Help me with my radar. Maybe I look at City Hall and see problems where none exist. Now see how you’d feel. Imagine you are trying to sell a piece of business real estate. You’ve got a real estate broker representing you, and there is an interested buyer at your…
So you think the swimming pool thing is a done deal? Laura Miller raised the cash? The mayor backed down? The kids get to swim? Yeah. Maybe. If you saw what I saw last week, you wouldn’t be taking anything to the bank just yet. You know the background here…
Get this. A guy involved in city council politics in suburban Southlake, where U.S. District Judge Joe Kendall’s wife is on the city council, calls the Southlake city secretary and asks for Kendall’s wife’s home address. The next thing the guy knows, he’s in downtown Dallas getting the Miranda warning…
Al Lipscomb did the crime. He didn’t have to do the time. Now let’s see if he pays his dime. The sentence U.S. District Judge Joe Kendall gave former Dallas City Council member Al Lipscomb last week — showing far more mercy than Kendall was in any way required by…
If you want to know what’s wrong with the soul of this city, come here and walk with me for half an hour. Our city government system, designed to be “above politics,” puts people in power who are beneath politics, people who are self-seeking chiselers and social climbers, born without…
Some weeks after former city Councilman Al Lipscomb was convicted of bribery in federal court, a local wag said to me, “They railroaded a guilty man!” And for many people, there’s the rub. It’s not a question of whether he took the bribes but more an issue of whether the…
OK, confess. You voted for the river thing. You saw the computer graphics on TV with the sailboats on a lake in downtown Dallas. I understand. And I know you also have a life. You have to earn a living and all that stuff. You’re not hugely fascinated by hydrology,…
For the last five years, Dallas’ downtown business establishment and mayor have staked their prestige on a massive U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to rebuild the Trinity River around the city center. Now that project may crash into the wall of a national scandal. The Secretary of Defense has…
The $7,700 bribe paid to former Councilman Al Lipscomb wasn’t about traffic cops hassling people at a bar, the way the city council and police chief make it sound. The man who paid Lipscomb was in trouble because his employees kept getting arrested for selling cocaine. Pretty big difference. Hey…
The Trinity River Plan is starting to take on an almost zany quality, like a Marx Brothers movie. The city staff has told at least one council member that they can’t be accused of going back on the original plans for the $2 billion river project because there are none…
After three years of hype about how the Dallas Independent School District was finally going to teach kids to read, the jury is now in. It’s thumbs-down. According to a recently released evaluation of the “Dallas Reading Plan,” it’s a total bust. Kids in grades one through three have barely…
If you listen to what people in Dallas are saying on talk radio and in line at the grocery store, you can’t help hearing a general undertone of disgust and cynicism. Something in last month’s 65-count federal bribery conviction of city councilman Al Lipscomb seems to have rubbed the city…
The lesson that should have come out of the Al Lipscomb trial in Amarillo — the unmistakable lesson for the jury — is that Dallas is a profoundly corrupt city. But that lesson never made the daily newspaper here, because the daily newspaper is part of the corruption. Lipscomb, our…
AMARILLO — Last week when Dallas City Councilman Al Lipscomb told his lawyers he wasn’t going to plead guilty to corruption charges and would face trial here on a change of venue instead, the lawyers more or less panicked. Walk around downtown Amarillo for a couple of hours, and you…
When people get mad at the Dallas school board, they often talk about how dumb the members are. But the dumbest thing Dallas school boards have ever done over the years is accept the advice of their own well-educated, high-dollar, ought-to-know-better lawyers. The absolutely most egregious example of all is…
Either somebody finds a way to turn down the heat at Dallas police headquarters, or the family feud between the new chief and the old one goes nuclear. And won’t that be a pretty sight? Just as Dallas gets ready to do its fashion-model runway walk in the 2012 Olympics…
For the last year, the Park Cities YMCA, which lies at the social heart of ultra-competitive, affluent, sports- and youth-minded Highland Park and University Park, has been engaged in a bitter battle for its soul. That’s a lot of battling over what may turn out to have been a small…
Here’s a difficult public relations puzzle: Let’s say you are the downtown Dallas business establishment, and you are very unhappy about the new ethics code under consideration by the city council. Why are you unhappy? Because you already control the city council through juice. Cash. The money. At least eight…
The so-called “fraud audit” of the Dallas Public Schools is headed straight to hell. It will never produce significant results or catch any big fish. So far the feds have caught minimum-wage janitors fudging on their overtime, roofing supervisors taking kickbacks, and a former superintendent stealing money to buy bad…
In the three months Waldemar Rojas has been superintendent of schools in Dallas, two things have become plain: The only goal he cares about is delivering a fat contract to Edison Schools, Inc., and he’ll resort to any level of political thuggery to make the Edison deal happen no matter…
Ben Click, our recently departed police chief, had it down: If you want to make it as chief in Dallas, just go to all of the neighborhood meetings, nod with astonishment and concern every time somebody tells you the amazing news about his garage being burglarized, and stay far away…
Here is the quiz: A city employee sees something crooked going on. He reports it. His claims are investigated and found to be completely true. What does it mean — what do you suppose is going on — if the reaction of the Dallas City Council is to defend vigorously…
