Philip Kingston is the City Council representative for Dallas’ District 14, the architect of the oh-so-close attempt to elect a progressive (read: anti-Trinity toll road) majority to the council. Gary Fitzsimmons is Dallas County’s outspoken former district clerk. Both men share an obsessive commitment to local politics. Both men sometimes…
Does the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office really need a military-grade mine-resistant SUV designed to withstand insurgent bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan? Almost certainly not, but with the federal government literally giving them away as part of its program to militarize local law enforcement agencies, it seemed a shame to pass up…
Last summer, the seven doctors and scientists on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee unanimously recommended significantly strengthening federal smog standards. Current allowable levels of smog-producting ozone — 70 parts per billion — cause serious health problems (e.g. a “decrease in lung function, increase in respiratory symptoms, and…
Sometimes, in the giddy throes of class warfare (i.e. making fun of the Park Cities), one can occasionally lose sight of the bigger picture — namely, the basic human need to expel waste products from their bodies. We regret that, in gently ridiculing Highland Park’s crackdown on portable toilets last week,…
In 2004, after a man’s death from a controversial choke hold (the “lateral vascular neck restraint”) prompted Police Chief David Kunkle to revisit the department’s use-of-force guidelines, the Dallas Police Department bought its first batch batch of 400 Tasers. They were intended as an intermediate option, a relatively humane way…
On the evening of April 28, the typically sleepy chambers of the Richardson City Council were aboil. Hundreds of agitated residents pressed into the auditorium, so many that police refused entry to several dozen, who were ushered into a separate room to watch a video feed of the proceedings. Mayor…
In the far northeastern corner of Flag Pole Hill Park, just shy of where the open space surrounding White Rock Lake gives way to the ranch-style homes of Lake Highland, a dirt footpath snakes for about three-quarters of a mile along a thicket of trees. Ken Coutant, a tax accountant…
There are First World problems, and then there are Highland Park problems. Beginning this month, Dallas’ toniest municipal enclave will begin a crackdown on porta-potties. The problem — if that’s the correct term for it — is that residents and city officials are tired of looking at the garish plastic boxes…
In the legislative session that just wrapped up this week, as has become their custom, Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers pushed measures that were variously undemocractic, anti-transparent, reactionary, discriminatory (both anti-gay and anti-Muslim), mind-bogglingly stupidly puritanical, and many otherwise awful and/or pointless pieces of public policy, a few of which they managed to put into law…
As state lawmakers prepare to leave Austin, political observers are writing off 84th Legislature’s session as a dud, small in deed and ambition. After all, this is a body whose proudest accomplishments are passing tax cuts that will be too small for anyone to notice and letting licensed gun owners carry…
Texas is in a weird place when it comes to transportation. It is a state utterly dependent on the automobile and yet policy makers have proven unable — or, more precisely, unwilling — to properly fund the roads and infrastructure that makes car travel feasible. The gas tax has been…
In early 2011 then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott moved to bring down the hammer on Midland Funding, one of the country’s more rapacious debt-collection outfits. Every year the company would buy billions of dollars in debt from banks and credit card companies for pennies on the dollar (in 2010 those…
Connect-a-Jet was going to do for private aircraft what Expedia.com and its competitors did for commercial air travel. No longer would luxury-minded fliers be forced to dispatch their indentured servants to personally charter that flight to the Caymans — which, we’re told, is how private jet reservations typically work. Instead,…
When Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, last visited Dallas in October, local law enforcement seemed damn near progressive in its approach to dealing with citizen photographers. Dallas police and the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office didn’t just encourage officers to attend the seminar he’d helped organize,…
For the past month (or, if one date the onset of disaster to the first whisperings of an untoward relationship between the mayor and a developer, for the past six months), watching Richardson politics has been like observing a slow-moving train wreck — one in which the engineer stubbornly and…
Bilal Abood, the Mesquite man arrested Thursday as part of a counter-terrorism investigation, hasn’t committed any act of violence. Nor, so far as the government seems able to prove, has he threatened to commit an act of violence; if prosecutors have evidence to the contrary, they didn’t present it to…
Richardson’s City Council election is over. Come Monday when the council meets to canvass the results, Mayor Laura Maczka will no longer be mayor if, as she previously announced, she declines the second term voters had no choice but to elect her to. Surely it’s past time to shut up…
In December 2012, the Dallas City Council approved the condemnation of the Trinity Park & Club, a 23-acre complex of soccer fields and cross-country trails near the Trinity River in Pleasant Grove. The owner, a wiry, Dominican-born ex-high school coach named Rhadames Solano, had spent the past 15 years turning…
On Saturday, Arlington residents voted by a healthy 59-41 margin to ban the city’s red-light cameras, which was surprising only in that there are 10,808 people in Arlington who apparently like red light cameras. The real questions are: When are the cameras coming down; when is the vendor, American Traffic…
Ladies of Irving, beware. A serial groper — or gropers — is on the loose. According to an Irving PD news release, at least eight women and girls in recent months have reported “being inappropriately touched on the buttocks” in the southeastern part of the city…
You should feel bad for Richardson Mayor Laura Maczka. As she detailed in an emotional speech at a City Council meeting late last month, her personal life has recently gone to shit. She and her longtime husband just divorced, she’s undergoing intensive treatment for a melanoma relapse and she’s had…
Christin Bates, the Dallas Theological Seminary doctoral candidate/muscular dystrophy patient whose struggles with Texas’ health bureaucracy we chronicled here a week ago, won’t be stuck in a nursing home after all. Bates, 31, had spent the previous eight months futilely battling an alphabet soup of state health agencies in an…
