Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings announced Wednesday the closure of the emergency mega-shelter for people displaced by Hurricane Harvey. The shelter occupied the bottom floor of the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center’s parking structure for the better part of a month. There simply aren’t enough evacuees left — less than 300 at…
Two huge forces are bearing down on Dallas right now — climate change and Amazon — and either one could be the boost the city needs to leap ahead. Or land in the ditch. See what Hurricane Harvey did to Houston, Irma to Florida. People can nibble around the edges…
Dallas City Council member Dwaine Caraway loves the city’s Youth Commission. It comes up whenever he talks about the reasons he serves on the council. The commission comprises council-appointed high school students from around the city who aspire to public service, and Caraway says it’s essential to fostering southern Dallas’…
Just after the Dallas City Council voted Sept. 6 to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park, a crane and work crew appeared to take it down. Municipal government is not known for its speed, and it is constrained by rules to make spending slow and…
Here’s a little number the Dallas mayor and the City Council won’t want you to see. During the State Fair of Texas’ 24-day run this year, it will suck an average of 10 percent of the Dallas police force out of the rest of the city. At a time when…
After a week-long melodrama of false starts, pratfalls and tragedy, the city finally succeeded Thursday night in evicting Confederate General Robert E. Lee from his place of prominence atop a hill over Turtle Creek two miles north of City Hall. Spurred by the threat of an armed rally in defense…
All this online nattering about how much money the Dallas mayor and City Council are wasting on taking down the Robert E. Lee memorial is just insipid. True, the takedown, estimated to cost about $500,000, is taking too long. But the delays have been unavoidable, and the penny-pinching argument is…
The city’s star-crossed efforts to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee took a tragic turn Sunday night when a crane on its way from Houston was struck by an 18-wheeler, killing the driver of the truck and badly damaging the crane. Before the accident a small crowd…
Hiram Patterson, whose name is on the federal complaint that stopped the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas Wednesday, is a Confederate history buff who has very little idea what his own complaint is about. In fact, at the end of the day Wednesday, even after a…
They began gathering well before noon Wednesday, greeted by police and gathered around barricades surrounding Lee Park. They wanted action, either to see the statue of Robert E. Lee taken down after a Dallas City Council vote that seemed preordained, or to see it saved at the last minute. Around…
After an hour spent listening to the public and another hour stating their own positions, the Dallas City Council voted 13-1 today to pull down an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in an upscale neighborhood near downtown. Within hours of the vote a crane appeared at the…
On Tuesday, U. Renee Hall officially took over as Dallas’ chief of police in an atypical way. Traditionally, Dallas’ chiefs have been sworn in on their first day in a public ceremony. Thanks to Hall’s background, she was unable to do so. Officers coming to Texas from outside the state…
Today Dallas comes to a wonderful and terrible crossroad. All indications are that the City Council will vote, probably 14-1, to pull down the city’s many Confederate monuments to white racial privilege. If we have only one council member still in favor of white racial privilege, that will be just…
Major portions of Senate Bill 4, Texas’ just-passed “sanctuary cities” bill, will not immediately become law after U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia blocked significant portions of it from taking effect. Garcia’s ruling, handed down late Wednesday, stops a portion of the law the would require all local law enforcement agencies to comply…
This week, largely ignored in the face of Hurricane Harvey, one of Dallas municipal politics’ biggest worms turned again when Mayor Mike Rawlings announcing a new date for the vote on the immediate removal of Lee Park’s Robert E. Lee statue. The City Council will decide the issue Sept. 6,…
Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center is ready for guests, Mayor Mike Rawlings said Tuesday morning, whenever they arrive. Over the last two days, city of Dallas employees and volunteers have converted the first floor of the convention center’s air-conditioned parking garage into a 5,000 capacity shelter capable of housing…
Early Monday afternoon, as volunteers inside the first floor of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center’s parking garage scurried to put together and line up 5,000 cots, two volunteers from East Texas Community Emergency Response Team sat outside on the parking garage steps, finishing off their Jason’s Deli boxed lunches…
Let’s not get fooled on the Confederate memorials question in Dallas. It’s easy to do. It’s worse than a who’s-on-first routine. This one is more like where-is-first? What may camouflage the real controversy more than anything else, especially for people who are outside the city looking in, is the recruitment…
The city of Dallas announced late Sunday afternoon that it is opening its biggest emergency shelter, adding space for about 5,000 more evacuees from Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath. At the request of the state of Texas, the city is preparing the bottom floor of the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention…
Last week, two court decisions came down that could change the course of electoral politics in Texas — and Dallas County — for the 2018 midterms and beyond. A U.S. District Judge in Corpus Christi tossed the state’s new voter ID law Wednesday, ruling that it unconstitutionally discriminated against the…
Want a pretty good indication where things stand at Dallas City Hall? A majority of the members of the Dallas City Council have decided the city needs to stop keeping a record of where the council gets its campaign money. Gee. What could they have in mind? I stumbled into…
A federal district judge in Corpus Christi ruled late Wednesday afternoon that the Texas’ voter ID law, in all its forms, is unconstitutional. Her decision, which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced he will appeal, says that the original 2011 law and a revamped version passed this year both…
