Imagine it this way. You own a vacant building. A guy wants to rent it for a business. You rent it to him for a percentage of his business revenue. But you never ask to see his business’ books, cash register tapes, anything. You never even stroll by to see…
Talk about a really bad scene. Senior Corporal Ron Iscaro has been called to the podium to address the members of the Dallas Citizens Police Review Board. They are debating a resolution on pay for police officers and firemen injured in the line of duty. He’s been up there 10…
Two weeks ago the mayor and the city council held a news conference slapping themselves on the back for a new law to fight apartment crime. They passed an ordinance putting more of the responsibility for crime-fighting on the backs of apartment owners. I wonder if it occurred to the…
Screenplay: Toiling for years deep in his political laboratory, Dr. Lipscombstein’s dream has been to bring his revenge to life. An experiment with an ethics complaint against Mayor Laura Miller was a dismal failure. But now, with lightning crackling above his mountain lair, former city Councilman Al Lipscomb finally sees…
You’re a photo buff. You like to walk around your neighborhood playing with your new digital camera. Some bubba in coveralls with a handgun in his pocket runs out of his house yelling at you that you “could get your ass shot” if you take any more pictures. So you…
OK, time out, is it just me? Or is anybody else getting tired of the Scrubbing Bubbles routine from the mayor? Mayor Miller, here’s a page from your organizer: Get rid of roosters. Check. Pass a law against smoking. Check. Pass a law against people taking shopping carts home with…
We don’t want to build a concentration camp. Right? Not even for ugly, smelly people. We wouldn’t want to live in a city with a sign on the gate that says “Reinlichkeit macht frei” (Cleanliness makes you free). In order to keep our heads on straight, let’s just be frank…
Dave Capps is the van rental guy campaigning against a $400 million tax subsidy for a new Dallas Cowboys football stadium. I’m sitting in his office at the van place. He’s been talking reasonably and seriously about alternative financing schemes for football stadiums. But, you know, reasonable and serious have…
Oh, wow. How very Dallas. A certain set of downtown leaders can’t get exactly what they want on the Trinity River project or on downtown development schemes, so now they want to set up their own private government. The same set of moguls who brought us that stupid Palladium project…
Once a Yankee, always a Yankee. Every once in a while, I get a certain error message in the eyes of native Dallasites too polite to tell me. “ERROR…ERROR…FATAL YANKEE-THINKING ERROR.” I got that look a lot last week when I was going to lunch with people, calling them up…
So I’m plugging away one day last week, and a helpful e-mail pops in from the city telling me Dallas Mayor Laura Miller will be available to the media at 4:15 p.m. in the little horseshoe off Independence Avenue just inside the Rayburn Office Building in Washington, D.C. I do…
Nobody at the top gets fake drugs yet. You can tell by the way they keep trying to shuffle the deck chairs. Take the attempts by the interim Dallas police chief to reorganize his command staff: He doesn’t get that the only “reorganization” good enough for the city’s fake-drugs scandal…
OK, here’s the deal on 2004. I have a great idea for what we could do with the Trinity River. I should say, I know of a great idea. Like so many ideas, it’s not really mine. But it’s wonderful, and it could happen. It’s a good project. Dallas does…
You probably wouldn’t understand the psychology of a reporter. Well, maybe if you think of a fisherman. His fish story is better if the line snapped the first time, then he hooked himself in the seat of his pants, then he fell out of the boat, cut his finger, there…
So the Dallas City Council has spoken, and we are not going to devote our money or our energy to any kind of natural treatment of the river that runs through us. Instead, according to the council’s recent unanimous vote on the multibillion-dollar Trinity River project, we will build a…
The Dallas fake-drug “investigation” announced with fanfare last week by the city attorney is a heavily controlled inside job dominated by city staff that will produce none of the fundamental justice people are looking for. Mexican-Americans wronged in fake drugs aren’t looking for an outcome in which somebody calls for…
It’s good the narcotics detective in the fake-drugs case got off, and not because it meant he was pure as the driven snow (or chalk dust, as the case may have been). The danger from the beginning was this: The jury would convict this cop at the bottom of the…
How cool would it be to have a beautiful urban lake downtown, surrounded by pocket parks and amphitheaters, where a person could carry a bag lunch on a cool day and maybe even rent a canoe? That’s what we voted for in 1998 when we narrowly approved the Trinity River…
The Dallas Independent School District churns out reams of documents telling teachers what to teach, how to teach it and when. The problem is that the documents are self-contradictory, sloppily written and full of enough nitwit gobbledygook to put the average person in the nuthouse after two days on the…
I’m sitting here at City Hall, listening and chewing my ball point pen in half while the city council gets briefed on what the new downtown lake will look like when they actually build it. Steam is coming out of my ears. Look, I don’t have an MBA from the…
Yuck. There’s stuff I just don’t want to know about people. When I served on the editorial board of a no-longer-extant major metropolitan daily newspaper in Dallas, I learned that certain people like to confess very personal things about themselves. On occasion a visitor who had come to talk to…
OK, now I don’t want you to panic or anything. I’ve been sitting around City Hall listening to some of those boring old nuts-and-bolts discussions they sometimes have about money–the sessions that never get on television. And, yes, there does appear to be a bit of an issue. But here’s…
