OK, North Texas. Regional transportation planners have heard your shrill, anti-toll battle cry. They know you will not countenance a speculative private toll road that inexplicably runs from Wylie to Greenville. They also know you also hate those new “managed lane” thingies, which essentially charge drivers for using highway space…
The Desoto Police Department’s first attempt to run off Sergeant James Henrise came around 1996. Henrise and a fellow cop had come forward with evidence they claimed showed that Chief John Horvath had improperly meddled in a seven-year-old murder investigation and used public funds to finance a family vacation to…
On Thursday afternoon, a dozen or so journalists stood in an awkward semi-circle near the Women’s Museum at Fair Park, gazing at Dallas’ first bike-share station. They had been promised that Mayor Mike Rawlings would be there at 3:30 p.m. to take the inaugural ride on one of the gleaming…
Dallas ISD has, for the moment at least, put last spring’s athletic-recruiting scandal behind it. The 15 coaches and administrators Superintendent Mike Miles fired over the summer have exhausted their appeals. Madison High School’s 2012-13 and 2013-14 basketball titles have been vacated. There’s a new athletic director and, the district…
On Tuesday morning, right after an African-American principal and an African-American superintendent had finished predicting a great future for East Dallas’ Lee Elementary and its new International Baccalaureate program, a woman buttonholed DISD trustee Mike Morath. After a few complimentary words about Morath’s efforts on behalf of the campus, she…
The neighborhoods surrounding Dallas ISD’s Robert E. Lee Elementary are much like the neighborhoods surrounding nearby Stonewall Jackson and Lakewood Elementary. That is, they are predominately white and upper middle class, with just a touch of East Dallas crunchiness. But while Stonewall and Lakewood bulge with kids from the neighborhood,…
There’s a long and sordid history of notorious American criminals cashing in on their fame by publishing books, selling prison artwork or hawking their personal effects. Nowadays, the macabre “murderabilia” market has mostly migrated online, where anyone with an Internet connection and an unhealthy obsession with sociopaths can buy memorabilia…
It’s far too early to render judgment on Superintendent Mike Miles’ school-choice initiative. Eventually, he wants to open nearly three dozen specialized campuses that offer an alternative to neighborhood schools but aren’t as selective as magnets. Thus far, he’s opened just one: Mata Montessori, just south of White Rock Lake…
Everything you need to know about Michael Furrh you can learn from his outgoing voicemail message: Caddie Master at Caddie Club; golf ambassador for Rolling Hills Country Club; Guinness World Record holder. Hopefully you didn’t get bored and hang up, because that last part is key. At Arlington’s Rolling Hills…
When a Dallas cop shoots someone in the line of duty, you can count on Dallas Police Association leader Ron Pinkston to leap to the officer’s defense. The cop who shot a mentally ill man who, as best a surveillance video shows, stood up from a chair? Shouldn’t have been…
Dallas City Council members were treated to the Commemorative Air Force’s cinematic masterpiece “If These Planes Could Talk.” There are known knowns about Dallas Executive Airport. These are things we know that we know. One of the known knowns, courtesy of Dallas City Council member Tennell Atkins, is this: “We…
On Thursday evening in a spacious meeting hall at University Park United Methodist Church, neighborhood leaders and local bureaucrats, led by City Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates, began the process of puzzling over how to solve Preston Road and Northwest Highway. The intersection, choked with traffic and curiously dumpy given…
Five years ago this month, a Dallas County justice of the peace signed an order evicting Clifford Holland from the $1.2 million home he was renting on Caruth Boulevard, a block outside of University Park. Aside from the eye-popping $6,000-per-month rent, the case was a routine tenant-landlord dispute: Landlord claims…
Millard “Lou” Tierce is the Fort Worth veterinarian who was allegedly harvesting blood from dogs he was supposed to euthanize until his office was raided earlier this year. Tierce, whose vet license was suspended last week, was initially arrested on a charge of animal cruelty. Somehow, though, a misdemeanor, as…
The United States’ gun-show loophole is as wide open as it’s ever been. Any private citizen with a cache of firearms can still sell them to any other private citizen without conducting a background check, as licensed dealers are required to do, because freedom. There’s a catch. The loophole, gaping…
Gene Phillips isn’t the type of homeowner the Texas Legislature had in mind when it passed a law in 1979 allowing senior citizens to indefinitely defer their property taxes. Think instead of an ailing grandmother, whose Social Security check wouldn’t stretch quite far enough to cover groceries and property taxes,…
Well before Wilmer-Hutchins High School basketball standout Troy Causey was beaten to death by a friend and on-court rival after being improperly recruited from Richardson ISD, it was clear to anyone paying attention that Dallas ISD’s athletic department was rotten. Superintendent Mike Miles’ subsequent house-cleaning was greeted as a righteous,…
Erstwhile billionaire/current Dallasite Sam Wyly has fallen on hard times. The serial entrepreneur, who with his late brother Charles founded Green Mountain Energy and turned Michael’s into a $1.6 billion craft-store empire, was recently dinged for around $300 million for illegally hiding financial transactions in offshore trusts to sidestep U.S…
During a seven-year law enforcement career as a Dallas County deputy constable and Dallas City marshal, Tyler Atkins says he protected the public from fake security guards. “I used to take people to jail who used to run security companies without a license,” he says. But for the past several…
Luke Crosland stands at the window of his seventh-floor office and looks out across Preston Center. In the foreground, a tangle of luxury SUVs battle for access to a shabby, two-story parking garage that seems to deteriorate before his eyes. The garage is ringed by a jumble of aging retail…
Here’s the good news: Dallas-Fort Worth ozone levels for the first this year dropped below the federal standard of 84 parts per billion. The bad news: the 84-ppb standard the area has just now met for the first time is from 1997. The current standard is 75 ppb, well below…
Dallas has terrible streets. Ask any driver who hasn’t been rendered prematurely senile by the constant jostling over disintegrating pavement or any cyclist who’s survived a run-in with a man-eating pothole. Hell, ask City Hall, which estimates that it will take three-quarters of a billion dollars to get the city’s…
