On the surface everything always looks so sober and important at City Hall, following a solemn script as if every subcommittee meeting were a medical school graduation ceremony or the funeral of an important person. And then you get these bizarre little windows on what’s really going on. Yesterday I…
Neil Emmons, Dallas’ District 2 plan commissioner who died last week, was way deep in the woods on some big development deal many years ago, on the side of the neighborhood and giving the developer grief, of course, when a guy I knew who worked for the developer gave me…
Needs shutterstock: 312342893 Wednesday, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and Leander Johns, the head of Uber Dallas announced a plan to add 2,500 new drivers for the app-based ride hailing service in southern Dallas. On the surface it looks like an easy win. Dallas south of I-30 needs jobs and is under…
It’s almost enough to make you think we had racial segregation in this town. First, three years ago, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a finding that Dallas was violating federal law by using desegregation money to promote segregation. The city denied it, of course, but…
Unless they happen to be the city of Dallas’ paid defense attorneys, it’s hard to find a lawyer who thinks the city of Dallas has a shot at winning the lawsuit brought by Three Expo Events following the City Council decision to ban the Three Expo’s Exxxotica sex show from…
Monday, Dallas police Chief David Brown had a plan to stem Dallas’ ongoing spike in violent crime. He told the City Council’s public safety committee he would shuffle hundreds of officers’ beats and schedules to deal with a 75 percent jump in murders so far in 2016 over the same…
With its monolithic columns at the entrance and pictorial windows of art glass, The First Presbyterian Church of Dallas in the 1800 block of Young Street is a cultural and visual landmark. One of its early homes was the first brick church in Dallas, and it grew from a single…
The Dallas Police/Fire Pension Fund, still trying to dig itself out of the billion-dollar financial hole it dug for itself by making stupid investments, is going to meet Friday to consider “censuring” board member Philip Kingston for speaking candidly and intelligently to the public about the pension fund’s problems. And,…
Pasties, whipped cream and an oversized dildo, not the First Amendment, are the real issues at the heart of the Dallas City Council’s decision to ban the Exxxotica sex-expo from the city-owned convention center, according to the city’s response to a lawsuit filed by Three Expo events, the company that puts…
All through last week’s City Council briefing on the city’s ancient and unresolved Trinity toll road controversy, I kept thinking I sniffed the unpleasant scent of burning human hair that you get when someone is being thrown under a bus. Kept looking around the council chamber, sniffing. Couldn’t find it…
Ted Cruz has officially lost it with Donald Trump. Texas’ Canadian-born junior senator went after the GOP’s presidential front-runner Thursday afternoon with all the bluster he could find, putting an end to any hope the two candidates could revive the congenial relationship they had earlier in the campaign. “It’s not…
Coming soon to a city near you (very near you): the prize fight of the century. In the one corner, with a left fist loaded with lawyers and a right glove packed with money, we have the Big Contender, Dallas City Hall, determined never to admit that the “whitewater feature,”…
Dallas’ quest to keep Exxxotica out of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center will keep its puritanical legal eagle on the job, thanks to the majority of the Dallas City Council that voted to keep Scott Bergthold on the team defending the city against the porn convention’s lawsuit. Bergthold, a…
The city of Dallas will not be piloting a cite-and-release program for marijuana possession after all. Wednesday morning, the Dallas City Council shot down a long-in-the-works proposal that would’ve required Dallas police officers to issue tickets, rather than making arrests, when they discovered Dallas residents with less than four ounces…
At the end of last week, the Dallas City Auditor issued a report (copy below) saying the city handed out $29.9 million to housing contractors in a three-year period and forgot to keep any records to show whether any of the housing got built. Oh, and they also forgot to…
There was a day when the three men who sat in front of me in the Dallas City Council chamber for Monday’s Trinity toll road meeting could have said jump, and the entire Dallas City Council would have fainted from embarrassment for not having thought of it themselves. But this…
Nothing about Donald Trump is new. In any major American city, no one need dig far to find people who exhibited the traits that make Trump so appealing to the Republican electorate, and Dallas is no different. None of its residents may have had all of Trumps’ charms rolled into…
They’re the superheroes of the Democratic Party, swooping in to save the day with their super vote before a misguided populace burns the Democratic establishment to the ground by selecting a candidate who spews radical ideas as if it were 1972. Birthed in the flames of George McGovern’s ’72 presidential…
OK, Dallas City Council, this is between us and please don’t tell our readers about it here at the Dallas Observer, in fact please don’t tell the Observer about it, either. I wish you would go into a smoke-filled room, shut me out totally, draw the blinds, refuse to comment,…
Mr. Trump, this is from me, an old middle class white guy watching from the sidelines here in Dallas. You said if they took the nomination away from you at the convention, “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing many, many millions of people.” I’m looking at your people, Mr…
Presented (mostly) without comment, here’s Dallas City Council member Rickey Callahan bringing in St. Patrick’s Day, and his birthday, with a lovely, lilting brogue and a song. Thanks, Rickey, and District 8 council member Erik Wilson, who brought our attention to this video…
President Obama came to a good place last weekend to tell people what this election is about. Dallas may not be the only bull’s eye in America for a discussion of ethnicity politics and voting rights, but it’ll do. In our own backyard and in the nation, some white people…
