An ugly bit of street theater is being prepared for us by certain people at City Hall. When it gets here, I want you to know the real story. In the first week of June, as many as 200 poor families will be tossed out on the street in West…
On Wednesday afternoon, the state Senate signed off on the bill that one of the region’s biggest anti-abortion organizations, Texas Right to Life, has identified as a key building block to ending legal abortion Texas. Senate Bill 415, which passed its initial Senate test with a 22-8 vote, would ban…
This week in the federal corruption trial of one of Dallas’ most powerful and long-tenured elected officials, an important behind-the-scenes truth has been told about how this city really operates. It raises a question about who and what we are. For at least a half century, Dallas city and county…
Over vociferous objections from the chamber’s Democratic minority, the Texas Senate voted 21-10 late Tuesday afternoon in favor of state Senator Lois Kolkhorst’s so-called “bathroom bill.” The bill requires patrons of the state of Texas’ publicly owned facilities to use the bathroom designated for the sex listed on their birth…
Hey, here’s an idea. If we have to do some kind of claw-back because the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund is in trouble — you know, send out the guys with the baseball bats and have them repossess those overpaid pension benefits — how about we start with the…
Last week architect and land planner Kevin Sloan told an audience to go home and Google “Bobcat City.” So I did. It’s us. If you Google Bobcat City, the first thing that pops up is an extremely cool YouTube video produced by Texas Parks and Wildlife about a study of…
For a while longer at least, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System board of directors is going to hold off the elephant in the room. On Thursday afternoon, by an 11-1 vote, the board agreed to continue restricting lump-sum withdrawals from deferred retirement option program (DROP) accounts. DROP accounts…
Like Dallas, Houston is in Austin right now trying to get the Legislature to sign off on a much needed fix for its police and fire pension funds. Houston cops, firefighters and the mayor are not in total agreement on what they want, but at least they have somebody in…
Almost all of the homeless camps the city has scraped away for the TV cameras over the past year are back up, rebuilt close to their original locations or maybe half a mile away. If the city’s tent-scraping program was intended to resolve homelessness, promote health and safety or reduce…
Pretend you’re some private company. You dump an enormous load of concrete into the Trinity River creating an obstruction so massive that boats can no longer even get up and down the river. Say you get caught. Don’t you think you’d have to fix it? Or go to the pen?…
A truly new idea, immense in scope, revolutionary in purpose but also wonderfully simple, cheap, pragmatic and real, is suddenly on the table in the city’s most ancient and intractable unsolved problem — the damned Trinity River. It’s this: Stop. Just stop. Stop trying to stick stuff on it, spray…
On Tuesday afternoon Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings filed a notice of non-suit in his lawsuit against the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund. That means that the mayor, who’d sued the fund as a private citizen in order to stop to fund from making payments he believes could bankrupt the…
Taking money out of mass transit to save the city’s dying police and fire pension fund is not a fun idea. It’s nothing to look forward to. But we have to do something, and whatever we do probably won’t taste sweet. “The pension crisis is a public safety crisis now,”…
Early Sunday morning, just before 5:30 a.m., according to the Dallas Police Department, a car that a witness described as a black sports car sped past DPD’s South Central Substation on Camp Wisdom Road, spraying bullets from a handgun. The two suspects, Assistant Chief Randy Blankenbaker said Sunday afternoon, initially targeted…
After twice being left for dead, cite-and-release for low-level marijuana possession is back on the table in Dallas, with a vote by the city council expected as early as March 8. Members of the council who support cite-and-release have twice pushed for changing the way Dallas cops handle pot arrests…
President Trump tweeted two days ago: “The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!” I got so excited when I read it. You mean liberal activists are actually going to do to Republicans what the Tea Party…
On Tuesday afternoon, city staff released the results of the first year of Dallas’ so-called living wage program. In late 2015, the Dallas City Council voted to require any business with a city contract to pay its employees $10.37, about $3 more per hour than the federal minimum wage of $7.25…
Very surreal experience for me yesterday sitting at a white tablecloth luncheon among the mucketies at the annual Trinity Commons Foundation affair. I think they assumed based on my appearance I was a waiter and let me in. I sat there listening to endless blah-blah-blah from three Dallas mayors, one…
All right, now we’ve got this police and fire pension issue where we can see it and where we can begin to make our own personal decisions, thanks to yesterday’s unanimous vote by the board of directors of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension board. This is now a moral…
Late Friday afternoon, the city of Dallas’ weekly memo packet featured a little gift from new City Manager T.C. Broadnax to the Dallas City Council: a map, long awaited, of each of the city of Dallas’ homeless encampments. [pdf-1]Members of the council, led by Oak Cliff’s Scott Griggs, have pushed…
Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton submitted an amicus brief to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in support of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel to the United States by citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. In doing so, Paxton ensured that Texas was the first state to…
Wednesday was big day in Austin for both Texas’ staunchest advocates against reproductive choice and the organizations that have fought tooth and nail at the Texas Capitol and in the courts against the advance of legislation that seeks to limit abortion to the absolute limit of what is allowed by Roe…
