Ron Jackson/Texas FreewayThe Neches River BridgeIn April 2009, I wrote about the court battle between the city of Dallas and people in East Texas over a proposed dam and reservoir on the Neches River. The East Texas people won that one, successfully persuading a judge to kill the planned reservoir…
Private property still legal in Dallas! Or should I say, legal again. The Dallas City Council just voted unanimously to approve a plan to keep several businesses on Rock Island Street, right behind the Trinity River levee down by the Corinth Street bridge. Council members Steve Salazar, Pauline Medrano and…
The Dallas Morning News’s City Hall blog today carries two items in which Dallas city council member Dave Neumann and our mayor, Tom Leppert, alternately bitch about and then sort of pooh-pooh the problems the city is having getting the Trinity River levee system repaired.Dallas must fix its levee system…
There’s a great story by Steve Thompson on Page One of The Dallas Morning News today about old industrial businesses on Rock Island Street, a quaint one-block lane tucked between the Trinity River levee and Lamar Street a mile due south of downtown. Several businesses there are fighting to keep…
Texas GOP VoteRNC Chair Michael Steele and Stephen BrodenThis afternoon, The Dallas Morning News endorsed Stephen Broden, the Republican vying for Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson’s seat in the U.S. Congress. Fascinating — in no small part because Johnson has been the No. 1 purveyor of federal pork for The News’s…
Trey Garrison, a writer I admire and a contributing editor at D, has an op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News today suggesting that Tuesday’s suicide at the University of Texas at Austin makes the case for allowing all students in Austin to pack heat when they go to class…
So, just for grins, let’s do this. Let’s take off our war helmets, put down our skull flails for maybe 10 minutes on this whole Dallas property tax hike issue and talk about something bigger. I like the tax increase adopted by the city council last week. But I not…
Robert, don’t post this item, because I know you won’t, because I know you hate me, but this is something I posted as a comment on an earlier item, and then I changed my mind, and now I’ve decided it’s too important and deserves its own item. It’s about the…
Man behind the curtain: So, Mayor Tom Leppert complained in last week’s “state of the city” address that unnamed “federal partners” aren’t being very nice to him. Who, we wondered, was he talking about? Hanging around City Hall, Buzz chatted up a couple of people who are keeping close tabs…
Wow. When did the whole topic of taxes turn into wild scary voodoo? Please. Taxes are numbers. Numbers are not snakes. A majority of the Dallas City Council has already voted once in favor of raising the current property tax rate by 4.9 cents per $100 in the value of…
City of Dallas Facebook pageFrom yesterday’s Pavaho Pump Station groundbreaking, though feel free to write your own captionDidn’t even get my print-edition column out the door this week before I got a major correction, and this one from a person who would know — city council member Angela Hunt. She…
O.K., I’ve been laughing up my sleeve over the mayor’s whining remarks last week, complaining that certain unnamed “federal partners” aren’t being very nice to him. Hanging around City hall last week for various dumb events, I was able to chat up a couple of people who are keeping quite…
This is just an arm-chair amateur speaking, but Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s response to the motorcycle beat-down scandal seems right-on to me. Brown is going to require his more veteran coppers to work afternoon and midnight shifts with the rookies so that the rookies won’t all be out on…
If I tell you something weird is going on at Dallas public school headquarters, that’s not exactly a news bulletin, is it? But what if I’m talking about something deeply weird? Last week the school district headquarters staff tried to launch a major search and destroy mission to bring down…
I guess grassroots just aren’t what they used to be. Today an announced “grassroots” outpouring of support for embattled 30th District Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson amounted to a dozen preachers speaking to 20 human beings and 40 empty folding chairs in the Flag Room at City Hall. “We have come…
Donna MicheauxI’m here at the Dallas Independent School District board of trustees briefing, awaiting a presentation by Chief Administrative Officer Donna Micheaux on those proposed new admissions policies for the district’s magnet schools. But according to the public speakers who have already appeared, Micheaux called them all this morning before…
Ms. Greer called me this morning to tell me she made it through the night. She’s a courtly, pretty lady, 88 years old, whose house is at the very end of Rockefeller Boulevard by Moore Park, south of Cadillac Heights, about four miles down river from downtown. She’s the last…
In the last few weeks everyone has been talking about taking on a tax increase so we can give City Hall more money. I promise you this much: This story will make you wonder why on earth we would even consider giving the people at City Hall more money. Josh…
In the wake of Congressional candidate Stephen Broden’s latest bombshell about incumbent Eddie Bernice Johnson’s scholar-gyp scandal, we have to wonder about the whole Congress. Is Johnson’s fiddling of some scholarship funds from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation merely symptomatic of a much broader and deeper running syndrome? Over the…
A fellow citizen sent me this picture today after visiting the city of Dallas Department of Building Inspection at 320 East Jefferson Avenue in Oak Cliff. She reported that the sign had exactly the opposite of the intended effect on her…
We need to put political correctness aside at least for the moment and have a frank discussion about killing the homeless. Can a case be made for it? For the last couple weeks I have been talking to people about the homeless in Dallas, inspired first by the controversy over…
This item is a dilation of a comment I posted to yesterday’s item about 30th District Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson and the scandal about scholarships and nepotism. It struck me after I posted the comment that maybe I owed the topic a better effort. In the mid-1980s I interviewed both…
