Yesterday, four of the county’s commissioners and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins approved a resolution declaring Dallas County a “Welcoming Community.” The resolution, while nonbinding, affirms the county’s stance that undocumented residents are “integral members of our community” and calls on local law enforcement agencies to “end nonessential collaborations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” As…
Dallas City Councilman Lee Kleinman represents District 11. Last week he sat down with the Dallas Observer to talk about the city police and fire pension crisis, the future of a car-free Dallas, housing in the city and his upcoming election challenge from real estate blogger Candy Evans. Get ready…
People should start paying me not to write anything positive about them. Just over a week ago I wrote something positive about Jesse Moreno, vice chair of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board, and now I see on this Wednesday’s upcoming City Council agenda there will be an effort to…
Let me go back to an earlier point. I still say the money situation that the city is in right now makes absolutely no sense unless there is a monumental leak or a series of leaks somewhere. And I think the new city manager ought to go looking. Things, after all,…
Armed with a stack of signature-covered petitions and dressed in his usual dapper suit, Dwaine Caraway announced at Dallas City Hall on Wednesday afternoon that, after a two-year hiatus, he is coming back for the District 4 city council seat he held from 2007-2015. “We had a lot of momentum…
We are so screwed. The Texas economy is totally dependent on trade with Mexico. Trump’s determination to stir up his flash mob by insulting Mexico is going to absolutely kill us. But our top Texas elected officials are Republicans who are so afraid of far-right challengers that they can’t do…
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, scheduled to go on trial later this month on federal corruption charges, is still king of the city’s old black protesters. But the old black protest machine’s days as a major political force in the city probably are numbered anyway, no matter which way…
Monday evening, the Irving-based Boy Scouts of America announced that it would begin admitting scouts based on their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificate. The BSA’s decision comes a month after the family of Joe Maldonaldo, an 8-year-old transgender boy from New Jersey, filed a legal…
The hits, apparently, are going to keep on coming for Dallas’ woebegone police and fire pension system. On Monday afternoon, a group of six former Dallas cops sued the system’s board in U.S. District Court in Sherman, alleging that the trustees’ decision to temporarily stop withdrawals from members’ Deferred Retirement Option Program…
Of course Dallas cops and firefighters are furious over the public tone of the pension fund fight, because so much of it accuses the ordinary members of the fund of somehow being at the bottom of the debacle. All of the talk about pension fund millionaires, for example, makes it…
Late Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks issued a preliminary injunction banning the state of Texas from implementing a rule, drafted last summer, that would require the burial or cremation of any tissue resulting from an abortion performed in the state. In granting the injunction sought by Whole Woman’s…
Ahmed Motaz AlOlabi and Basimal Labbad became two of 50 travelers detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at DFW, along with scores more at airports across the country, in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to keep foreigners from seven majority-Muslim countries out of the United States.
This week there was some hope that the city of Dallas and the troubled Dallas Police and Fire Pension System were on their way to reaching a deal to save the pension from potential insolvency. Early Wednesday morning, however, that mediation broke down, leading to some of the strongest signals yet…
Thursday’s meeting of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board was an abominable disgrace. Most members of the board turned their backs on taxpayers and fought instead to shield their cronies at the State Fair of Texas from public scrutiny. But, remember: There’s one good thing about abominable disgraces. These are…
We knew Dallas municipal election turnout was bad. Now we know it’s among the worst in the country. A comprehensive new study from Portland State University reveals that Dallas’ 6 percent turnout for the 2015 mayoral election between incumbent Mike Rawlings and Dallas attorney Marcos Ronquillo was the worst among the…
Former three-term Dallas Mayor Robert “Bob” Folsom, the man who brought Reunion Arena and the Dallas Chaparrals to the city after serving on the Dallas ISD school board and lettering in four sports at Southern Methodist University, died Tuesday at his Dallas home. He was 89. Folsom, born on Feb. 15, 1927,…
Last fall, after the Texas Supreme Court refused to hear a case with the potential to limit the impact of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Unites States Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in June 2015. In October, Texas’ Republican leadership, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney…
The federal corruption trial of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, still scheduled to begin next month, will offer a two-month cavalcade of the city’s power elite, according to documents released Thursday by both the prosecution and the defense, but the documents disagree about which side the power elite will…
At the urging of the mayor, the Dallas City Council has abandoned efforts to save 162 lane miles of city streets now in danger of collapsing into an irredeemable condition, even though national bond rating agencies have already successively downgraded the city’s credit rating based in part on deteriorating streets…
Two weeks ago, a 9-5 straw vote by the Dallas City Council pushed back the city’s long-awaited May bond election. Thanks to a variety of factors — Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings cited the unwillingness of those who “write the big checks” to do so for a May bond election while…
In Austin, a season of gun bills has begun in the 2017 legislative session. There are 28 gun bills introduced in the House and the 12 gun bills introduced in the Senate. They appear on the heels of 2015 victories for gun rights activists, with the passage both of open carry…
Fine. Any day now Dallas is going to go hat-in-hand down to the Texas Legislature, that famous factory of therapeutic thinking, and ask it to cure the city’s police and fire pension problems. Me, I’d just as soon walk into the bus station and ask if anybody could help me…
