Audio By Carbonatix
Oak Cliff Metals’ move, which was on the council’s to-do list last month, returned this afternoon, with Mayor-For-Now Dwaine Caraway once again squaring off against Vonciel Jones Hill over the site that’s in her district near S. Central Expressway and Loop 12 and across the train tracks from his. This, incidentally, is the very same Oak Cliff Metals presently on Pontiac that The News and Caraway went after last year, with Caraway “showing up at the front gate … with a van full of code inspectors behind him and insisting that the owners of the company deal with him privately, apart from the process,” as Jim wrote last year.
The News recapped last month’s tussle between longtime frienemies Caraway and Hill, which involves a City Plan Commission-approved specific use permit and picked up today right where it left off — with Caraway making sure everyone knows “I’m very adamantly opposed to it [and] those who will profit from it and celebrate a meager victory.” He would later call it a “stab in the heart of the southern sector,” specifically the part near the Trinity River developments taking place near there. During his rant, he said he didn’t “care how it turns out in the paper.” He’s against it, plain and simple.
“I’m fighting for Kroger grocery stores we don’t have in the southern sector — not one, with the exception of Wynnewood Village,” he said. “We
don’t have the Kroger, but we have the scrapyard. We don’t have one
movie theater in the southern sector, but we’re fighting very hard to
deliver the scrapyard. We don’t fight hard to deliver the grocery stores, the movie theaters, the quality
retail, the stores, the banks … all the things we want for a better quality
of life.”
I couldn’t keep up with his tirade, as he called it. But long story
short, said the mayorish: He said it’ll land in South Dallas because
North Dallas wouldn’t tolerate it, plain and simple. “Do any of y’all wanna live by a
scrapyard?” he said. Then, he kind of laughed: “Heh heh heh.”
A resident of Joppa, which is in
Caraway’s district and across the tracks from the scrapyard’s proposed new site, said residents there are terrified of the scrapyard: It’ll
become “a crime generator,” said the woman whose name I did not catch, a place where residents can simply
walk across the tracks with their stolen goods, plop them on the scales
and walk off with easy cash.
When Caraway called for the record vote, only two council members voted against the SUP: Caraway and Carolyn Davis.
The council’s now on to the historic designation for Adamson High School. Finally. Dallas ISD’s all for it. Go, Leopards!
