Eighteen months after our initial report, Dallas has NEW LEADERS who are PLANNING more but facing the same PROBLEMS. There are real-life CONSEQUENCES.

By TANYA EISERER, SCOTT FARWELL, EMILY RAMSHAW and ANGELA SHAH / The Dallas Morning News

"When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters.
One represents danger and the other represents opportunity."
President John F. Kennedy

Last year, The Dallas Morning News published a special section that proved a high-altitude premise: Dallas is in decline.

The conclusion was based on months of data analysis by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and a parallel investigation by a team of News reporters.

The study uncovered a series of startling government failures and offered a sober conclusion: If Dallas does not reverse its course, the city will spiral into a cycle of decline that could gut services and hollow out civic life.

A year and a half later, a similar study anchored the original findings – Dallas has sky-high crime, bottom-dwelling schools and a middle class that's stampeding for the suburbs – and made a double-helix sort of discovery.

Dallas City Hall does not have a plan to fix the mess.So, even though City Manager Mary Suhm has recalibrated city government in important ways over the last 18 months, even though the city is benefiting from the ideas and leadership of a new police chief and economic development director, even though there is fresh energy and optimism in the Dallas Independent School District under Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, the city's underlying problems remain.

Key findings in the 2005 Booz Allen report:

•Dallas has the highest crime rate of any large city in the nation. And, even though the city is projected to spend more money than ever on public safety, Dallas spends less to fight crime than its peer cities around the nation.

•Dallas public schools have among the highest-paid teachers and the lowest standardized test scores in Texas.

•Dallas residents are migrating from the city to the suburbs at a faster rate than anywhere else in the nation, taking businesses and tax dollars with them.

Those trends were identified in last year's report, when Booz Allen suggested Dallas' decision-makers seemed unaware of the city's tailspin, unequipped to measure it and unwilling to accept it.

It was as if Dallas City Hall were an aircraft flying blind and in the clouds, in a steep nosedive, with a disoriented pilot.

Nearly a year and a half later, a follow-up analysis shows that the flight crew has begun to get its bearings. But without an altimeter, or a full sense of the impending crisis, the pilot is fiddling with the flaps instead of pulling back on the stick.

"Dallas is no longer in complete denial," according to the consultants hired by The News, citing a survey in which the mayor and City Council agreed the city needs to change course. "But despite some improvements, Dallas remains in crisis."

Unchallenged, the report said, the city will continue on a downward spiral.

It works like this: High crime and cratering schools send droves of middle-class families into communities like Frisco, Rowlett and Garland. Eventually, businesses follow. Dallas sales and property taxes plummet, reducing funds the city needs to fight crime and fix its schools.

Evidence of the outward migration can be seen on a drive north, 25 miles out of the city, through a sea of tri-level trophy homes in communities with double-digit growth.

This has not been an easy year for Dallas to focus on long-term goals.

First the city was buffeted by political intrigue during the spring strong-mayor debate. That referendum was widely perceived in southern Dallas as an affront to the political power of blacks, who turned out in historic numbers to reject it.

A month later, FBI agents swept into Dallas City Hall with wide-net subpoenas for records detailing how developers won city approval for government tax subsidies. That investigation, which focused on several black political leaders, continued to inflame the city's race wounds.

Booz Allen's analysis did not attempt to take the temperature of the city's icy racial politics, other than note that the FBI investigation may signal a lack of council accountability, and further erode public trust.

And, as expected, the analysts did not discover major statistical changes over the last year and a half.

But when they investigated the inner workings at Dallas City Hall and thousands of pages of plans and reports from key city offices, they discovered a bureaucracy without a blueprint.

New economic development and comprehensive land use plans, while critical components of a finely tuned city, will not help Dallas with what it needs most – a strategic, integrated vision for the city.

Think of it like a diagram for building an automobile. First you must decide what type of vehicle you need, a car or a truck? A Porsche or a Hummer?

You must decide what type of terrain you will be driving over, how many passengers you need to haul and what type of gas mileage you need.

The city has taken a fragmented approached to the project – a set of tires here, a new radio there, without knowing whether they will fit Dallas, or suit its long-term needs.

"There is still no plan to get the city out of the cycle of decline ... there is no one accountable for developing such a plan," the Booz Allen report states. "The city charter does not define accountability or responsibility for such a plan, and neither do the recent proposals to change the charter."

But a city is not simply a sum of its statistics, as Booz Allen and The News discovered during three months of reporting.

Yes, a high crime rate, plus low TAKS scores, multiplied by urban-to-suburban flight, may equal a loss of sales and property taxes.

But that formula does not measure entrepreneurial spirit, or its hope for Dallas.

It does not tell the story of Continental Cabinets, a South Dallas business, or explain why it survives and thrives.

Numbers do not speak clearly about the challenges facing Ida Willingham, 61, who cannot read, write or afford school supplies for the 10 nieces and nephews she's raising in a house near Fair Park.

A crime rate is a narrow window through which to view the fluid and chaotic streets patrolled by Dallas cop Hector Roa, and a wide-angled view of a troubled code enforcement department would distort the value of inspector Bob Curry's home-by-home work.

Statistics offer a big picture. People provide profound insights.