Late Sunday night, The Dallas Morning News posted a banal piece announcing that Mayor Mike Rawlings had raised $30.5 million for a southern Dallas investment fund, a cornerstone of his GrowSouth initiative. The most controversial thing in the article was that the fund — which doesn’t involve tax money, just the…
Lawyers for the family of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old kid who made the clock, have notified the school district and city government in suburban Irving (see below) that the family intends to file civil rights lawsuits if they don’t get $15 million in damages. Hold your breath for one second…
Eleven weeks later, the Oak Lawn community is getting the police attention it’s been demanding. Since September 1, the area immediately surrounding the gay friendly Cedar Springs strip has seen at least 12 people attacked. Some victims were robbed and many ended up in the hospital. Geoffrey Hubbard, a bartender at…
Two weeks ago, Ben Sandifer took off from his job as an accountant and headed down to City Hall to plead with the City Plan Commission to vote against rezoning a portion of the Texas Horse Park. He didn’t have a problem with the zoning change per se, which was…
Texas Governor Greg Abbott came out punching hard and fast after last week’s terrorist assault on Paris, making it clear Monday he would be doing everything he can to keep refugees from the humanitarian crisis in Syria, or at least not in Texas. “Given the tragic attacks in Paris and…
Kept my mouth shut until it was said and done. Best I can do for you, conflict of interest-wise. Now I have to blurt it out. I am so glad that damned house near me on Live Oak Street, the “wedding venue,” is down and reduced to rubble at long…
Who in Dallas could better express the way Dallas worships things — football and otherwise — than members of the Staubach clan? What they have to say about woman-beating and the Dallas Cowboys football team, specifically player Greg Hardy, is doubly interesting. It tells us something about ourselves. It tells…
Dallas City Attorney Warren Ernst insists his sudden retirement at age 61 after two years on the job isn’t being driven by anything special going on at City Hall at the moment. OK, fine. But I think it has to do with everything happening at City Hall these days. Every…
Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate offered little in the way of new rhetoric or tactics from Texas Senator Ted Cruz. The Canadian-born first-termer stuck to usual strident style — one picks up things like that as a college debater at Harvard — decrying the big government boogeyman, Kentucky Senator Rand…
Given her past woes and some of her past performances, Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk’s appearance Monday night at a community meeting was pretty damned striking. She’s back in the ring, man. Throwing punches. I would even have to go ahead and pay her what may be an old…
So, the Dallas City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to fix the language in the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance to more accurately describe Dallas’ transgender residents. Essentially, the council made a tweak to clarify that gender identity an sexual orientation are not the the same things. Everybody who was protected under the…
The forebears of the modern-day feral hog arrived in Texas well before there was a Texas, tagging along with and occasionally escaping from early Spanish explorers in 17th century. They took to the wild, where they spread like kudzu and interbred with subsequent waves of formerly domesticated swine gone rogue,…
City Council member Adam Medrano, the head of the city’s LGBT task force, wants to fix something pretty simple in Dallas’ non-discrimination ordinance. Let’s just tweak some language, Medrano says, to make sure all Dallas residents are treated equally. Medrano wants to ensure that Dallas’ transgender population is protected and…
Do you ever pause, put the paper down or look up from your tablet and wonder what’s really going on? Maybe we should all do that. Every day. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott couldn’t find a real sanctuary city to attack in his state, so he threatened Dallas County Sheriff Lupe…
On the front page of its Metro section last Monday, The Dallas Morning News had a piece reporting that the Dallas Police Department’s attrition rate (i.e. the number of officers who resigned, got fired, retired or died last year) was higher than it’s been in Chief David Brown’s five-year tenure leading the…
When is being fat a legitimate political issue? Ever? Even theoretically? Is it ever right for a skinny person to get mouthy about other people being fat? I winced, I admit, when I read that Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs was talking about people at City Hall being too…
The short of it is this: Dallas’ pension fund for police and firefighters is in big trouble. This week, the City Council heard from an outside auditor that the fund has $5 billion in commitments that it doesn’t have assets to pay, based on the new way the Governmental Accounting Standards…
Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez has ensconced herself in Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s head. It wasn’t even that hard, really. She just slightly — and we mean slightly, none of the changes have had a tangible result yet — changed the way the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office deals with undocumented…
Many of the employees at City Hall are women, and many of those women work in certain areas — Office of the City Secretary, Office of the City Manager, Office of the City Council — where tensions and tempers can run high. Conflict with elected officials is not just probable…
OK, Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs probably didn’t threaten to break a city staff member’s fingers, as he was accused of doing the infamous Affair of the Fucking Digits earlier this year. But he did call city staff a bunch of lard-asses Monday. We know, because we heard him…
Two-and-a-half years ago, around the beginning of May 2013, surveyors working for the city of Dallas staked out the contours of the Texas Horse Park’s centerpiece arena. Judging by the location of the stakes, the arena was going to be built more or less on top of an ancient and…
Half of the battle over moving a concrete plant out of the Trinity Groves restaurant theme park and farther into West Dallas was over in June, but we just didn’t know it. In June, as Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez and the rest of the city staff hurried the City…
