There are two scary things about the “strong mayor” proposal probably slated for a referendum in Dallas next May: It seems to have roots in affluent venues in the Park Cities and North Dallas. And it would absolutely gut the Dallas City Council. But does being scary make it bad?…
“What am I, the Flying Dutchman?” I’m sitting on this DART train wondering. Outside I see a flat rolling moonscape, crumbling cinder-block walls, ranks of dusty 18-wheelers, an endless procession of small tumble-down frame houses. The back yard of Dallas. Add some minarets, I could be in Fallujah. And me,…
This is such a cover-your-ass world. Everybody has an excuse. Nothin’ ain’t nobody’s fault, never. The only antidote to c.y.a. is the phrase c.y.a. artists fear most–“on your watch.” As in, “It doesn’t matter how many layers of deniability you wrap around your big rear end. If it happened on…
I want to tell you, this town is a gypsy fortuneteller’s paradise. Give me a turban and a blue bathrobe, and I could make a million bucks here as “The Great Schutzkin.” It’s sooo easy. Two weeks ago I put the envelope to my forehead, concentrated real, real hard, and…
Remind me what the 911 emergency call system is for. Emergencies, right? For example, you walk out to the parking lot, and your car has been stolen. So you call 911. They get right on it. That’s the theory. Now let’s talk about the fact. A guy I work with…
I have a crystal ball. I’m going to predict the future. In detail. And you watch: I’m going to be right. In detail. A little swami music, please. A week from now, a consulting firm called McKinsey & Company will present the Dallas City Council with a report on what…
This is an open letter to U.S. Senators James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, John McCain of Arizona, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, and to U.S. Representative Don Young of Alaska and anyone else in Congress with an interest in the stalled surface transportation bill:…
If you read the fake-drug report, you’ll get the picture. The fact that nobody’s in charge and nobody’s accountable at City Hall doesn’t stop at City Hall. It trickles down. It’s a culture. Terence Hart and Lena Levario, the lawyers who conducted the investigation for the city and wrote the…
Come with me on a journey deep into the Dumpster of nitty-gritty gut-level local politics, down where the money meets the road and virtue is the lesser of two evils. Don’t forget your boots and a clothespin for your nose. A month ago, Mayor Laura Miller accused District 8 Councilman…
You can’t tell people from other places about Dallas–even when they move here. It’s too wacked. Start trying to explain to them how we didn’t have the ’60s: All of a sudden they have to make a cell call. The best we can do is live with it. But every…
Try this one on for size. What if Dallas is so screwed up that the only way to get it going right is radical surgery? What if we went back to something like the old business-guy committees that used to run everything before the yankee federal courts stuck their noses…
Maybe this is the way to put it, in order to get anybody’s attention in this town. Maybe I should forget about the fact that we have a deeply corrupted, dangerously out-of-control police department and just talk about the money. I pay about $1,000 a year in city of Dallas…
Jim Bryant is 75 years old, walks with a cane, sometimes suffers a dry throat from medication. He gets tired. But Jim Bryant is stubborn about principle. Today he has taken his cane in hand and come downtown to City Hall yet again to continue his quarter-century-long battle with the…
Wouldn’t you know. All the time I criticize the Dallas City Council and say they’ve screwed up, and they get mad at me because they think they’re doing such a damn stellar job. So last week I walk out of a city council session thinking for once they really did…
Wow. Does anybody at Dallas City Hall ever look out back? There are so many homeless people picnicking, camping and taking leaks back there, it looks like the building was designed by I.M. Pee, not I.M. Pei. All of the homeless people who used to employ the public library and…
At the end of July, flooding in this part of Texas killed four people and destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses. Joe Tillotson is mayor of Lancaster, once a countrified farming community in Southern Dallas County, now a suburban boomtown. He was quick to place blame where he believed it…
A couple of years ago the New York Daily News published a powerful editorial about the New York City public school system. The paper said the biggest thing the city’s huge staff of school administrators needed was more middle-class parents to tell them what to do. “They need squeaky-wheel parents…
You. You better step over here and get a program. Once the city council gets back from summer vacation and the game starts up again, you’re never going to keep track without one. Major play ahead. Mayor Laura Miller and the old downtown business boys have come to a deal…
Everybody wants the new Dallas police chief to fix everything. Obviously. Sure. When he’s done with that, I wish he’d come over to my house and fix my computer. The problem is fix what? Fix it how? That’s where we get into trouble. Some of these problems are older than…
All the time, I rag on people, I criticize, I say negative stuff. For a change, I want to do something positive. Problem with that: my skill set. After so long as a reporter, what else am I qualified to do? Great idea: debt collector. A lot of it’s the…
So here’s what I’m wondering. Guy calls up the Dallas Area Rapid Transit agency and tells them one of their tow-truck drivers just went bananas and pulled a gun on him in traffic. What does DART do? They call in their guy, right? Grill him. Then they call the citizen…
I’m all for Wizard of Oz voyages of self-discovery. I’m just not sure it’s fair to do them when you’re the mayor. But say this for Dallas Mayor Laura Miller. In recent weeks she has been candid about her change of heart since getting elected to her first full term…
