Last Friday, the day Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins was ticketed for shaking a 61-year-old city employee while screaming, “Do you know who I am” in her face, the security camera that should have recorded the incident wasn’t working. The city of Dallas says it had been out of order…
A bill filed Monday in advance of the upcoming session of the Texas Legislature would make the maximum penalty for the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana a $100 fine. The fine would not count as a criminal conviction and could not considered as such by anyone performing…
Update: 12:54 p.m.: Atkins has issued a statement about the incident. He admits that he was “a little upset” but denies touching Hultquist. “I regret that the two ladies feel I was too aggressive in my comments and that I ‘shook’ one of them,” he says. (You can check out…
Get ready for Round 3 in the ongoing — and possibly never-ending — bout between Laura Miller and would-be Preston Road/Northwest Highway developers. A few months after helping neighbors kill two proposed apartment developments near the intersection, Miller is limbering up to fight Crow Holdings’ plan to build a pedestrian…
In his first term as North Dallas’ state representative, Jason Villalba established himself as a serious, policy-minded lawmaker focused on finding common-sense solutions to important problems, like freeing Mavs fans from stupid and outdated liquor laws. Unapologetically conservative, to be sure, but in a reasonable, non-pandering way that has won…
On paper — and video — firing Jesus Martinez was a straightforward call for Dallas Police Chief David Brown. Martinez was filmed “using his right knee to pin the pedestrian’s right elbow down while raising the pedestrian’s left elbow and hand upward causing him severe pain,” according to the police…
Bringing an end to almost an eight-year legal battle, the Dallas City Council will vote Wednesday on whether to pay two charity groups $250,000. Big Heart Ministries and Rip Parker Memorial Homeless Ministry sued the city in March 2007, challenging a city ordinance that restricted the ways groups could provide…
For the past few years, the Dallas City Council says it’s been trying to develop a vacant lot on Simpson Stuart and Bonnie View roads, in a section of Dallas south of Loop 12 that is 22.5 square miles but home to just 27,500 people. What the relatively low-population area…
Just over a week ago, on November 24, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the “odds were in favor” of the state suing the federal government to stop President Obama’s executive action on immigration. Wednesday afternoon, the governor-elect cashed that bet, announcing that he’d been joined by 16 other states…
Of the just more than $155,000 the city of Dallas spent responding to Ebola, almost $27,000 — just more than 17 percent of the total — went to caring for Bentley, Nina Pham’s King Charles Spaniel. The majority of the Bentley cash, $17,057.46, was spent on getting Grand Prairie Armed…
Sana Syed had a baptism by fire. Just after she took the city of Dallas’ public information officer job, Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed with Ebola. Syed did an admirable job filtering and distributing the torrent of information that would come out over the succeeding weeks. She would also show…
Put aside any thoughts you had about the 2015 Dallas mayoral election being competitive. Mike Rawlings is running again. Just before his annual “State of the City” speech Tuesday, Rawlings formally revealed to The Dallas Morning News the poorly kept secret that he’ll be on the ballot in May. He…
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, soon to make his home in the governor’s mansion, says the “odds are in favor” of Texas suing the federal government to prevent the implementation of President Obama’s proposed executive or to stop the deportation of certain undocumented immigrant who have been in the country…
Back in February of 2013, Schutze shook loose a secret memo showing that City Manager Mary Suhm had struck a secret deal with Trinity East Energy to allow gas drilling on city parkland while, at the same time, promising the City Council that there would be no gas drilling on…
The Dallas City Council’s decision last week to repeal its anti-protest ordinance — the one that has irked both the far left and far right, from the peaceniks railing against the Bush Presidential Library to the Obama-hating patriots — was a tacit admission that banning people from protesting next to…
One thing is clear after Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings’ 15-minute speech Wednesday at a Trinity Groves breakfast: It can’t possibly be about what he said it was about. There is no way that after all the time, all the “balloon juice,” that’s been expelled over the issue, that he can…
The results are in from state Representative Rafael Anchia’s survey of Dallas residents’ feelings about the Trinity toll road. They are exactly what you’d expect. Of 1,014 respondents who reported Dallas ZIP codes, only 42 said they supported the toll road, and 955 were against the toll road and. Somewhat…
As we’ve mentioned before, City Manager A.C. Gonzalez’s presentations at the end of City Council briefings are frequently excruciating and uninformative. Tuesday, though, there was an interesting tidbit in the midst of Gonzalez’s promotion of the city’s wellness initiative for city employees. After singling out City Council member Dwaine Caraway’s…
A debate that began more than a year ago when City Manager A.C. Gonzalez tried to slip an ordinance that would have banned car services like Uber and Lyft in Dallas will likely end December 10, when the council takes up new regulations for transportation-for-hire businesses. The new regulations that…
Like the river its supposed to run beside, everything about the Trinity toll road is murky. It’s hard to know where the funding for the toll road will come from, hard to know what it will look like if it ever gets built and harder still to figure out why…
It’s been a few months since Clay Jenkins ceremoniously announced that, because rates of unaccompanied immigrant children coming into Texas had ebbed, there was no longer a need for a local shelter. Has the influx remained low? See also: Dallas County Will Not Shelter Thousands of Central American Kids After…
On Thursday afternoon, a dozen or so journalists stood in an awkward semi-circle near the Women’s Museum at Fair Park, gazing at Dallas’ first bike-share station. They had been promised that Mayor Mike Rawlings would be there at 3:30 p.m. to take the inaugural ride on one of the gleaming…
