This year’s winner of the first Jim Schutze Not My Job Award (flourish, drum-roll, hushed gasp) goes to … JERRY CHRISTIAN, member of the board of directors of DART, the regional transit agency. Asked recently if DART should lend a helping hand to save the endangered Dallas Police and Fire…
Amazing what one good speech can stir up. Amazing good, amazing bad, time will tell. But a speech to the City Council last week by District 6 candidate Omar Narvaez certainly stirred the pot. Days after Narvaez heaped shame and brimstone on the mayor and council for possible massive evictions…
Hard to tell what the jurors get out of a particular witness, but I know what I got from watching former Dallas County Judge Jim Foster on the stand Monday in the federal bribery corruption trial of County Commissioner John Wiley Price. Affirmation. Affirmation is good, but in the weird…
If you put aside the issue of bribery in the ongoing federal corruption trial of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price — the jury will decide that one — and just look at what he did, his behavior may look mild next to the way public business gets done in…
A month ago civic leader Walt Humann posted an essay on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News saying it would be a terrible mistake for the city to take sales tax money away from DART, our regional mass transit agency, and use it to save the Dallas Police…
The approach of a June 3 court-imposed deadline — when more than 100 poor families are to be tossed out of their homes in West Dallas — is creating a political pressure-cooker. None of the parties to this dispute wants to be blamed when the TV cameras show up to…
Here’s a scary thing, and please don’t think I’m trying to make a joke. A child died. A man died. And those are just the ones we know about. So I’m not trying to be funny about the ongoing crisis in the Dallas 911 emergency service. But “ghost calls”? Before…
There are two big questions to which Dallas police and fire officers need to demand answers quickly, as negotiations in the legislature on a bill to reconstitute their pension fund near an end. These questions are about the two main issues looming over the debate. The first issue, clawback, may…
First, very serious caveats about the ongoing federal corruption trial of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. He’s innocent until proven guilty. The jury is weeks, maybe months from deliberations. OK, that’s out of the way. Now let me ask the obvious question — the one I hear whispered every…
Great news this afternoon from Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has shot down the city’s request to have the Trinity River legally downgraded to a non-navigable river rather than fix a fake kayaking rapids built by the city. “This I will not do,”…
An ugly bit of street theater is being prepared for us by certain people at City Hall. When it gets here, I want you to know the real story. In the first week of June, as many as 200 poor families will be tossed out on the street in West…
This week in the federal corruption trial of one of Dallas’ most powerful and long-tenured elected officials, an important behind-the-scenes truth has been told about how this city really operates. It raises a question about who and what we are. For at least a half century, Dallas city and county…
Hey, here’s an idea. If we have to do some kind of claw-back because the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund is in trouble — you know, send out the guys with the baseball bats and have them repossess those overpaid pension benefits — how about we start with the…
Last week architect and land planner Kevin Sloan told an audience to go home and Google “Bobcat City.” So I did. It’s us. If you Google Bobcat City, the first thing that pops up is an extremely cool YouTube video produced by Texas Parks and Wildlife about a study of…
The question has always been why. Why did the city of Dallas carry out a decades-long manifestly illegal campaign of persecution against a Dallas author. Now that author, a Kennedy assassination expert whose theories differ from what he says is an official city doctrine, has agreed to a modest out-of-court…
Like Dallas, Houston is in Austin right now trying to get the Legislature to sign off on a much needed fix for its police and fire pension funds. Houston cops, firefighters and the mayor are not in total agreement on what they want, but at least they have somebody in…
Almost all of the homeless camps the city has scraped away for the TV cameras over the past year are back up, rebuilt close to their original locations or maybe half a mile away. If the city’s tent-scraping program was intended to resolve homelessness, promote health and safety or reduce…
We talk here all the time about things that are hopeless, things headed to hell in a hand-basket, the usual, so every once in a while, when something good does happen randomly, I like to offer it as a footnote or caveat or just for grins. In that vein, the…
The ongoing Dallas County Courthouse federal corruption trial is taking place at two levels. Last week in the formal courtroom encounter, retired FBI agent Don Sherman and Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price never looked at each other, never moved an inch from their seats. But at the second, subliminal…
Pretend you’re some private company. You dump an enormous load of concrete into the Trinity River creating an obstruction so massive that boats can no longer even get up and down the river. Say you get caught. Don’t you think you’d have to fix it? Or go to the pen?…
A truly new idea, immense in scope, revolutionary in purpose but also wonderfully simple, cheap, pragmatic and real, is suddenly on the table in the city’s most ancient and intractable unsolved problem — the damned Trinity River. It’s this: Stop. Just stop. Stop trying to stick stuff on it, spray…
Great, I have an answer to a question. Now, after hearing opening arguments in the John Wiley Price case, I know why no Perots are indicted. I get it. But given the government’s theory on why no Perots should or could have been indicted — and given the opening arguments made Monday…
