Congratulations, Dallas citizen, on your recent decision to examine the nuts-and-bolts operations of your local law enforcement agency(s)! A well-informed citizenry is vital functioning of democracy and, as we all know, crime stats is a particularly dusky corner of local government. Your thirst for knowledge and community spirit are a…
The deadline, May 4, set by the city to clear the Dallas homeless encampment known as Tent City was not hard and fast. That much is clear after Wednesday’s Dallas City Council meeting. Adam Medrano desperately wants to get rid of Tent City. His district — which covers the Cedars…
Jeffrey Handy, the guy promoting Exxxotica porn conventions under the name J Handy, says in a new court filing that Dallas knew exactly what it was getting into when it allowed the porn convention to come to the city’s convention center last summer. Nevertheless, the City Council banned Handy and…
Is there another Dallasite who has made the national news as often as Dr. Robert Jeffress this year? The 60-year-old pastor of 12,000-member Dallas First Baptist has become the most prominent evangelical leader supporting Donald Trump, earning him rebukes from other church leaders, such as when he commented last month…
If we ever needed proof, we got it when Donald Trump opened his mouth at Liberty University and made his infamous reference to “2 Corinthians.” After wiping off the drool from laughing so hard, evangelicals knew with certainty that he was not one of us. Every American evangelical spanning the…
On the surface everything always looks so sober and important at City Hall, following a solemn script as if every subcommittee meeting were a medical school graduation ceremony or the funeral of an important person. And then you get these bizarre little windows on what’s really going on. Yesterday I…
Neil Emmons, Dallas’ District 2 plan commissioner who died last week, was way deep in the woods on some big development deal many years ago, on the side of the neighborhood and giving the developer grief, of course, when a guy I knew who worked for the developer gave me…
Needs shutterstock: 312342893 Wednesday, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and Leander Johns, the head of Uber Dallas announced a plan to add 2,500 new drivers for the app-based ride hailing service in southern Dallas. On the surface it looks like an easy win. Dallas south of I-30 needs jobs and is under…
It’s almost enough to make you think we had racial segregation in this town. First, three years ago, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a finding that Dallas was violating federal law by using desegregation money to promote segregation. The city denied it, of course, but…
Unless they happen to be the city of Dallas’ paid defense attorneys, it’s hard to find a lawyer who thinks the city of Dallas has a shot at winning the lawsuit brought by Three Expo Events following the City Council decision to ban the Three Expo’s Exxxotica sex show from…
Monday, Dallas police Chief David Brown had a plan to stem Dallas’ ongoing spike in violent crime. He told the City Council’s public safety committee he would shuffle hundreds of officers’ beats and schedules to deal with a 75 percent jump in murders so far in 2016 over the same…
With its monolithic columns at the entrance and pictorial windows of art glass, The First Presbyterian Church of Dallas in the 1800 block of Young Street is a cultural and visual landmark. One of its early homes was the first brick church in Dallas, and it grew from a single…
The Dallas Police/Fire Pension Fund, still trying to dig itself out of the billion-dollar financial hole it dug for itself by making stupid investments, is going to meet Friday to consider “censuring” board member Philip Kingston for speaking candidly and intelligently to the public about the pension fund’s problems. And,…
Pasties, whipped cream and an oversized dildo, not the First Amendment, are the real issues at the heart of the Dallas City Council’s decision to ban the Exxxotica sex-expo from the city-owned convention center, according to the city’s response to a lawsuit filed by Three Expo events, the company that puts…
All through last week’s City Council briefing on the city’s ancient and unresolved Trinity toll road controversy, I kept thinking I sniffed the unpleasant scent of burning human hair that you get when someone is being thrown under a bus. Kept looking around the council chamber, sniffing. Couldn’t find it…
Ted Cruz has officially lost it with Donald Trump. Texas’ Canadian-born junior senator went after the GOP’s presidential front-runner Thursday afternoon with all the bluster he could find, putting an end to any hope the two candidates could revive the congenial relationship they had earlier in the campaign. “It’s not…
Coming soon to a city near you (very near you): the prize fight of the century. In the one corner, with a left fist loaded with lawyers and a right glove packed with money, we have the Big Contender, Dallas City Hall, determined never to admit that the “whitewater feature,”…
Dallas’ quest to keep Exxxotica out of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center will keep its puritanical legal eagle on the job, thanks to the majority of the Dallas City Council that voted to keep Scott Bergthold on the team defending the city against the porn convention’s lawsuit. Bergthold, a…
The city of Dallas will not be piloting a cite-and-release program for marijuana possession after all. Wednesday morning, the Dallas City Council shot down a long-in-the-works proposal that would’ve required Dallas police officers to issue tickets, rather than making arrests, when they discovered Dallas residents with less than four ounces…
At the end of last week, the Dallas City Auditor issued a report (copy below) saying the city handed out $29.9 million to housing contractors in a three-year period and forgot to keep any records to show whether any of the housing got built. Oh, and they also forgot to…
There was a day when the three men who sat in front of me in the Dallas City Council chamber for Monday’s Trinity toll road meeting could have said jump, and the entire Dallas City Council would have fainted from embarrassment for not having thought of it themselves. But this…
Nothing about Donald Trump is new. In any major American city, no one need dig far to find people who exhibited the traits that make Trump so appealing to the Republican electorate, and Dallas is no different. None of its residents may have had all of Trumps’ charms rolled into…
