On Friday afternoon, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings withdrew his request for a temporary restraining order barring the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System from making certain payments. Rawlings made it quite clear, however, that he has no plans to end his lawsuit against the system’s Deferred Retirement Option Program. When it was open…
Before the 85th Texas Legislative Session formally opened on Tuesday, state lawmakers had already filed a handful of bills that would curb or strike down the law enforcement practice known as civil forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize assets from those suspected, not charged or convicted, of involvement…
Texas’ tourism industry is placing itself on the front lines of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s effort to regulate where people use the restroom. Fearing a similar backlash to those which have happened in Indiana and North Carolina, convention and tourism wranglers from across the state Wednesday joined together at…
Candace Evans, the Candy behind the popular Dallas real estate blog CandysDirt.com, is running against Lee Kleinman for the District 11 City Council seat Kleinman’s held for the last four years. Evans says that while Kleinman is a good neighbor and a good guy, she feels like their North Dallas…
Yesterday, Dallas Animal Services officials told the City Council there was progress in the effort to deal with the estimated 8,000 loose dogs roaming South Dallas. Still, Dallas Police Department Major Barbara Hobbs said Monday, the department needs more time to transition from enforcement to education with Dallas residents. Since Hobbs…
Texans love their sports. Football is the second most cherished religion in Texas, according to Texas Monthly, with baseball and basketball following close behind. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on sports every year, building stadiums, buying team memorabilia and watching playoff games. But imagine if the National Football…
T.C. Broadnax is starting to get a handle on what he calls the challenge ahead. On Thursday, a little less than a month before he takes over the Dallas city manager’s office from A.C. Gonzalez, the Tacoma city manager sat down with the Dallas Observer for a discussion about his approach…
The measure members of the Texas anti-abortion lobby are calling “the most important pro-life bill of the session” is officially on the books ahead of the 2017 Texas Legislative session. Late last week, state Representative Stephanie Klick and state Senator Charles Perry officially filed the Texas Right to Life-designed ban…
As I see it, I don’t just have a tendency to be paranoid. It’s my job — a nasty one sometimes, but somebody’s got to do it. I am still sort of obsessed with a completely inscrutable move last week by a majority of the City Council, pushed by the…
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is going to do this, apparently. Patrick formally announced Wednesday his plans to shepherd a so-called bathroom bill through the Texas legislature. If passed the bill would require visitors and workers at Texas’ public schools, government buildings and public universities to use the restroom consistent with the…
I don’t believe it. This story the mayor and his posse on the council handed out yesterday at a city council briefing about why they won’t support a city bond campaign in May doesn’t even begin to add up. There’s another agenda in this agenda somewhere. The nice thing about…
A controversial Texas mandate that some fetal tissue be buried or cremated after medical procedures remains on hold, at least for another three weeks. After a testy two-day hearing in Austin, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks said late Wednesday afternoon that he would not issue his final ruling on the…
In the end, it seems that the only concrete solution that will come out of Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings’ Commission on Homelessness is another committee. Acting Tuesday afternoon on the commission’s final recommendations, the Dallas City Council’s Housing Committee agreed that the best way to pursue the commissions recommendations is forming…
In Dallas, gentrification has always arrived riding a bulldozer. Poor people get kicked out of their homes and their communities are scraped off the face of the earth. Nobody even asks where they went. But a new idea is afoot in West Dallas, the city’s latest gentrification battleground. In this…
Oh, thank goodness. It looks like we won’t have take Fair Park, our neglected and benighted 277-acre exposition park at the center of our city, and marry her off to the Park Cities after all. As The Dallas Morning News reported last week, national corporate interests, some with international experience managing public attractions…
Dallas is a burger, young people as the meat and fixings and rich whites and poor blacks as the buns.
If the relationship between Dallas City Hall and HUD isn’t against the law, it ought to be.
Thursday afternoon, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System voted to allow members of the fund’s controversial Deferred Retirement Option Program to make limited, monthly withdrawals from their accounts. Thus ended a moratorium on withdrawals that began earlier this month. Members with DROP accounts will still not be allowed to make…
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller will cap off an eventful 2016 with a trip to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Miller will interview with White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Trump strategist Steve Bannon in hopes of becoming the secretary of agriculture, according to a statement released by…
Just before the holiday, Dallas City Hall learned it is being accused and maybe criminally investigated in federal housing matters.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is not done with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Late Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks ruled that the organization’s lawsuit against Abbott, filed last December after the governor had the FFRF’s secular nativity removed from the capitol, can proceed to trial. In his ruling, Sparks said…
Dallas author Kurt Eichenwald says Trump supporters sent him an image on Twitter that caused an epileptic seizure.
