When Dallas City Council members grilled city staff during a committee hearing Monday about a lack of progress on affordable housing issues, staff forgot to mention the team of feds breathing down their necks. They could have told the council: “We’ll know more after we figure out who’s going to the pen.”…
Five-and-a-half months ago the Dallas City Council finally, after years of trying, passed cite-and-release for low-level marijuana possession and set a start date for the program of Oct. 1. But on Sunday, anyone stopped for possessing less than four ounces of pot are still subject to arrest. What happened? The…
Obviously we all get why Dallas and other cities are genuflecting before the great god Amazon, devourer of all retail. Every city hopes devoutly that Amazon will deign to make it the home of its second headquarters, which, if you don’t mind my pointing out, is an oxymoron. Companies are…
Call this a pet peeve if you must, but it’s way bigger than a peeve to me. You cannot walk your dog off the leash in Dallas. In Dallas, you cannot allow your dog out into your unfenced front yard off the leash. And in Dallas and all of the…
This weekend, I attended a memorial service, after which I fell into conversation with a well-known Dallas landscape architect and planner, commiserating ruefully about the effect Texans like U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert have on the rest of the state. We agreed that every time Gohmert shoots from the hip, a…
There ought to be a way to solve the problem of the Robert E. Lee statue. Since the big, bronze two-horse statue of the Confederate general and a soldier was yanked from a Dallas park a week and a half ago, the city has been fussing about what to do…
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the rest of the team each took a knee before the national anthem at Monday night’s game against the Arizona Cardinals. The demonstration, after which the team stood and linked arms during the anthem, was a show of solidarity in the face of comments made…
Post-Harvey, Houston already wants to carry out a truth and reconciliation process about flood safety. The lesson from Harvey was clear: No matter what the official public line may have been on flood safety before Harvey, Houston was not safe. Dallas is in the same boat, but our boat may…
After a Friday afternoon session lasted more than three hours, the city of Dallas’ Confederate Monuments Task Force is done. The task force, convened by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and made up of nominees named by each member of the City Council, recommended the city remove the Confederate War memorial…
Now that the Robert E. Lee statue is gone, his formerly eponymous park in Oak Lawn is getting a new name. The city of Dallas Parks Board voted unanimously Friday morning to give Lee Park a new placeholder name, returning the park to its original name, Oak Lawn Park, until…
Hate to tell you — and I know this will make people mad on both sides, and I’m really only talking about Dallas — but this debate we’ve been having about the Confederate statues is absolutely the best thing we’ve done in Dallas in the 100 or so years I…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings announced Wednesday the closure of the emergency mega-shelter for people displaced by Hurricane Harvey. The shelter occupied the bottom floor of the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center’s parking structure for the better part of a month. There simply aren’t enough evacuees left — less than 300 at…
Two huge forces are bearing down on Dallas right now — climate change and Amazon — and either one could be the boost the city needs to leap ahead. Or land in the ditch. See what Hurricane Harvey did to Houston, Irma to Florida. People can nibble around the edges…
Dallas City Council member Dwaine Caraway loves the city’s Youth Commission. It comes up whenever he talks about the reasons he serves on the council. The commission comprises council-appointed high school students from around the city who aspire to public service, and Caraway says it’s essential to fostering southern Dallas’…
Just after the Dallas City Council voted Sept. 6 to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park, a crane and work crew appeared to take it down. Municipal government is not known for its speed, and it is constrained by rules to make spending slow and…
Here’s a little number the Dallas mayor and the City Council won’t want you to see. During the State Fair of Texas’ 24-day run this year, it will suck an average of 10 percent of the Dallas police force out of the rest of the city. At a time when…
After a week-long melodrama of false starts, pratfalls and tragedy, the city finally succeeded Thursday night in evicting Confederate General Robert E. Lee from his place of prominence atop a hill over Turtle Creek two miles north of City Hall. Spurred by the threat of an armed rally in defense…
All this online nattering about how much money the Dallas mayor and City Council are wasting on taking down the Robert E. Lee memorial is just insipid. True, the takedown, estimated to cost about $500,000, is taking too long. But the delays have been unavoidable, and the penny-pinching argument is…
The city’s star-crossed efforts to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee took a tragic turn Sunday night when a crane on its way from Houston was struck by an 18-wheeler, killing the driver of the truck and badly damaging the crane. Before the accident a small crowd…
Hiram Patterson, whose name is on the federal complaint that stopped the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas Wednesday, is a Confederate history buff who has very little idea what his own complaint is about. In fact, at the end of the day Wednesday, even after a…
They began gathering well before noon Wednesday, greeted by police and gathered around barricades surrounding Lee Park. They wanted action, either to see the statue of Robert E. Lee taken down after a Dallas City Council vote that seemed preordained, or to see it saved at the last minute. Around…
After an hour spent listening to the public and another hour stating their own positions, the Dallas City Council voted 13-1 today to pull down an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in an upscale neighborhood near downtown. Within hours of the vote a crane appeared at the…
