Over the weekend I received a long, thoughtful email from Susan Cantrell Holloway, a downtown resident worried about a recent story in The Dallas Morning News by Robert Wilonsky. He was waxing rhapsodic about plans to tear down an old tower and eliminate a city park at the north end…

D Magazine’s Tim Rogers covered last week’s Trinity toll road public hearing for Frontburner, which is more than I did for my own newspaper, so maybe it’s my guilt tilting me toward his favor. I found myself feeling sorry for him when his boss, Wick Allison, commented below his item…

Alliance-AFT, a Dallas teachers union that was making robo-calls a year ago to get Dallas school Superintendent Mike Miles fired, is about to endorse one of his strongest supporters for re-election to the school board. The union will inform members Friday that it has endorsed Miguel Solis for the Place…

Can’t let this pass without at least pointing out the irony. Last Sunday Dallas City Council member Tennell Atkins was all over The Dallas Morning News opinion pages with an essay on the importance of public incentives for private developers in under-served areas of the city. He wrote: “Evidence of…

A family chore last night prevented me from attending a big community meeting about a proposed restaurant at White Rock Lake, but stories on Channel 8 and in the daily paper this morning gave the flavor. The community is looking at the idea of building a commercial restaurant on parkland…

Some forms of Dallas City Council recusal may even be based on the ancient naval art of semaphore. Everybody’s an expert on something. I happen to be an expert on Dallas City Council recusing styles. One of my favorite all-time recusers quite a few years back was the late James…

The Pulitzer Prizes just came out. Once again I scan the list, searching for yours truly. Not a mention. But next year it will be different. Next year my early work on the Trinity River toll road is going to win me the Pulitzer and possibly also the Nobel and…

The Dallas City Council is reopening the question of whether the underground tunnel system beneath the buildings downtown is what killed downtown street commerce in the 1990s. Apparently now that downtown is on the rebound, some people suffer from a superstitious fear that reopening closed portions of the tunnel system…

One day in 2013 Hannah Hargrove stopped being a kid. She had been out of college a year, working in the family business. On the day her father, John Hargrove, was killed in a bar fight, the business became hers to run. She was 23. One of the first calls…

The people who love and defend White Rock Lake Park are not idiots and nutcases. They went to war two years ago against a plan to mow Winfrey Point meadow and turn it into a commercial parking lot, because they did not want a commercial parking lot in a beautiful…

Last week I was telling you how the city’s so-called “white water feature,” the fake kayak rapids they built in the Trinity River three years ago, is still there and still stupid, sitting out in the middle of the river like giant petrified elephant poop that nobody knows what to…

This morning, Eric posted an item here with a particular quote that I just could not let pass. Eric saw through the quoted statements immediately, so I guess I’m just piling on. His story was about remarks made recently to The Dallas Morning News by a powerful regional transportation planner…

All right, please allow me to take care of some inside business here and use this space to respond to all of you who were kind enough yesterday to inquire whether I am turning into Steve Blow or Steve Blow is turning into me. Yes. It’s a natural part of…

Next month the “White Water Feature” on the Trinity River just south of downtown will be three years old. This ugly chunky mound of concrete, built at a cost of $4 million and intended to be a man-made rapids for canoeists and kayakers, was so ill-conceived, poorly designed, badly made…

In the smoke, din, blinding flashes, screams, roars, flying body parts, weird music and scarily bad odors blasting out from Mayor Mike Rawlings’ enormously maladroit public school takeover campaign, there has been a silver lining. It is a very thin silver lining, kind of like a kitten that survives an…

Monday I said Mike Rawlings was about to announce a pause — a tapping of the brakes — in his public school takeover campaign. I was a little off. Instead it turns out he has been meeting with three really old guys. I guess that could have the same effect…

There is a distinct possibility the mayor or somebody else associated with the public school takeover effort now underway — called “home rule” by its backers — will announce this week that they are “tapping the brakes,” pausing the campaign for now. That will make lots of people happy but…

You probably have passing familiarity with the boy-in-the-bathtub story, about 10-year-old Arnav Dhawan, the Frisco child whose decomposing, five-days-dead body was found by police under ice packs in the family bathtub. The mother, 38-year-old Pallavi Dhawan, is charged with murder, even though the official finding on cause of death in…

Ed Timms and Kevin Krause had a great story in The Dallas Morning News on Sunday about a local agency that certifies businesses as minority or women-owned. The North Central Texas Regional Certification Agency seems to be sort of the same outfit as something called All Temps 1 Personnel. The…

The mayor’s pissed-off walk-out last week from a meeting with Latino leaders to discuss his school takeover plan is, if anything, more of a mystery, now that a recording of the meeting is circulating. He said last week he walked out because the meeting was being hijacked and he wanted…