Two recent city documents to call to your attention: 1) showing that we have spent almost $610 million so far on the Trinity River project, which is mainly unbuilt, and 2) showing that we need to spend $121 million, which we supposedly don’t have, just to stop our terrible street…
The so-called bike share program at Fair Park may be a scarcely utilized disaster. That doesn’t mean that a well-considered bike-share system, with stations placed strategically at points throughout the central city so riders can travel from where they are to a place they might want to go (rather than…
One of the more amusing vagaries of the theater inspired by campaign finance laws since the Citizens United case opened the sluices for corporate giving is the little dance candidates must do with their Super PACs. Formal campaigns can’t officially coordinate with Super PACs, but, because Super PACs can accept…
If you didn’t already know the attitude of the overflow throng that came to the Sheraton downtown to hear Bernie Sanders, it was absolutely clear less than five minutes into the Vermont senator’s speech. “Bullshit,” came a shout from the crowd as Sanders described Texas all-Republican state government. This was…
Big picture, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last month in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project shouldn’t change much. In endorsing disparate impact theory — the notion in civil rights law that a policy can be found illegally discriminatory through a statistical analysis of its effects…
Philip Kingston says that despite what you may have heard, he really does care about his fellow city employees. So much so, in fact, that he’s been crowd-sourcing — with the help of white board put up at City Hall — a list of things city of Dallas workers want from…
Well, it turns out that the city councilman who the general public has known as Rick Callahan since he was elected to represent District 5 in 2013 actually prefers to be called Rickey Callahan. This is incredibly awkward. The councilman recently changed his official City Council name—which appears on the…
Attention homosexuals, sodomites and godless cowards who, through misplaced compassion or cowed silence, abet the gay destruction of the American way of life. Christians are sick and tired of being bullied, and they’re not going to take it anymore. No doubt you’ve heard this rhetoric before. Lord knows there’s been…
“Revered” is a bad word, I know, for Dallas playwright, social activist and teacher John Fullinwider, because it means old. But, look, he is old. And he is revered. He had a piece on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News yesterday suggesting a much better approach to the…
In November 2014 Mayor Mike Rawlings braved a breath-catching chill and the self-defeating inadequacy of the notion that two isolated docking station could constitute a functioning system and enthusiastically kicked off a bike-sharing program at Fair Park. Rawlings gleefully hopped on one of the $8,000 bikes (the city paid $125,000…
Five months ago I told you about David Jensen, a semi-retired art-handler and antiques collector who lives in a warehouse in West Dallas. He’s right in the path of major real estate developments that are changing that realm from a disused industrial wasteland to an urban oasis. He moved there…
Sometimes, you don’t realize what you had until it’s gone. Amid what’s been a downright depressing stretch for newly minted Texas Governor Greg Abbott — on gay marriage, guns, military exercises, etc — our former governor, the immaculately bespectacled Rick Perry, has gone out and started sounding like a centrist,…
Here’s a mental exercise: Think of the rain that falls on your head as if it were continuing to fall through the soil beneath your feet. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Rain falls fast through the air, hits the earth, then falls slowly through the soil until it reaches…
On the one hand, it might be comforting to know that the new, huge, taxpayer-funded but privately operated detention camp in South Texas for immigrant women and children is providing its young inmates with vaccinations. On the other hand, one should remember that vaccines, while life-saving, are not candy but…
The Dallas Morning News had an editorial this week about how City Council members need to be more polite, under the headline, “Yelling and Hurling Insults Is No Way To Lead.” Wrong. Sure it is. Depending on what you’re leading. If you’re leading the Sunday school class out onto the lawn…
The $125,000 bike-share program at Fair Park — those two forlorn rental kiosks that Mayor Mike Rawlings tried so ardently last November to make seem like a good idea — is, for all practical purposes, a city project. Rawlings, along with various members of city staff, pushed it as a way…
Try to imagine the ravaged heart of Patricia Allen, whose three children drowned last month in an Irving apartment pool so murky that emergency crews couldn’t tell how many kids were even in the pool. These were not toddlers. Treshawn Smith was 9. His brother Anthony was 11. They lingered…
Listen. We could sit here and go on and on all day long about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his basically insane exhortation to county clerks not to issue marriage license applications to gay people. But somehow talking too much about people like Paxton just makes us feel sort…
Sunday, ahead of what should be the first full day of Texas County Clerks signing marriage licenses for same-sex couples, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gave cover to those officials whose personal religious dogma is more important to them than following the U.S. Constitution following Friday’s Supreme Court ruling legalizing…
He didn’t just get sick of it and quit. There was calculation. Dallas School Superintendent Mike Miles, who came here three years ago with a mandate to reform the school system, quit yesterday because the board had flipped and the mandate was gone. In effect the school board gave up…
Dwaine Caraway’s “big announcement” Tuesday, to borrow a phrase from Dennis Green, was what we thought it was. Caraway is going to run for Dallas County commissioner Place 3. You know, the one that’s been held by John Wiley Price since 1985. Before we even get to Price, let’s talk…
In case you missed it — something that’s entirely possible given the average Dallas resident’s level of municipal engagement — Dwaine Caraway is no longer on the City Council. It’s a shame, too. Caraway, whether he was railing against plastic bags, imitating his eminently imitable colleague Vonciel Jones Hill or…
