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…
At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, a group of Dallas day laborers and representatives from the Workers Defense Project were out in full force to advocate for local workers’ rights. Their appearance yesterday was the latest in a push over the last several months to require Dallas employers to allow water…
The issue at hand is a little wonky, but not too complicated. The Dallas City Council took bids for a contract to collect fines for the city’s municipal courts. In the next fiscal year, the contract holder is expected to resolve more than 150,000 cases. MSB Government Services submitted the…
They had one job. Last Tuesday, the one day this year most people will even think to look at the Dallas County elections website, it went down. For seven hours. Any person needing to know her polling place had to seek out other methods. The situation was laughable, but it…
Last week, we told you about an internet survey pushed out by Dallas state representative Rafael Anchia asking residents their opinion about the Trinity Toll Road. We speculated that Anchia’s sudden interest might signal forthcoming action in Austin, likely an attempt by supporters to fund the currently unfunded (and unneeded)…
Just two days after winning his unopposed re-election bid, state Representative Rafael Anchia has released a survey to gauge Dallas residents’ opinion of the proposed Trinity toll road. The survey was quickly pushed out on social media by opponents of the toll road such as City Council member Scott Griggs,…
Preliminary numbers are out for Texas’ midterm election voter turnout from the Election Project, and they are abysmal. Just 28.5 percent of Texans eligible to vote did so, either in early voting or on Tuesday, the lowest percentage in the country. The last time Texas voted for its governor in…
As in any good tragedy, Craig Watkins’ tumble from his perch as Dallas County district attorney was preceded by hubris and stupidity. After badly underperforming compared with the rest of his party in his 2010 re-election win against Republican Danny Clancy, Watkins did everything possible to ensure another close race…
So, Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez is making his twice-monthly report to the City Council Wednesday afternoon. This time, he’s going to be talking about something called the Dallas Center for Performance Excellence which, well, we’ve read the whole briefing and still have no idea what it is. Its purpose,…
In one West Dallas neighborhood, roughly 25 to 30 percent of eligible voters do not have a valid photo identification for voting. This area, along with sections near Fair Park, have the highest rates in the city. Yet speaking to voters outside C.F. Carr Elementary School, one of the central…
