The selling point for a professional “city manager” system of city government — we’ve got one of the biggest ones in the country here in Dallas — is that everything will be run in a professional or “businesslike” fashion, not all loosey-goosey and a mess like it would be if…
Last Thursday, during a routine stormwater inspection, city staff came upon an unsettling discovery: 300 to 400 dead fish in a West Dallas drainage pond on the landward side of the Trinity River levee near the Pavaho Pump Station. Workers plucked what fish carcasses they could safely reach — almost…
The state of Texas’ obstinacy about changing a Conroe man’s death certificate continues to have positive consequences. Last week it led to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the interim commissioner of the Department of State Health Services, Kirk Cole, being brought up on potential contempt charges. The state caved…
Wednesday’s decision by the Dallas City Council to allow Love Field vendors to charge higher prices in exchange for those vendors guaranteeing a higher minimum wage for their workers was standard-issue horse trading. Vendors got what they wanted — the ability to charge 10 percent more than street prices for…
David Jensen is a guy I have written about over the last six months who lives in a West Dallas warehouse in the path of a big new apartment development that is favored by the city. He showed up at City Hall Wednesday to try to stop the city from…
Call it a small, mostly symbolic victory for the anti-toll road bunch. Late Wednesday afternoon, the Dallas City Council unanimously approved a half-measure drafted by freshman council member Adam McGough that keeps the bond money already raised for the city of Dallas Trinity project — some $47.7 million — from being…
Today as the Dallas City Council returns from its summer slumbers, it takes up a number of prickly questions, none more so than the debate over asking developer Trammell Crow Co. to include some affordable housing in exchange for the company’s getting an enormous grant of extra development rights from…
A secret but common belief among political professionals here is that only people over 60 really care about local politics, and all they want is more stop signs. Yet here we are on a very warm summer evening at The Foundry, an indoor/outdoor bar that shares a small repurposed industrial…
My favorite part of the audit released yesterday of the city’s water meters: In 2008, when the water department was taking flak for too many “implausible” meter readings — meter readings that are either crazy, totally whacked out or you-gotta-be-kidding-me — they did what any head-up self-defending bureaucracy would do…
Recently I came across a great term of art I think aptly describes the contrast between the way the Bishop Arts/North Oak Cliff district of the city is growing and the way West Dallas is developing. It’s, “Orderly but dumb versus chaotic but smart.” A tight fit. In a conversation…
Whether on the prime-time slot graced by Senator Ted Cruz or the kid’s table afternoon debate where former Governor Rick Perry to his place, just too many candidates filled the stages. Neither Texan got more than about 10 minutes of cumulative time to speak and Cruz was additionally impaired by…
All right, I understand that very few readers of the Dallas Observer are worried about Social Security yet, but you all have to have Social Security cards. Right? That’s all I’m talking about. Just the card. And, yes, it’s more than that. I’m a lifelong libtard. I am pro-government. I…
Pop quiz: Aside from the obvious (i.e. poor judgment and inept management), what do the following events have in common? An employee of the city’s Trinity Watershed Management is helping organize her boss’s retirement money. To cover expenses, she solicits money from several companies that hold lucrative contracts with the…
Clint McDonough is chairman of the Dallas office and a managing partner in an accounting firm that was known since 1903 as Ernst and Ernst, since 1989 as Ernst and Young, now calling itself “EY,” which I thought was the name of a character in an A.A. Milne children’s book…
A week from Wednesday the city council will vote on a zoning deal adjacent to Klyde Warren Park, where the developer wants permission to build a residential tower more than 60 percent higher than the law allows. It’s permission to make 60 percent more money. Oh, but you know our…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, you may have heard, is “deeply concerned” about eXXXotica, the three-day porn expo that arrives in Dallas on Friday. Alas, he wrote in a letter to the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which had objected to the event taking place in the city-owned Convention Center, there was nothing…
It’s easy to get lost in all the affordable-housing stuff that’s been swirling around City Hall for the past couple of years. First HUD was really mad at Dallas over its housing policies, then it wasn’t, then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs…
Last we checked in on Rick Perry’s quixotic second bid for president, our erstwhile governor had picked a fight with the 2016 Republican field’s irresistible force, Donald Trump. Perry, desperate to get into August 6’s Fox News-sponsored first GOP debate, was doing everything he could to raise his national profile,…
Every once in a while, often in the hottest weeks of the year for some reason, I get an enormous hankering, a craving from deep in my soul, a raw hunger that can only be quelled with a great steaming plate heaped high with the well-sauced meat of that great…
I have so many conflicts of interest here, I shouldn’t even open my mouth. But, you know. In a letter to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, the Dallas Women’s Foundation has expressed its “deep concern and disgust” that the Dallas Convention Center will host a porn convention, Exxxotica Expo, on August 7…
Erstwhile Texas governor and current presidential candidate Rick Perry’s campaign is in danger dying before it really gets underway, but Perry is doing everything he can to avoid a premature exit. Perry is stuck somewhere below 5 percent in national Republican primary polls. In any election from 2012 backward, low…
Dallas City Hall took a big head-slam yesterday in the Cityplace Sam’s Club suit. 5th Court of Appeals Judge David J. Schenck shot down the city’s argument that neighbors had no right to sue over a big-box store on the east side of Central Expressway north of Haskell Avenue. Schenck…
