Wednesday was big day in Austin for both Texas’ staunchest advocates against reproductive choice and the organizations that have fought tooth and nail at the Texas Capitol and in the courts against the advance of legislation that seeks to limit abortion to the absolute limit of what is allowed by Roe…
Tuesday morning, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins announced the formation of a joint agency spanning city and county jurisdictions that will be focused entirely on getting Dallas County’s homeless population of the streets. The Dallas Area Partnership to End and Prevent Homelessness is the first step…
In volatile times, things happen for the first time, things we’ve never seen before. New events explode into view suddenly without prelude or context. We need time afterward to digest. I spent all last week trying to figure out why on the first night of the Trump travel ban I…
At last week’s meeting of the Dallas County Commissioners Court, Dallas City Council member Lee Kleinman was a lonely voice against a nonbinding resolution, eventually passed by the court, affirming that Dallas County call on county law enforcement to “end nonessential collaborations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” Kleinman, fearing that…
Martha Teran died on Oct. 30, trying to sell an iPhone 7. According to Dallas police, she met Lonzell Hunter in the parking lot of Medieval Times just off Interstate 35, believing the public parking lot would be a safe place to exchange her phone for cash. It wasn’t. Teran’s…
This story, at least in part, is about a zoning change. But it’s interesting, we promise. On Wednesday afternoon, as new Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax sat in on his first city council meeting, the council heard an item about a seemingly innocuous zoning change. Michael Coker, a land developer,…
Dallas City Council Member Scott Griggs said ruefully to me yesterday, “There are two things in Dallas you’re not allowed to ask about — the Trinity toll road and the State Fair of Texas.” Here’s what happens if you do. As Peter Simek reported in D Magazine earlier this week,…
Four members of the Dallas City Council, all of whom represent the city on the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Board, intervened in Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings’ ongoing lawsuit against the pension Wednesday afternoon. In their filing, the council members ask that the fund be placed in receivership as it…
Nothing could be more plain. The blame for the city’s dearth of low-income housing — expressed politically, in policy, in voting and in what people say on the record — lies squarely with City Hall. Every major action with bearing on this issue taken by the current mayor, the City…
Yesterday, four of the county’s commissioners and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins approved a resolution declaring Dallas County a “Welcoming Community.” The resolution, while nonbinding, affirms the county’s stance that undocumented residents are “integral members of our community” and calls on local law enforcement agencies to “end nonessential collaborations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” As…
Dallas City Councilman Lee Kleinman represents District 11. Last week he sat down with the Dallas Observer to talk about the city police and fire pension crisis, the future of a car-free Dallas, housing in the city and his upcoming election challenge from real estate blogger Candy Evans. Get ready…
People should start paying me not to write anything positive about them. Just over a week ago I wrote something positive about Jesse Moreno, vice chair of the Dallas Park and Recreation Board, and now I see on this Wednesday’s upcoming City Council agenda there will be an effort to…
Let me go back to an earlier point. I still say the money situation that the city is in right now makes absolutely no sense unless there is a monumental leak or a series of leaks somewhere. And I think the new city manager ought to go looking. Things, after all,…
Armed with a stack of signature-covered petitions and dressed in his usual dapper suit, Dwaine Caraway announced at Dallas City Hall on Wednesday afternoon that, after a two-year hiatus, he is coming back for the District 4 city council seat he held from 2007-2015. “We had a lot of momentum…
We are so screwed. The Texas economy is totally dependent on trade with Mexico. Trump’s determination to stir up his flash mob by insulting Mexico is going to absolutely kill us. But our top Texas elected officials are Republicans who are so afraid of far-right challengers that they can’t do…
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, scheduled to go on trial later this month on federal corruption charges, is still king of the city’s old black protesters. But the old black protest machine’s days as a major political force in the city probably are numbered anyway, no matter which way…
Monday evening, the Irving-based Boy Scouts of America announced that it would begin admitting scouts based on their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificate. The BSA’s decision comes a month after the family of Joe Maldonaldo, an 8-year-old transgender boy from New Jersey, filed a legal…
The hits, apparently, are going to keep on coming for Dallas’ woebegone police and fire pension system. On Monday afternoon, a group of six former Dallas cops sued the system’s board in U.S. District Court in Sherman, alleging that the trustees’ decision to temporarily stop withdrawals from members’ Deferred Retirement Option Program…
Of course Dallas cops and firefighters are furious over the public tone of the pension fund fight, because so much of it accuses the ordinary members of the fund of somehow being at the bottom of the debacle. All of the talk about pension fund millionaires, for example, makes it…
Late Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks issued a preliminary injunction banning the state of Texas from implementing a rule, drafted last summer, that would require the burial or cremation of any tissue resulting from an abortion performed in the state. In granting the injunction sought by Whole Woman’s…
Ahmed Motaz AlOlabi and Basimal Labbad became two of 50 travelers detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at DFW, along with scores more at airports across the country, in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to keep foreigners from seven majority-Muslim countries out of the United States.
This week there was some hope that the city of Dallas and the troubled Dallas Police and Fire Pension System were on their way to reaching a deal to save the pension from potential insolvency. Early Wednesday morning, however, that mediation broke down, leading to some of the strongest signals yet…
