Last week without any prior public discussion, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings announced (see below) he was unilaterally turning over the planning process for the Trinity River Park downtown to philanthropists Rusty and Deedie Rose in exchange for a gift of $1 million. The mayor did say, “We must also continue…
Tell me that again. Texas school districts, you say, are in state court in Austin telling a judge they need more money because of “the Legislature’s increased demands for standardized testing and curriculum requirements to graduate high school.” Wait. I’m a libtard. I always want the schools to get more…
Hey, Mr. Jensen. I’m so ashamed. I feel terrible. I wrote all those stories about the city screwing you out of your home and warehouse in West Dallas and how Monica Alonzo, the City Council member for your area, ignored your repeated pleas for help. You kept saying, “I don’t…
Wait a minute. Dallas Morning News Metro columnist Steve Blow is gone? You’re kidding me. Why was I not told? You say he retired? How can he just retire? This means no more Steve Blow alerts. What am I supposed to do with my wind-up Steve Blow alarm? I’ll tell…
Can’t shake it. Worried. I still think something scary could be going on with Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk. After I read a story about her in the Saturday edition of The Dallas Morning News, I was even wondering if I should call 911, but then I thought, “Oh, wait,…
The most stubbornly entrenched meme in local white culture — that “South Dallas” is a scary awful place — is the one most certain to flip in years just ahead. It will turn around 180 degrees. People of the green ethnicity, meaning the ones with money, will start scouring southern…
Dear New Dallas Morning News Editor Mike Wilson: For some reason that I guess I’m not smart enough to figure out – and I blame Eric Celeste, not you – Celeste’s July 7 item on Frontburner about you and the Morning News employee buyouts, “DMN Offers Buyouts to 167 Employees,”…
Few days ago I told you the City Council and mayor of Dallas were headed for some kind of group therapy at this week’s meeting because of knife-play going on behind the scenes about the annual budget. Yesterday’s meeting was a little bit disappointing for me because no one jammed…
Last week HUD Secretary and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro was on MSNBC Live disarmingly fending off flattering suggestions by host Melissa Harris-Perry that he may be tapped as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate: “I learned in life,” Castro said, “that if you want to have a great future you…
Couple weeks ago, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings gave City Manager A.C. Gonzalez and his top staff an unusual if very velvet-fingered push-back for showing the council a video presentation about how the next city budget will fix the streets when in fact it won’t. Uh-oh. It’s not nice to tell the…
Dallas City Hall X-Files. OMG. I am so ready. Wednesday Eric Nicholson had a story here which seemed to confirm at least in part a conspiracy theory I have touting for about 50 years. It’s about a secret under-the-radar City Hall effort to steer major resources into land at the southwest corner…
One of the smartest things former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller said to me when she was serving on the City Council was, “In Dallas, the most important thing is never to say anything about anything, ever.” I agreed with her. Sometimes it’s almost but not really funny. This is a…
In the matter of Susan Hawk, the Dallas County district attorney who finally resurfaced after three weeks to say she’s taking another four weeks unpaid time off to deal with depression, I know my primary empathy ought to be with her in her need to discharge her duties as head…
We got a spot of rain last week, but for weeks beforehand the weather person on the evening news had been warning me in increasingly dire tones about the drought. The region had gone 40 days and 40 nights without rain, she said, returning us to drought conditions. So what…
Don’t know what was going on at the beloved Lakewood Theater in Old East Dallas when I stopped by this morning – either a very serious remodeling or the first stages of demolition. When I went inside, workers seemed to be ripping out the stage and a bunch of interior…
Maybe we need to accept a certain bottom line here and prepare to deal with it. Dallas is becoming a much cooler city — almost more cool than it has a right to be — because of the coming change in who’s in control. But the change-over is not here…
Months ago, Dallas school board member Miguel Solis shipped me a copy of a 1999 book called Show Me a Hero by former New York Times writer (now senior columnist at Huffington Post) Lisa Belkin, about a late 1980s affordable housing/desegregation fight in Yonkers, an inner-rim suburb of New York…
You, my fellow citizen, can do a study of the development potential associated with a single DART light rail line through downtown. I’m serious. You can do this. All you have to do is walk east to west through downtown on Bryan Street and Pacific Avenue along the existing DART…
The selling point for a professional “city manager” system of city government — we’ve got one of the biggest ones in the country here in Dallas — is that everything will be run in a professional or “businesslike” fashion, not all loosey-goosey and a mess like it would be if…
On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “disparate impact” as a key principle in racial desegregation law, ruling that what matters is the effect, not the intent of government practices. That day the headline over Emily Badger’s item on “Wonk Blog” in The Washington Post exulted: “The Supreme Court’s…
David Jensen is a guy I have written about over the last six months who lives in a West Dallas warehouse in the path of a big new apartment development that is favored by the city. He showed up at City Hall Wednesday to try to stop the city from…
A secret but common belief among political professionals here is that only people over 60 really care about local politics, and all they want is more stop signs. Yet here we are on a very warm summer evening at The Foundry, an indoor/outdoor bar that shares a small repurposed industrial…
