The ballots in Saturday’s city election had barely been counted when The Dallas Morning News weighed in with a finger-wagging editorial scolding East Dallas, the city’s most politically active realm, for voting for the wrong person. In repeated endorsement editorials before the election, the city’s only daily newspaper had given…
An important piece of the story is missing, a kind of key, in the bleak saga of 130 or more families facing mass eviction in West Dallas on June 3. Is there any reason it has to happen? The answer is yes. If an agreement cannot be reached, the families…
The unanimous Texas House approval yesterday of a bail-out bill for the Dallas Police and Fire Pension fund sets up, among other things, the lowest point so far in the political career of Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. Every single thing he wanted in the bill he did not get, and…
Hey, got kind of side-tracked by my hobby yesterday, hope you don’t mind. I’ll get back in the saddle tomorrow. Kind of frittered away the day on my pastime – trying to guess exactly how screwed up City Hall is. I mean, we know it’s screwed up. Sure. But how…
We are now 31 days out from the deadline for the mass eviction of tenant families from small single-family homes in West Dallas – a human nightmare in the making – and it’s time to get serious about whose fault it will be if it happens. This is the saga…
In fields other than journalism, people use the term, “Monday-morning quarterbacking,” as if it’s a bad thing. In our business it’s bread and butter. So I don’t blame any of my colleagues for second-guessing the performances of the two opposing legal teams in the recently concluded federal corruption trial of…
Dallas County Commissioner Price strode solemnly out the backdoor of the Earle Cabell Federal Courthouse in downtown Dallas after his verdict was delivered, tersely telling a large scrum of reporters engulfing him, “The jury has spoken.” No one disputed that, but some people are still wondering if the jury that…
Halfway into their eighth day of deliberations, jurors in the eight-week federal corruption trial of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price emerged at last to deliver a stinging rebuke to prosecutors – not guilty verdicts on the most serious charges of bribery and mail fraud. The jury told the judge…
Thursday as the seventh day of jury deliberations in the John Wiley Price trial crawled to yet another inconclusive end, you could feel the tension in the air, both in the courthouse corridor and out in the community. In both places, nobody has the slightest idea what it means. The…
“Perception,” which usually means racism, is often taken for a 30-foot Trump wall, as if it separates whole regions of the city in ways that can never be breached. But earlier this week I wrote about the miracle or curse, depending on your view, taking place in West Dallas now:…
Let me get this straight. We’re really mad at the cops and the firefighters because fixing their pension fund is going to be expensive. So we’re just not going to have any more cops or firefighters? Or what? Hire people from the day-labor dorms? Outsource it to India? No, look,…
Certainly Matt Wood, the challenger in the District 14 City Council race, would have had a better shot on May 6 without the baggage of a clumsily heavy-handed negative ad campaign against his opponent, incumbent Philip Kingston. The fact is that the presence in the race of a richly funded…
The mayor, who has steadfastly denied any role or interest in West Dallas gentrification, is now actively working behind the scenes as a real estate broker to get a major West Dallas landholder to sell $20 million worth of land at what appears to be 10 percent of its current…
Rapt jurors heard head-snappingly different narratives Tuesday in closing arguments by prosecutors and defense lawyers on the last day in the eight-week trial of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. The city’s highest profile black politician is accused by the federal government of bribery and income tax cheating. Price, the…
Every six months or so Dallas is shocked, shocked again to find that racial segregation is going on here, but every time we discover it again, Dallas always avoids saying who. Somebody did it. Segregation is an act. People with names have to do things for segregation to persist. It’s…
Add this up. On March 16, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings told reporters that events he called “ghost calls” were crashing the city’s 911 emergency call center, causing potentially deadly backups in police and fire response times. Rawlings said solving the ghost call problem needed to be the city’s “number one…
Did you ever get badly bawled out by somebody, and the person stalked out of the room and then stalked back in and started bawling you out again? That means the person is mad at you. That’s what happened to federal prosecutors Tuesday in the corruption trial of Dallas County…
Looks like the mayor loses this one. He has been maneuvering to stall the evictions of hundreds of poor families in West Dallas, probably hoping the hard hammer would not fall on these poor souls until after the May 6 City Council elections. But it will fall this week. Khraish…
Maybe there was a line in the sand once between people who thought the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund was well run and those who disagreed. That line has disappeared under a whole bunch of footprints. In fact, two full years have passed — dating from March 2015 when…
When HUD Secretary Ben Carson came to town at the end of last week, all of the players in the Dallas affordable housing issue were on pins and needles. Nobody knows yet how real the Trump thing is in terms of changing housing programs. Carson’s agency, HUD, is the mother…
Now the May 6 City Council elections are barely a month away, and it’s time to start looking for the weird stuff. As usual, nothing is ever weirder than District 14 in East Dallas. For decades East Dallas has been the city’s most politically volatile region, sort of like an…
Mayor Mike Rawlings and his friends in the private business group called the Dallas Citizens Council obviously must have learned their lesson when they tried and failed to give away Fair Park, a 277-acre city-owned asset, without a proper public bidding process. Never going to pull a blooper like that…
