Pro tip: Don’t mess with the people of White Rock Lake. No matter how good your plans for providing parking for patrons of that fancy new children’s garden or offering high-quality food and drink with a pristine view of the lake may sound in your head, you will lose. For…
The Observer hasn’t written about Dave Neumann since he lost his Oak Cliff City Council seat to Scott Griggs. That was three years ago. Since then, Neumann has kept a low profile, running a consulting firm (somehow, it manages to have virtually zero online presence outside his own LinkedIn account),…
The best part of Scott Goldstein’s Dallas Morning News piece about the Charter Review Commission’s proposal to hike Dallas City Council salaries by 32 percent, to $49,530, comes at the very end: “Fifty-thousand dollars a year, that’s not bad,” said [former City Attorney Tom] Perkins, whose city salary was $258,343…
For a city run by a former librarian for most of the past decade, Dallas’ libraries haven’t gotten a lot of love. They were an easy target for the recession-era budget slashing of 2008, and despite an increase in materials funding last year, still haven’t recovered. Friends of the Dallas…
You’re an aspiring restaurateur. You’ve signed your lease, spent tens of thousands of dollars finishing out your space and getting all the proper permits and decide that it could use some European-style sidewalk seating. Great! City Hall is 100 percent behind you and your progressive, urban ideas. So let’s get…
Remember how in the 2008 comedy Step Brothers Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly try to launch an entertainment empire with an absurdly misogynistic rap video? And how it ends in disaster when they wreck the boat they were filming on? That’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened when…
A lot of words were spoken at today’s joint meeting of the Dallas City Council and Dallas ISD board of trustees. Most were on point, for or against the call to draft a home-rule charter. Some were illuminating. Almost all were delivered with passion. It was, all in all, a…
If there was one thing Dallas City Hall would have been wise to take away from the fracking debate, it’s that you shouldn’t mess with Raymond Crawford. He’s the slight, balding, professional needlepointing David to your Goliath. City Hall, however, isn’t so good with lessons, which is why Crawford has…
Maybe, just maybe, Dallas has shaken its reputation as the country’s worst city for cycling. Bicycling magazine hasn’t mentioned it in a couple of years, anyway. The city has, however, earned another not-so-welcome distinction. It’s the “least outdoorsy” city in America, according to Outside magazine. We are, apparently, less outdoorsy…
How many dogs and cats are there in Dallas? It’s a hard, maybe impossible figure to nail down with any certainty, but extrapolating from the Humane Society’s U.S. pet-ownership statistics, the number is just north of 600,000. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s pet-ownership calculator gives a slightly smaller but comparable…
Editor’s note: Recently, our Eric Nicholson reported on the goat skulls and carcasses that await visitors of the new Texas Horse Park, one of Dallas City Hall’s bizarre attempts to develop southern Dallas. Together with Eric’s previous scoop about the park being entrusted to an accused horse abuser, the story…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown didn’t think his proposal to secure access to a federal database of private banking and financial information would be controversial. It sailed through the City Council’s Public Safety Committee unopposed last week. Then again, that committee didn’t have City Councilman Lee Kleinman. “‘The right of…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wears many hats. He’s a “man’s man,” a pizza lover, a terrible actor, the titular head of a major American city. He is also, you might be surprised to learn, a distinguished journalist. So says the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism. It has…
Remember that story a couple of weeks back about how Dallas was sitting on 25,000 municipal court warrants? And how you were probably safe ignoring your traffic citation with impunity? That was caused by a technical glitch, and technical glitches get fixed. The reprieve was temporary. The broader trend is…
The town of Hutchins doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. There’s Hutchins State Jail, the town’s second-largest employer, and new intermodal facilities centered on the Union Pacific train tracks and I-20 (this presumably explains how the population doubled between 2000 and 2010, to 5,338), but it has otherwise…
Transforming Valley View Center from a dystopian wasteland into Dallas Midtown, a mammoth, 450-acre complex of restaurants and offices and stores and apartments and retail, won’t be cheap. More than $10 billion was the figure floated when developer Scott Beck first went public with the idea last year. Most of…
You needn’t stray far from where where the Texas Horse Park’s barn and activity building are going up off Pemberton Hill Road to start finding goat skulls. A couple of feet into the mesquite trees should do; the bleached white bone is impossible to miss against the underbrush…
It used to be that, four or five times a year, Dallas would have an auction and sell its tax-foreclosed properties to the highest bidder. The last one happened on June 13, 2013, two weeks before the City Council complained that the houses were falling into the hands of slum…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is still officially on the fence about tearing down I-345, the two-mile stretch of freeway between downtown and Deep Ellum. He’s spent the last several months meeting with, in his words, “local business leaders, concerned citizens and the Texas Department of Transportation.” Even after meeting Tuesday…
If the Dallas City Council thought its baby-splitting compromise on single-use shopping bags (a $.05 cent fee, not a ban) could stave off the bagpocalypse of free market prophecy, they were sorely mistaken. As Kroger rep Gary Huddleston eagerly explained to WFAA on Thursday, the consequences once the new ordinance…
The casual observer will be forgiven for overlooking Councilman Lee Kleinman’s role in Dallas’ debate over plastic-bag regulations. With Dallas City Councilman Dwaine Caraway constantly sermonizing against them on the one hand, and with Sheffie Kadane and Rick Callahan’s dismissal of any attempt to regulate them as a thinly veiled…
The bloodless but brutal Plastic Bag War of 2013-14 has finally come to a close. The final battle, waged primarily through hyperbole and terrible metaphor, came today with the Dallas City Council ultimately voting 8-6 to impose a fee on single-use carryout bags at most retail stores. Under the ordinance,…
