The Dallas Morning News had an editorial this week about how City Council members need to be more polite, under the headline, “Yelling and Hurling Insults Is No Way To Lead.” Wrong. Sure it is. Depending on what you’re leading. If you’re leading the Sunday school class out onto the lawn…
The $125,000 bike-share program at Fair Park — those two forlorn rental kiosks that Mayor Mike Rawlings tried so ardently last November to make seem like a good idea — is, for all practical purposes, a city project. Rawlings, along with various members of city staff, pushed it as a way…
Try to imagine the ravaged heart of Patricia Allen, whose three children drowned last month in an Irving apartment pool so murky that emergency crews couldn’t tell how many kids were even in the pool. These were not toddlers. Treshawn Smith was 9. His brother Anthony was 11. They lingered…
Listen. We could sit here and go on and on all day long about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his basically insane exhortation to county clerks not to issue marriage license applications to gay people. But somehow talking too much about people like Paxton just makes us feel sort…
Sunday, ahead of what should be the first full day of Texas County Clerks signing marriage licenses for same-sex couples, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gave cover to those officials whose personal religious dogma is more important to them than following the U.S. Constitution following Friday’s Supreme Court ruling legalizing…
He didn’t just get sick of it and quit. There was calculation. Dallas School Superintendent Mike Miles, who came here three years ago with a mandate to reform the school system, quit yesterday because the board had flipped and the mandate was gone. In effect the school board gave up…
Dwaine Caraway’s “big announcement” Tuesday, to borrow a phrase from Dennis Green, was what we thought it was. Caraway is going to run for Dallas County commissioner Place 3. You know, the one that’s been held by John Wiley Price since 1985. Before we even get to Price, let’s talk…
In case you missed it — something that’s entirely possible given the average Dallas resident’s level of municipal engagement — Dwaine Caraway is no longer on the City Council. It’s a shame, too. Caraway, whether he was railing against plastic bags, imitating his eminently imitable colleague Vonciel Jones Hill or…
File this one under things we aren’t smart enough to understand. Sunday, the photo of first-term Texas Senator Ted Cruz you see in the embedded tweet made the social media rounds. It is an Associated Press photo, taken at a Cruz campaign event at a gun range. Many Cruz supporters…
One of the funniest not-at-all-funny things Dallas City Hall has done in recent years is the MLK “façade improvement program,” intended to “spruce up” (in the words of the city’s only daily newspaper) Martin Luther King Boulevard, an arrow through the heart of abject poverty in southern Dallas. We have…
Surely, Raquel Hultquist knows now who Tennell Atkins is, but that’s not really the point. What was an issue Thursday, at Atkins’ long-awaited trial for his December alleged assault on Hultquist, was whether she knew who he was then. Hultquist, a 911 operator conscripted into temporary security duty at one of…
Philip Kingston is the City Council representative for Dallas’ District 14, the architect of the oh-so-close attempt to elect a progressive (read: anti-Trinity toll road) majority to the council. Gary Fitzsimmons is Dallas County’s outspoken former district clerk. Both men share an obsessive commitment to local politics. Both men sometimes…
Maybe it’s a busy day for you, but every once in a while if you get a minute you need to stop and think about what you want the city to be. If you don’t, somebody else will. “This is social engineering,” Elizabeth Julian said to me recently. “The question…
In the far northeastern corner of Flag Pole Hill Park, just shy of where the open space surrounding White Rock Lake gives way to the ranch-style homes of Lake Highland, a dirt footpath snakes for about three-quarters of a mile along a thicket of trees. Ken Coutant, a tax accountant…
Rick Perry officially announced his renewed presidential aspirations Thursday at Addison Airport. Flanked by veterans and Taya Kyle, the window of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, Perry said he would return American exceptionalism, lambasted President Obama and told a cheering throng that “rights come from God, not the government.” “It’s time…
A couple of weeks ago, former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s wife, Anita, announced that her husband had something very important to tell all of us on June 4 in Dallas: He’s going to run for president, again. (It was a pre-announcement announcement, not an announcement-announcement. Just try to act surprised…
At what Dwaine Caraway said would be his last City Council meeting, the term-limited council member put on a vintage performance, fighting against what’s become the bane of his existence: single-use plastic bags. He lost. Single-use plastic bags will be free again on Monday, but he lost fighting the good…
Dallas City Council will vote Wednesday whether to replace the nickel charge for disposable grocery bags, which became effective January 1, with an outright ban. “It’s an environmental issue. These bags, because of the physical nature of the bags, they are going to be a permanent litter problem. It doesn’t…
Hey, wouldn’t it be great to be able to walk from your apartment to Klyde Warren Park, the hugely successful new deck over a downtown freeway named for a rich kid? You can. Really. Just be rich. But what about this? What if you could get a really nice pretty…
(This story replaces a version published this morning.) This just in: What the city has said for 20 years about flood safety and a proposed toll road along the Trinity River very possibly is not true. In a major flood that road may be underwater and threatened. Yesterday after I filed…
Two weeks ago, Eric Williams and Subrina Brenham, two losing candidates who got less than 200 votes each in running for the Dallas City Council District 8 seat soon to be vacated by Tennell Atkins, filed a lawsuit. Williams and Brenham alleged that Dianne Gibson and Erik Williams, the two…
This was bound to happen, Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston says. Kingston has described the runoff for the council’s District 10 seat as a twist on the prisoner’s dilemma — a well worn example of game theory about how people decide whether to cooperate or screw one another over. In fact,…
