To understand just how badly City Hall has bungled its stewardship of the section of the Great Trinity Forest sandwiched between the Trinity Forest Golf Course and the Texas Horse Park, you can visit the delicate wetland pond the city illegally let a contractor drain last month for “dust control.”…
If you’re looking for popcorn-worthy fireworks at a public transit-related public meeting, your best bet is to watch the Dallas City Council decide who should represent the city on the DART board, an exercise that invariably descends, as so many other discussions at City Hall do, into a bitter racial…
Brace yourself, Dallas transit users. We’re here to break some tough news: DART is losing. We don’t mean that the agency, now three decades old, has largely failed to woo people out of their cars. That’s true, but it’s not entirely DART’s fault. Neither to we mean that the focus…
Congrats to the concerned parents of Lakewood Elementary. Seriously. You guys piled into a public meeting and shot down a Dallas ISD proposal to stick a Verizon cell tower on the school’s roof. That’s how democracy’s supposed to work. Good on DISD, too, which has the bureaucratic heft to plow…
Hunched over a table at a Jack in the Box, Kevin Woods doesn’t look much like a cowboy. No hat, no belt buckle, no boots, not a horse in sight. Here, tucked between a cluster of warehouses and a bustling urban highway, is about as far from the open range…
Neighbors never exactly embraced Wal-mart’s plans to build a Neighborhood Market on Lower Greenville. Suspicious of the chain’s ability to integrate into an urban neighborhood, particularly one as fastidious as Lower Greenville, their opposition was close to unanimous, the only variation being in the intensity of their anti-Wal-mart sentiment. Leaders…
Even without cell-phone metadata placing him near his ex-girlfriend’s San Antonio condo in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2009, prosecutors may still have convinced jurors that Jon Thomas Ford was guilty of her murder. There was the testimony of their friends at the party he’d stormed out…
City Hall has done its part to make Patriot’s Crossing a reality. Over the past five years, it’s handed developer Yigal Lelah $4.4 million and promised another $1.3 million in HUD funds. It has endorsed him in three unsuccessful attempts to win lucrative, highly competitive low-income housing tax credits from…
In what is being called (by me) the greatest public-safety threat to strike the popular walking path since a proposed high-rise threatened to blot out Highland Park’s view of the sun, the Katy Trail has been overrun with feral cats. So says a WFAA story from last night, though maybe…
After the Texas Supreme Court issued its opinion on Friday in Kinney v. Barnes, Robert Kinney’s attorney declared victory. Kinney, an Austin businessman, had sued his former boss to force the removal of online postings accusing Kinney of taking bribes. “This is a win for Robert and other people who…
It’s been more than two years since a federal administrative judge told Tricare, the Department of Defense-run healthcare program for military families, to pay for Kaitlyn Samuels’ physical therapy. And for more than two years, Tricare has been stubbornly ignoring the decision. That’s Tricare’s prerogative. The administrative ruling carries all…
There’s something fascinating happening in Collin County. Residents are voicing an opinion on an issue — in this case they loathe the idea of tolled “managed lanes” running down their portion of Central Expressway — and, lo and behold, their duly elected leaders, including Collin County’s entire legislative delegation and…
The city-owned Dallas Executive Airport has a new website. It’s slick, a vast leap forward from the static, text-heavy site that seemed a relic from the dial-up era. Just in time, too, since the airport is on the cusp of a major expansion. There, amidst bold-faced promises of Dallas’ “world-class…
There exist, floating around the Internet and stuffed into the filing cabinets of public-interest watchdogs, an trove of eminently credible reports and white papers explaining in painstaking detail why and how Texas’ decade-old experiment with electricity deregulation has failed. But there’s an easier way to show how the free market…
There’s a fundamental tension baked into Dallas’ plans for the Trinity River corridor. On the one hand, it wants to open the vast, unconcreted lands of the Great Trinity Forest for people to enjoy — average folks, too, not just the naturalists and horsemen and gonzo hikers hearty enough to…
There are many plausible explanations for the so-called Texas Miracle, the state’s decade-plus surge in economic and population growth. Job creators appreciate the low tax burden and light regulation. Workers like the low cost of living and lack of a state income tax. Heretofore unimagined quantities of oil and gas…
Michael Morris, as Schutze mentioned this morning, is arguably the most important man in local transportation. As transportation director for the obscure but powerful North Central Texas Council of Governments, he has an outsize say in how transportation dollars get divvied up across 16 counties and, by extension, which ideas…
It’s never a good idea to cut off a humongous cement truck on the freeway. Not so much because karma may bite you in the ass at some vague point in the future as that it could be piloted by a driver who has no qualms about crushing the back…
When Urban Orchard Market opened to moderate fanfare last October, there was hope that maybe, finally, Downtown Dallas was grown up enough to support a grocery store. It’s not. Ten months after opening, the jaunty “Now Open” banner still hanging above the door, the market has quietly closed. A downtown…
Riding the DART train, you may have wondered at some point whether those those overhead straps are capable of holding the weight of a fully grown adult. The answer is yes. You’ve probably never wondered whether those straps are capable of holding the weight of a fully grown adult as…
On Tuesday afternoon, with summer vacation on the wane, a sparse a handful of families could be found at Fair Park’s entrance at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, en route to the aquarium or the Texas Discovery Gardens. Further into the park, there was a man sitting on a bench…
Pop quiz: What was Dallas Morning News personal finance columnist Scott Burns referring to when, in a July 1989 column, he described “a project that may give Dallas, particularly downtown Dallas, a better future” and a symbol of “what we need to be the city we want to be in…
