Two upcoming City Council votes, both technical and arcane on the surface, will go to the heart of the city. The moment draws nigh. With two simple votes Aug. 9, the Dallas City Council may leap across an immense chasm in time and usher in a new era. Or not…
In multiple court hearings last May, Assistant City Attorney Melissa Miles complained that the city just couldn’t quite trust West Dallas landlord Khraish Khraish, who was selling many of his rental houses to his tenants. The city didn’t know if the deeds were kosher. The city was afraid he might…
After nearly a week of criticism from Boy Scouts, their parents and the public, Michael Surbaugh, chief Scout executive of Boy Scouts of America, apologized Thursday for a speech President Donald Trump gave at the group’s National Jamboree on Monday night. The president’s speech lambasted the press, rehashed his Electoral College victory…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wants the City Council to hurry up — hurry up! — and sign a pile of documents creating some kind of a private thing to control the new park we want to build on the Trinity River downtown. Former City Council member Angela Hunt has her…
On Tuesday night, one week into Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s first called special session of the 85th Texas Legislature, the Texas Senate signed off on the term’s most controversial bill. After nearly eight hours of debate, 20 Republicans and one Democrat voted to require Texas children attending public schools to use bathrooms…
Sometimes we have to go back to the old-fashioned used-car lots that used to line Ross Avenue if we want to know how to handle things. You don’t sign a check to buy a car if the guy won’t let you drive it around the block first. Walk away. You…
Yesterday. I am staring at a Dallas Morning News online story telling me that the Texas Association of Business would start running ads on Texas radio stations today warning that, if the special session of the Texas Legislature passes a bathroom bill, it could cost Texas the NFL draft. I…
Forget all the small-bore stuff like the Trinity toll road, Fair Park and so on. It’s more and more clear that we are at a major crossroads in the city, a place calling for real regime change. Total. In what we in the print business call a full-page “bleed” —…
Over the next couple of days, the special session of the 85th Texas Legislature will get rolling. On Friday, Texas Senate committees will hear testimony on the state’s two proposed “bathroom bills,” which would regulate which restrooms Texans are allowed to use, and several anti-abortion bills. On Saturday, the upper…
I’m a Democrat. I’m anti-Trump. The only things more depressing to me than President Donald Trump are Democrats. If it’s still like this in 2018, I may have to vote for the vegan, even though I have never really been totally sure what that is. Maybe for a change and…
Every once in a while, somebody says something so wholly at odds with evident truth, so totally contrary to known facts, so diametrically opposed to obvious reality that we just have to stop and do big, loud forehead slaps on ourselves. Last week, Dallas City Secretary Rosa Rios, bristling at…
Construction crews were putting finishing touches on the new Uplift Pinnacle Secondary school at Camp Wisdom Road and Interstate 35E when I toured it last week with architect Brian L. Nelson of HKS, school director Rachel Harris and Uplift chief development officer Deborah Bigham. I tried to imagine the throngs…
On Thursday night, the George W. Bush Presidential library hosted a throwback to a kinder, gentler, political universe, where two ex-presidents from opposing parties got along like old friends. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton spoke to the graduating class of the Presidential Leadership Scholars program about the need for bipartisanship,…
Earlier this week, as part of the ongoing process to select Dallas’ next police chief, the seven remaining finalists for the job met with community members selected by City Manager T.C. Broadnax. Among those selected to participate in the panel interviews was Dominique Alexander, the leader of the Next Generation…
Texas’ state leadership, led by Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, may be set on passing legislation telling transgender Texans which bathroom to use during the upcoming special session, but Dallas ISD board members Miguel Solis and Dan Micciche aren’t having any of it. Ahead of the special session,…
If people who write about and think about affordable housing on a national level ever look at Dallas — and they do, from time to time — surely they will find the Dallas citizen who was just commended by the recent national convention of the League of United Latin American…
This week is the beginning of the end for one of Texas’ longstanding political fights. Over the course of at least five days in a San Antonio courthouse, a three-judge federal panel will hear arguments over whether Texas illegally discriminated against the state’s minority population when it drew its current…
The state of Texas, thanks to its new, slightly weaker voter ID law, is no longer discriminating against minority voters. At least that’s the case if you listen to the U.S. Department of Justice. Late Wednesday, John Gore, the deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division,…
I understand why leaks in Washington about Trump are a big deal and my leaks about things like drainage problems in Dallas, not so much. I think I have a pretty good working sense of proportion. But leaks are still leaks, and I have my reasons to make sure people…
The view I give you here sometimes of City Hall is depressing, and yet some twinge of conscience provokes me now and then to tell you how optimistic I am about the city. According to the surveys, I think you are, too. Between City Hall and the city, a strange…
The greatest challenge in the thing we call vaguely “The Trinity River project” is sheer size. The full project area along the river through downtown is 10,000 acres. That’s 15.6 square miles. You could put New York City’s Central Park in it 12 times. It’s two-thirds the size of Manhattan,…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that he and a 10-state coalition will sue the federal government over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protections if the U.S. Department of Homeland Security refuses to phase out the program. DACA, established by President Barack Obama in 2012, protects certain undocumented individuals…
