Let me just give you a quick current example of how we get screwed up in this town. This Tuesday, DART, the regional transit agency, had to eat crow and go back to the drawing board on a new $1.25 billion rail line through North Dallas after both City Council…
For one minute, let’s not call it the murder problem. The word, murder, makes people understandably crazy. Let’s go easy on the murder and just call it the general social messed-up-edness problem or GSMP instead. Better? We now have two recent independent reports on GSMP, one assembled by the administration…
Last week, a day before candidate filing opened for the upcoming school board election, East Dallas/Love Field Dallas board member Miguel Solis announced he will not seek reelection. His public statement maintained a certain aura of mystery. He didn’t announce new plans. It was sort of like, “And now my…
We struggle, strive, scrape our shins and freeze our toes to see what’s on top of the cliff of urban poverty. Once up there, we all see the same thing. And we all shrug and say, “I am not seeing this.” What we don’t want to see is race. More…
I’m struggling through a bunch of dense academic articles and data about crime and social equity for a column I’m working on that I’m sure no one including my loved ones will ever read — well, they don’t really read my stuff anyway — because I think writing stuff that no one can stand…
Study after study blames violence and social dysfunction in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods on a roster of causes, from extreme poverty to environmental pollution to segregation itself, but the elected leadership of old South Dallas has insisted for 15 years that their crime problems are caused by a car wash…
A proposal to turn over 105-year-old Reverchon Park to a commercial sports operation — defeated at the Dallas City Council a month ago –- passed yesterday after East Dallas member David Blewett engineered a revote. He got his way. The deal to change the 46-acre park just north of downtown…
We got stuck on the wrong part of what the police chief said. At a press conference Jan. 5 about the shooting death that day in Dallas of a 1-year-old and the nonfatal shootings of an 8-year-old and a 20-year-old, Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall used a curse word…
OK, I hate to keep shooting this horse, but all of you people who wanted East Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston and council member/mayoral candidate Scott Griggs out of City Hall because they weren’t civil enough, here’s how civility works: David Blewett, who beat Kingston in District 14, is…
Two days after the Dallas City Council in a split vote shot down a deal to turn over Reverchon Park to a for-profit sports entity, East Dallas District 14 City Council Member David Blewett, who had voted against the giveaway, filed paperwork with the City Secretary for a re-vote —…
We start this new decade in the city with two facts staring us in the face. Fact One: Truly powerful new ideas are on the table right now that will help us take away the sharp bite of social inequity, greatly reduce crime and, most important and valuable, harvest the…
Let’s get this one straight before it rolls away from us. A certain amount of misrepresentation is going on about the meaning of a federal judge’s recent action dismissing the city as a defendant in a civil lawsuit arising from the Amber Guyger/Botham Jean murder case. This is not a…
It’s Christmas. I am spending a Dallas holiday afternoon sitting cozily on the sofa in front of a cold fireplace with the air conditioning on, thumbing through the year on my phone to remember all the worst things people said about me in 2019. Carols on the stereo in the…
The headline was jarring: “Trump has veered dangerously from the conservative legacy of protecting our air, water and natural resources.” Conservative legacy? Veered? I must have missed something. I read the rest carefully. Trammell S. Crow, a wealthy environmental and education philanthropist who lives in Dallas, said in an op-ed…
I learned this week in a piece by Shawn Shinneman at D Magazine that the city of Dallas is paying lawyers to sue the Texas Attorney General in district court in Austin to get out of turning over Mayor Eric Johnson’s daily calendar. Let me just run that by you…
When I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times last week by William H. Webster (the only person ever to have been director of both the FBI and then the CIA), I wanted to believe every word, because essentially he was calling President Donald Trump an idiot, which…
Hallelujah, the angels sing, after all. Well, my version of angels. My better angels are those local public officials who have integrity, intelligence and guts. They’re better than the ones who don’t, right? Last week a posse of better angels stepped up, including a few who were unelected citizens, and…
The mayor wants an answer to the city’s astronomical murder rate — twice San Antonio’s, four times Austin’s — right away from the city manager. I can think of a quick way to get there. Release the record of 911 calls from Jim’s Car Wash. Wait. I’m serious. This is about…
In a casual conversation about suburban public schools and ethnic diversity recently, I noticed that the person with whom I was chatting did not believe the presence of Asian American students in a school system should be counted toward diversity. In fact, she sort of felt it worked the other…
So the mayor has changed his mind. After ducking crime and a soaring murder rate in his election campaign last summer, after handing it all off to a study commission when he got elected, now all of a sudden Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson sees a murder crisis in the city…
North Dallas City Council member Lee Kleinman would have me believe that his being near the end of an eight-year term limit on the council has freed his tongue. I am trying to remember Kleinman with a tongue that was unfree. In any case, he was typically iconoclastic this week…
A recent news story reports that the Dallas City Council is about to revisit the affordable housing issue, to which I would offer a small correction. This would actually be a case of the council re-revisiting affordable housing, possibly even re-re-revisiting. The affordable housing issue gets so many visits, you’d…
