When the Texas Legislature passed new rules governing the payday and auto-title lending industry in 2011, lawmakers accidentally (or not) left gaping holes large enough to drive large, cash-laden trucks through. It was little surprise, then, that that’s exactly what’s been happening. The Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder found one of…
Yesterday afternoon, we were summoned down to City Hall via a text message from Paula Blackmon, Mayor Mike Rawlings’ chief of staff. After several long months of silence, it appeared that there was finally going to be some semi-official word on the new regulations for gas drilling within Dallas city…
U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, who coasted unopposed to a 10th term last month, was on Fox News today to discuss the fiscal cliff. Johnson, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is a Democrat. Fox News host Neil Cavuto is — well he’s a Fox News host…
The City Council’s agenda yesterday was chock full of actually interesting stuff. You can relive it any time you want through the city’s database of archived council videos. But just in case you have something better to do, we’ll summarize the high points. It’s Not Raining On Tennell Atkins’ Parade,…
Cathie Adams served for less than a year as chair of the Texas Republican Party before being unseated in 2010, but she’s long been a fixture on Texas’ right wing, particularly as a leader of the virulently anti-abortion Texas Eagle Forum. It was in that role that Adams spoke alongside…
In an interview with the Morning News over the weekend, Mayor Mike Rawlings qualified some of his previous statements about the potential of AT&T and SMU’s proposed Trinity Forest Golf Course to be an economic game-changer in southern Dallas. The project could spur lots and lots of economic development and…
The last time the City Council’s Public Safety Committee met, members squabbled over the details of a proposed measure aimed at protecting cyclists. The ordinance — we’ll call it the don’t-be-a-dick-to-cyclists rule — would require motorists to pass bikes at a safe distance and not make right turns into their…
In 2006, the city of Dallas picked the Dallas-based architecture of Brown Reynolds Watford to design the Texas Horse Park. At the time, plans still called for a massive, $30 million complex complete with a half-mile race track, grandstands, a therapeutic pool, an RV campground, and all sorts of other…
Back in September, using the format of a totally ridiculous board game, we recapped the fight over gas drilling on land owned by the city of Dallas. At that point, the drilling task force had long since wrapped up its work, and a vote from the City Council on new…
Despite its vaguely official-sounding name, the Christmas Bureau of Austin & Travis County is not a branch of local government. It’s a nonprofit charity, one that purports to help needy individuals and families during the holiday season. That seems to be what the organization did from 1964, when it was…
It’s getting near Christmas, and as far as we’re aware, Texas has yet to secede from the Union. Even Governor Rick Perry thinks it’s a bad idea, and he looks like the sort of man who’d snort wasabi on a bet. But the Texas Nationalist Movement is still feeling pretty…
The full Dallas city council just got its first chance to learn a little more about the proposed golf course that the city and AT&T want to build in southern Dallas. There’s still a lot for the city to work out before it agrees to clean up and lease the…
Downtown Dallas 360, the city’s long-range master plan for the area, has high hopes for southwestern downtown. Where Reunion Arena once stood, it envisions a cluster of mid-rise mixed-use developments. These would be clustered around a promenade and central park and would be accessible by stops on the new Oak…
Last week, Dwaine Caraway sent us a little pre-Thanksgiving note. It read, in full: We are pleased to invite you to the District Four Community Celebration, on Monday, December 3 from 10am-2pm. The event will be held in the 6th Floor Flag Room at Dallas City Hall. Hosted by Councilman…
Pretty much everyone seems to be in agreement that turning an unused former landfill in southern Dallas into something is a good idea, and that, since the city will be paying to clean up the land up anyway, and because there aren’t exactly hordes of developers itching to get get…
If you ask the people who run it, the city’s red light camera program, aka SafeLight, has been a tremendous success. They cite statistics maintained by the program showing the number of crashes at intersections has dropped by more than half, from 115 to 57 per year, and that the…
Eric has a pretty nice rundown of today’s big announcement, and I’m sure Schutze will chime in at some point, when he’s done looking into the combination polo-field/squash complex expected to be announced for southern Dallas next week. In the meantime, Sharon Grigsby, editorial page editor for the Morning News,…
The Great Trinity Forest, as Mayor Rawlings is fond of reminding people, is an underutilized jewel, a huge, relatively untrammeled swath of nature cutting through the city’s southern half. As the country’s largest urban hardwood forest in the country, it’s already world-class, to borrow a phrase. Yet Rawlings and his…
As we’ve mentioned more than once, Dallas Animal Services has been dealing with a few serious unresolved issues, some of them stretching back years: the HVAC system in the shelter doesn’t work and apparently never really has, leading to stifling temperatures in the summer months; the shelter and field divisions…
The City Council made it pretty clear last month that it’s not quite ready to take the bold step of barring drivers from throwing things at cyclists. This is in keeping with general reluctance to turn Dallas into a legitimately bike-friendly city, a reluctance that seems to stem both from…
A few weeks ago, the Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder went on a journalistic mission to a Cash Store outlet near his home in Austin. His aim, as he describes it, was to see what it was like to take out a payday loan in Texas, particularly in the wake of…
Over Thanksgiving weekend, the Morning News’ Randy Lee Loftis posed a question we’d been wondering about ourselves: Just what the hell happened to that fracking ordinance the City Council was supposed to pass, the one that would finally and completely resolve all those unanswered questions about gas drilling within the…
