The Republican National Convention committee on Tuesday kicked off a week of host city-searching with a trip to Cleveland, the first of four stops. After Cleveland, committee members will make stops in Kansas City and Denver before rounding out the trip in Dallas late next week. Dallas city officials, for…
An early draft of the 2014 Texas Republican Party platform obtained by the San Antonio Express-News would get rid of some of its most strident anti-LGBTQ language while maintaining staunch opposition to marriage equality and any state or federal benefits for same-sex couples. The draft also includes an endorsement of…
After DeAndre Upshaw repeated his story, this time for the Dallas City Council, about the bouncers at Uptown’s Kung Fu Saloon who appear to discriminate based on race, the City Council had an idea. They could all meet there for happy hour. “You mention about no socks,” Councilman Dwaine Caraway…
OK. So maybe the bike-helmet mandate the Dallas City Council passed 18 years ago wasn’t really about protecting people’s heads. Maybe it was really about giving cops in general an extra reason to interrogate suspicious-looking people in poor, minority neighborhoods, and for one cop in particular to express an apparent…
As the Division Director of Immigration and Legal Services for Catholic Charities of Dallas, Vanna Slaughter has long received email updates whenever young migrants arrive alone in the Dallas area. For some time, she says, she’s received around 250 of these cases in a given month — already a large…
Councilman Tennell Atkins wanted the town hall meeting to be done “the right way.” That’s why he asked all his angry constituents to stop talking directly to him and instead write their questions down on little cards. The cards would then be passed to the front of a room, for…
Dallas, we have learned, does a wonderful job of building incredible parks over freeways. On that front, you might credibly say we’re world-class. As for providing residents with usable public green space in their neighborhoods, that’s a different story. Dallas’ rank on the Trust For Public Land’s annual Park Score…
In a recent chat with our Amy Silverstein, Dallas City Councilman Philip Kingston described the outcry over proposed cuts to Dallas Animal Services — and the public jockeying among departments for additional funding — as “absolute theater.” But c’mon. An online petition and a get-together at Lee Harvey’s? That hardly…
If you live in Dallas and your house or apartment is more than 22 years old, and if your commode uses 3.5 gallons or more per flush, the city would like to give you a free, low-flow toilet. There’s no catch. No strings. Ninety bucks of porcelain, yours for the…
Dallas City Hall has come a long way over the past 10 months. Last year, it was trying to chase Uber out of town with vice stings and surreptitious regulations. Now, it’s put forth some generally sensible recommendations to streamline the governing of the “transportation for hire” industry and put…
Anyone who’s been lulled into thinking that Texas Democrats might finally have their act together need look no further than Kesha Rogers. Rogers, a Lyndon Larouche Democrat who’s staked her U.S. Senate campaign on a promise to impeach Obama (she’s compared him to Hitler), somehow managed to get into a…
Dallas City Councilman Sheffie Kadane still isn’t sure Dallas should be fluoridating its water. “Have you seen toothpaste that has fluoride in the toothpaste?” he asked Dallas Water Utilities Director Jody Puckett this morning. “And have you read the disclaimer on it that says ‘Do not swallow, and if you…
If you were to do a power ranking of city of Dallas governmental bodies, the Park Board would come in third, behind the City Council (obviously) and the City Plan Commission, the whims of which can make or break multimillion dollar development deals. The Park Board’s 15 members are appointed…
The group of 100 or so people who demonstrated in person against Kung Fu Saloon this Wednesday had no hard proof that the bar excludes black people. The official reason why they couldn’t get in, their stories went, had to do with fashion. “My jeans were too baggy,” said Ryan…
God bless Lee Kleinman. While his colleagues on the Dallas City Council were busy this afternoon working themselves into an oratorical lather — this time over council pay raises — he staked his position with a single sentence. “As a fiscal conservative, I can’t support any sort of raise at…
On Sunday afternoon, the Lakewood Advocate’s Brittany Nunn was treated to her first glimpse of White Rock Lake’s fabled Amphicar. She didn’t know that it was an Amphicar — an amphibious convertible produced produced briefly by a German company during the 1960s — or that it was fabled, just that…
The records we used for this post initially — provided to us by Councilman Philip Kingston, who had obtained them from Dallas Police Department David Brown’s office — were incomplete. Rather than the 144 citations we reported, there were 244 issued in 2013 and 103 issued in 2014 — 347…
Superficially, the Republican race for state Representative Dan Branch’s Park Cities/Preston Hollow seat started off positive. Here you had three intelligent, accomplished young professionals politely agreeing with each other on how best to shape Texas’ future. Their few apparent distinguishing features — I’ve been endorsed by LeVar Burton! Holy crap…
At the beginning of every Dallas City Council meeting, long before most spectators (and many council members) are fully awake, a religious leader of some stripe stands at the podium and offers a brief prayer. A few months ago, we wondered whether the U.S. Supreme Court might declare such displays…
Dallas City Councilwoman Vonciel Hill: steadfast opponent of LGBT rights, veteran race baiter, lover of poorly designed inner-city freeways, and … passionate advocate for walkable urban spaces? So it seems. During a lengthy City Council discussion this afternoon on a pilot program aimed at revolutionizing how Dallas does downtown parking…
Dallas knows how to do car ownership. It’s kinda sorta embraced Uber and Lyft. But short-term car rental? That’s to be determined this summer, when the city dips its toe into Zipcar. The inaugural neighborhoods — downtown, the Arts District, Uptown, Oak Lawn and Mockingbird Station — have been selected…
On Wednesday afternoon, as the Dallas City Council gathered in a Trinity River Audubon Center conference room overlooking a shrunken pond and sea of marsh grass, there was a solid thunk of bird hitting glass. No one seemed to notice, save for maybe the security guard standing at attention with…
