Just what you wanted to kick off your Labor Day Weekend — 16 pages’ worth of budget Q’s and A’s prepared for the City Manager’s Office for the city council following the August 8 budget briefing. There are 49 questions, all told, ranging from Big Picture to footnotes that flesh…
Finally, a press release from Dallas City Hall that settles a long-simmering argument at my house: “Dallas becomes first major Texas city to add cartons to the list of acceptable recycling items.” Son. Of. A. Clearly, I was wrong. Sorry, honey. My apologies. Never shoulda been putting those rinsed-out milk…
Oh, right — Morsels is the name of the downstairs coffee shop at the city-owned Omni downtown, which opens on 11/11/11, in case you’ve forgotten. Anyway. They’re looking to hire someone willing to be “responsible for up-selling and suggestived selling of gift shop items and brewing gourmet coffee.” Suggestived? Hey,…
Looks like we’ll need to find something else to do on September 12: Judge Laurine Blake of Bonham has dismissed the lawsuit hoping to overturn the November referendum allowing for the citywide sale of beer and wine. As we’ve noted in recent days, the city had filed a motion for…
The day before the Labor Department broke the dismal news that the unemployment rate’s unchanged and consumer confidence has “dropped sharply,” students, professors and local business leaders filed into the auditorium at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business to hear from two panels of business and governmental leaders as…
Wednesday’s council briefing is shaping up to be action-packed, in the words of Ronnie Dawson: It’ll have redistricting, a look-see at Dallas Fire-Rescue’s budget (which includes that proposal to move and mothball engines) and … dunh dunh dunh … flow control, otherwise known as Marys Suhm and Nix’s controversial proposal…
Two weeks back we talked to Joey Zapata, the interim assistant city manager who deals with code compliance, about the city’s plan to “reorganize” the Dallas Animal Services staff by pink-slipping 53 employees and replacing them with what they’re calling “contract,” or temporary, workers. Yesterday, in a packed, narrow room at…
Been hearing in recent weeks that there’s a plan afoot for the beleaguered Valley View Center, at long last, prompted by the as-predicted sale of the old Macy’s to a group of local investors who had the plan commission break up the mall into more manageable puzzle pieces two months…
Today brought another round in the ongoing fight over whether Lower Greenville is a daylight retail district or an evening entertainment strip. This afternoon, the City Plan Commission denied specific-use permits to two longstanding venues: Service Bar and Yucatan. City council will have the final say when both appeal the…
In the midst of all this talk of muni pool closures and family aquatic centers we can’t afford and privatizing parks clean-up and renegade tree-trimmers (oh — and liberating Kidd Springs), I went to look for something about Dallas’s park system. A history-of, some old photos, a little more information…
Karen Blumenthal was once a Wall Street Journal bureau chief and continues to write about the money business for the newspaper; and that’s her name on the books Mr. Sam: How Sam Walton Built Walmart and Became America’s Richest Man and Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition…
A busy D.C. kinda in the DFW this first day of September. Because, recall, Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness convenes in Dallas today, first at Love Field and then at SMU, to chitchat infrastructure in advance of the jobs speech that John Boehner made the president put off by…
Rest easy, Friends of Unfair Park. ICE’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit is on the job. In the most recent sweep, they rounded up 27 dangerous immigration violators in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — criminals guilty largely of … overstaying their student visas. Not quite the stuff of Bruckheimer actioners…
It’s been five whole weeks since the City Plan Commission denied giving a specific use permit to the proposed bowling alley next to Good Records. But fear not: It will resurface in two weeks, when the city council considers its last-ditch appeal. Before then, though, the CPC will once again…
By cutting funding to libraries, eliminating raises (or just paychecks) for City Hall workers, raising taxes, closing pools, deferring maintenance on pothole-ridden streets and privatizing parks clean-up? I kid. Only, I don’t. Anyway. This just in from Dallas City Hall: Angela Hunt, a 2008 recipient of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship,…
On June 6, 2006, this item appeared in the regional roundup found in the Metro section of The Dallas Morning News:Authorities have identified a woman fatally struck by a Dallas police car Saturday night as 51-year-old Patricia Ann Brooks. Police said Officers Juan Rangel and Susan Kreun were driving south…
A couple of weeks back, the city acknowledged that a “renegade pruning operation” was responsible for hacking down trees in the Great Trinity Forest, kinda the last place you’d expect someone to go nuts with a chainsaw. Now, this: Friend of Unfair Park Bill Holston sends along an item posted…
The case involving the citywide sale of beer and wine, which voters approved in November, is set for trial September 12. Could be a short trial, could be a long trial, could be no trial at all; a hearing’s set for this Friday in front of Judge Laurine Blake of…
Over the last couple of days I’ve received a batch of unhappy missives from Jane Bryant, the owner of 600 Elsbeth near the Bishop Arts District — a property that’s been the subject of years’ worth of litigation. Bryant’s particularly unhappy with my characterization of the property on Friday –…
Dallas Complete Streets Competition from Andrew Goodwin Brown on Vimeo.Absolutely, says Dallas filmmaker Andrew Goodwin Brown in the short you see above. It’s his entry in the 2011 Dallas Great Streets Visual Essay Contest, which City Hall sponsored in order to find out “what people like about streets in Dallas…
Damn it. We got so caught up in the state Supremes’ pole tax ruling at the end of last week we missed the far bigger one staring at us from the top of Friday’s Opinions on Orders page: City of Dallas v. Keneth E. Albert et al., otherwise known as…
After this, I’ll let Pete handle whatever becomes of the Dallas Backyard Music Festival — since, ya know, it’s a music festival? But we begin on Unfair Park for a couple of reasons: It’s on the Park and Rec board’s agenda for its Thursday meeting, which is where I was…
