Wow!
Did they offer him a blindfold and cigarette at least? I guess now that Mayor Tom has a new lap dog he figures he can just piss on anyone's shoes.

WTF? This is a cheap way of getting rid of Rasansky... How do other members know if any of their mutual funds, IRA's... etc, have any tie to the hotel???

Rasansky missed a chance to give them the old "nobody-said-squat-to-Ed-Oakley-when-he-was-sitting-on-the-council-and-at-the-same-time-buying-up-properties-next-to-the-path-he-was-advocating-the-Trinity-project-should-take" comeback, as well as the old "nobody-has-tried-to-recuse-Leppert-from-Trininty-discussions-for-steering-construction-work-on-that-project-to-his-former-firm" comeback. Maybe next time?

Dallas is planning on spending about $5 million an acre for land appraised for about $7.5 million.

At this price, we'd be paying the developed cost of the land, wouldn't we.

To me, this would be a clear case of EMMINENT DOMAIN ON THE FAT CATS WHO WANT TO GET FATTER AT THE PUBLIC TROUGH.

The old Sears building on Lamar was purchased for $2.1 million, about $123,000 an acre...17 acres...and is now worth about $400,000 an acre.

So Leppert and Co. will have Dallas taxpayers bend over for his monied friends.

THIS IS TOTAL BULLS**T!!!

Didn't LaMiller own stock in American Airlines or something-or-other when something was being considered a few years ago? Her critics tore into that one, but it was really kinda stupid....I mean, a lot of people don't know where they own stock.....c'mon, help me out here people, my meds are kickin in and making my brain a little fizzy....

Citigroup reports annual gross revenues of approximately $80 billion. Assuming the underwriters on the deal earn a market rate of around 4% on the $42 million cost, we are talking about $1.6 million. Split 6 ways, this works out to $267 thousand per bank.

Citigroup's chunk ($276 thousand), will therefore add an estimated 0.00003% to its gross revenues. Now, Citigroup has approximately 5.5 BILLION shares outstanding.

Spreading that $276 thousand in incremental revenue over these 5.5 BILLION shares, one can see that Natinksy could stand to make 5/1,000ths of a cent per share he owns by steering business to Citigroup.

If this is the new materiality standard for determining a conflict of interest, the entire City Council and Mayor should recuse itself from nearly every potential discussion which comes before it.

Mayor Tom Leppert? Color him evil and duplicitous (also arrogrant, because he assumes we're all too stupid to figure out what game he's playing).

The difference with the Laura Miller example was that she was playing with the Wright Amendment, the status of which could have a material impact on American Airlines' profitability and hence its stock price. The Citigroup thing, not so much.

I read the relevant sections of the City Code; it appears that Natinsky could solve the problem by agreeing to donate his entire maximum benefit from Citigroup's involvement (likely not in excess of one-half of one cent) to the City. It would be relatively easy to calculate his maximum net benefit from his conflict. The difficulty would be how he could mechanically transfer such a small sum of money (less than one-half of one cent) to the City treasury.

I think we're talking about Rasansky, not Natinsky, but I agree completely. Just wanted to get this clarified.

Yes, yes. Rasansky, not Natinsky. My bad.