as it takes a program to know the players in the Marian Hill story, one likewise needs to be “read into” this affair before trying to figure just who hates whom and why. The so-called “shouting match” at the council was allegedly at the behest of former mayor Gerald Taylor, after his reported political enemy Mayor Joe Dobbs canceled the meeting.

Taylor was arrested in December 2009 on charges he cashed personal checks using municipal court funds. The city judge, Monica Corker,  had been arrested the month before on charges she helped Taylor cash the checks.

As for the source of animosity between Taylor and Dobbs, I’m not sure. Dobbs is openly gay and he says that Taylor and others have a vendetta against him. Dobbs was also fire chief and demoted Taylor from assistant fire chief to firefighter after ethical concerns, he said in an article on the Dallas Voice Web site, the DF-W area’s leading gay-lesbian newspaper. Taylor reportedly responded to  Dobbs with a rather colorful homophobic epithet.

Dobbs say some in Seven Points are “playing games with him,” the article, written by David Webb, said. While that remains a distinct possibility just because of the way certain people are wired, it also is possible that Dobbs is just a player himself in what seems to be continual political theater at Seven Points. It seems a little bit like old time soap opera fare. Watch and then tune back in sometime 20 years later and you catch up but everything seems pretty much the same. That is a lot like the way it is in Seven Points. The more things change, the more they the remain the same old thing.