Tim O’Hare, Councilman Farmers Branch

As I was doing a little research this evening about English only ordinances and Farmers Branch, I came across a post on a site called DallasArena.  It bills itself as, “Your alternative to The Dallas Managed News.”  I poked around a little and it seems to be something like a news bulletin board, but it could be an online newspaper.

The post is by Kathleen Matsumura and concerns a meeting of the Farmers Branch city council from April of this year. She states that part of the meeting was on camera, but the part about redevelopment was off-camera.  Here’s one interesting part:

I sincerely hope Mr. O’Hare is asking for the extreme in hopes of getting a compromise in the middle ground.  I hope the city will not be spending up to a $1 million a year promoting the city to builders, real estate agents and businesses.

and this:

Mr. O’Hare feels we need to pick the brains of CEOs in area businesses, realtors, builders here and elsewhere.  He seems to have overlooked the roomful of thoughtful citizens gathered at the recent Community Meeting.  Why not convene another Forward Farmers Branch, uniting residents, staff, elected officials, businesses, churches, businesses, community leaders who could look together at who we are as a city and decide what we want to be?

and this:

Mr. O’Hare seems to want to perform a magic act….presto, chango…old homes gone with the flick of an ordinance or two and big new homes built in their place.

This reminded me of the nature of the current lawsuit brought against Farmers Branch claiming a violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act.  Tim O’Hare doesn’t seem to care about getting input from his fellow citizens of Farmers Branch, but rather he wants to make decisions and enact ordinances without them.  

Matsumura ends with a bulleted list of suggestions from Tim O’Hare — one was to improve the image of the city — I guess he’s managed to both improve (for a few) and tarnish (for many) it at the same time at this point.  Another was to change the name of the city — Mike Gallagher’s web person would probably be on board for that one.  Yet another — I have to quote it, “levy fines repeatedly until people abide by the ordinances” —  the landlord ordinance with its hefty fine dovetails quite nicely with this suggestion.

Combine this report with one I linked to on an earlier post (link to source):

Someone’s got to put a stop to this “invasion.”  Tim O’Hare has believed he’s the man to do it for some time now.  Indeed, when we met many months ago in my office, Tim O’Hare specfically told me his plan to get ever more big injury cases:  1) run for City Council; 2) either wait his turn or hope for something politically bad to happen to the current mayor of Farmers Branch; 3) get elected Mayor of Farmers Branch; and 4) when he was done with his term in the Mayor’s office, he would sit back and get “all the good cases” in Farmers Branch and beyond.  Why? Because his political fame would ensure he was the “go to guy” in Farmers Branch. 

Here’s another snippet from the same blog post:

One day, in the not-so-distant past, Tim O’Hare asked me to review about 20 or so files that he claimed he was simply too busy to work on.  My recollection of the review of those files, while imperfect, is that many, if not most, of the names on the files were Hispanic. That struck me for two reasons:  First, why would Spanish speaking injury victims choose to be represented by solo lawyer, Tim O’Hare? Secondly, while it would be a leap to presume that just because you have a Hispanic surname, you must be here illegally, why was Tim O’Hare, self-proclaimed “super-Christian,” helping people he probably knew were breaking the law by being here in the first place?

Why did I presume he was trying to help undocumented aliens?  If his practice (which he told me was a very busy plaintiff’s personal injury practice) is anything like mine, then at least a third of the 
Hispanic surnamed folks he represented were most likely undocumented aliens.  So, why should that matter?  After all, Tim O’Hare himself is on the record, and not coincidentally, in the Yellow Pages, as 
welcoming Spanish speakers with his “Se Habla Espanol” outreach, implying that he saw no contradiction with representing undocumented injury victims as long as the laws of Texas allowed it.  Bravo?

Perhaps Gallagher needs to print up and sell some t-shirts for Tim O’Hare.