The fun thing about being a reporter, the payoff, is getting to talk to interesting people. Often I hang up after an interview and think, “I wish I could call that person back some day and just get him or her to ramble on about whatever. I bet it would…
Late last week, when Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax released his first proposed budget since the city hired him earlier this year, one of the things that stood out immediately was the way he managed to balance his budget without slashing services. Broadnax did this by targeting money used to…
Pearlie Mae Brown, 80, still doesn’t have her house fixed. An engaging smile breaks across her face, then disappears, subsumed by worry. Rocking on the front porch of her small beige cottage on Crossman Avenue in West Dallas, she seems too tiny, too delicate to be the fulcrum in a…
Dallas City Manger T.C. Broadnax released his first budget late Friday afternoon. It makes a lot of promises — increased funding for Dallas’ police and fire pension system, cash for fixing some of the city’s beleaguered streetlights and money for public safety improvements among them — with no accompanying increase…
Executives from 10 of the United States’ biggest companies joined growing opposition to Texas’ pending bathroom bill Thursday. Prominent North Texas industry heads have signed a letter urging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to drop his support for the bill, which would require public school students to use the bathroom corresponding…
The battle over the potential toll road between the Trinity River levees, Dallas municipal politics’ forever war, is finally winding down. On Wednesday, during a Dallas City Council briefing, a clear majority of the council members, including Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, a longtime supporter of the road, indicated that they…
There’s a happy ending. But we don’t start out there. First we have to get through an explicit and disturbing account of Dallas’ racial past and present, published this week as part of an extraordinary document (copy below) calling for radical change in the way the city views Fair Park…
Last year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it’s targeting the seat of U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Dallas, in Texas Congressional District 32. Sessions has drawn two competitive Democratic challengers, former Hillary Clinton adviser Ed Meier and civil rights attorney and former NFL linebacker Colin Allred. Last week, the Observer…
On Tuesday, Mike Rawlings finally got a meeting with Gov. Greg Abbott. After the meeting, Dallas’ mayor said that are many areas in which he disagrees with the governor, but he was encouraged by the focus Abbott put on poverty in southern Dallas and reforming the state’s public education system…
Two upcoming City Council votes, both technical and arcane on the surface, will go to the heart of the city. The moment draws nigh. With two simple votes Aug. 9, the Dallas City Council may leap across an immense chasm in time and usher in a new era. Or not…
In multiple court hearings last May, Assistant City Attorney Melissa Miles complained that the city just couldn’t quite trust West Dallas landlord Khraish Khraish, who was selling many of his rental houses to his tenants. The city didn’t know if the deeds were kosher. The city was afraid he might…
After nearly a week of criticism from Boy Scouts, their parents and the public, Michael Surbaugh, chief Scout executive of Boy Scouts of America, apologized Thursday for a speech President Donald Trump gave at the group’s National Jamboree on Monday night. The president’s speech lambasted the press, rehashed his Electoral College victory…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wants the City Council to hurry up — hurry up! — and sign a pile of documents creating some kind of a private thing to control the new park we want to build on the Trinity River downtown. Former City Council member Angela Hunt has her…
On Tuesday night, one week into Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s first called special session of the 85th Texas Legislature, the Texas Senate signed off on the term’s most controversial bill. After nearly eight hours of debate, 20 Republicans and one Democrat voted to require Texas children attending public schools to use bathrooms…
Sometimes we have to go back to the old-fashioned used-car lots that used to line Ross Avenue if we want to know how to handle things. You don’t sign a check to buy a car if the guy won’t let you drive it around the block first. Walk away. You…
Yesterday. I am staring at a Dallas Morning News online story telling me that the Texas Association of Business would start running ads on Texas radio stations today warning that, if the special session of the Texas Legislature passes a bathroom bill, it could cost Texas the NFL draft. I…
Forget all the small-bore stuff like the Trinity toll road, Fair Park and so on. It’s more and more clear that we are at a major crossroads in the city, a place calling for real regime change. Total. In what we in the print business call a full-page “bleed” —…
Over the next couple of days, the special session of the 85th Texas Legislature will get rolling. On Friday, Texas Senate committees will hear testimony on the state’s two proposed “bathroom bills,” which would regulate which restrooms Texans are allowed to use, and several anti-abortion bills. On Saturday, the upper…
I’m a Democrat. I’m anti-Trump. The only things more depressing to me than President Donald Trump are Democrats. If it’s still like this in 2018, I may have to vote for the vegan, even though I have never really been totally sure what that is. Maybe for a change and…
Every once in a while, somebody says something so wholly at odds with evident truth, so totally contrary to known facts, so diametrically opposed to obvious reality that we just have to stop and do big, loud forehead slaps on ourselves. Last week, Dallas City Secretary Rosa Rios, bristling at…
Construction crews were putting finishing touches on the new Uplift Pinnacle Secondary school at Camp Wisdom Road and Interstate 35E when I toured it last week with architect Brian L. Nelson of HKS, school director Rachel Harris and Uplift chief development officer Deborah Bigham. I tried to imagine the throngs…
On Thursday night, the George W. Bush Presidential library hosted a throwback to a kinder, gentler, political universe, where two ex-presidents from opposing parties got along like old friends. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton spoke to the graduating class of the Presidential Leadership Scholars program about the need for bipartisanship,…
