The Dallas Morning News ran a picture earlier this week of Mayor Mike Rawlings with a huge grin on his face while he watched a gigantic mechanical claw rip down a dilapidated house in West Dallas — exactly the grin I might have have had, too, had I been there…
If you know her only in her formal public persona, one of the things you may not know about former Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt is that she’s really funny. She and her husband, Park Board member Paul Sims, would make a killer stand-up duo at any comedy club…
On the one hand there is the immediate case of Tennell Atkins, the Dallas City Council member accused of assaulting a city employee at City Hall in early December. On the other hand, there is City Hall. I thought they were having a security crackdown to protect the council from…
My big hope for this coming year would be that 2015 will be The Year of Talking Honestly. The bitterness and recrimination hanging in malevolent clouds over the 16-year-old Trinity toll road debate really have very little to do with the nature of the project itself. It’s about roads, parks…
Churlish is my middle name, so I guess I’ll go ahead and complain about people who are on my own side now in the Trinity toll road debate. In an otherwise really great piece about it last week, D Magazine Publisher Wick Allison made reference again to what he agreed…
As the end of the year approaches, I find myself pondering all the big questions of my existence, as in, “Why can’t I go pick up carry-out food in a restaurant without being accosted by an angry Dallas public school teacher who wants to tell me what a butt-head I…
“2014: The year in Vonciel Jones Hill.” That is my title for this essay. Why? Because I firmly believe that if you can understand what’s wrong with Vonciel Jones Hill, you can understand what’s wrong with our city. No, wait. You can understand what’s wrong with the universe. At some…
You saw here yesterday that The Dallas Morning News named a new editor to replace Bob Mong, who is retiring. I always admired Mong, a fact I tried to keep to myself. I know nothing about the new person, Mike Wilson. James M. Moroney III, president of A.H. Belo, owner…
A few quick updates for you on some of those Blacklands toll road issues I told you about earlier in the week. Apparently I was wrong about a lot of stuff. See also: State Road Officials Balk. I told you state Representative Cindy Burkett of Sunnyvale, our always sunny suburb…
I tend to keep a sharp nose out for possible nearby flatulence, and I am beginning to pick up strong whiffs from the old downtown political establishment — the ones former Mayor Laura Miller always called “The Boys” — in terms of how they will deal with next May’s watershed…
Sooner or later we’re going to find out who’s really pushing behind the scenes for that private “Blacklands” private toll road they want to build northeast of Dallas from Rowlett to Greenville. And I don’t mean the private dudes who want to build it for profit. I mean who in…
By the way and for what it’s worth, I am aware that I have been talking about nothing but the Trinity toll road for about a month, and I promise that I am on the verge of checking myself in for a toll road detox. Temporary detox. But here’s the…
The thing about Dallas lawyer Marcos Ronquillo, who formally announced yesterday he’s running for mayor of Dallas, is not that he’s Hispanic. We’ve seen that movie before. If Ronquillo’s last name can bring more Latino voters to the polls next May, then that may change the equation somewhat, but Domingo…
All I could do,the composure I could muster, at yesterday’s City Hall press conference announcing formation of an anti-Trinity toll road political action committee, was force myself to sit in my chair, take notes, act like a reporter and not jump up slapping my forehead and doing a wild Jake-legged…
Lots of talk yesterday about today’s upcoming announcement of a political action committee to kill the Trinity toll road, and, by the way, if you just moved here, it’s perfectly OK to say, “Toll road? OK, I don’t think I care about that.” But think of it this way: It’s…
The unveiling later this week of a political action committee to kill the Trinity toll road will be in and of itself an enormous watershed moment in local politics. Unheard of. The kind of people who oppose toll roads don’t have PACs in Dallas. C’mon. They don’t raise money for…
Talk about déjà vu. Here I am back in the ample auditorium of Rosemont Elementary, a modern school in North Oak Cliff with padded theater seating, thank God, attending yet another debate on the damned Trinity River toll road. I attended a debate on the Trinity River toll road in…
Two stories in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News were bookends for the debate on school rigor. In one, three Dallas school board members launched a campaign against too much testing, saying it’s mean to the kids. In the other, the head of the biggest company by far in Dallas and one…
Last night’s Trinity River toll road debate in Oak Cliff was a barnburner. A crowd of 450-plus broke into repeated emotional applause for City Council member Scott Griggs, who delivered a series of speeches attacking the road that were a cross between Winston Churchill and Tom Cruise — powerful to…
When a panel discussion of the proposed Trinity toll road begins this evening at 6:30 pm at Rosemont Elementary, something will be quite different about it compared with the same kind of events during the run-up to an anti-Trinity road referendum seven years ago. Everything. Seven years ago the supporters…
Sometimes we reporters who write about the schools get so busy reporting on whether school board members have been engaging in fisticuffs with the staff and why the cops had to hustle a board member out of a school, we lose sight of the boring peripheral questions like whether the…
The Dallas Morning News editorial page subscribes to the belief that our mayor accomplishes a great good when he calls attention to disparities between the city’s white and not-white hemispheres. I assume the paper also would give itself credit for doing the same with its years-old editorial page campaign, which…
