Back in March, The Dallas Morning News introduced us to Pam Mueller. Mueller, we learned, is a mild-mannered M Streets resident who has taken to renting out the other side of her small duplex on Airbnb, the short-term rental website that has, along with Uber, become synonymous with the “sharing economy.” “It’s more fun…
Last week HUD Secretary and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro was on MSNBC Live disarmingly fending off flattering suggestions by host Melissa Harris-Perry that he may be tapped as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate: “I learned in life,” Castro said, “that if you want to have a great future you…
Couple weeks ago, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings gave City Manager A.C. Gonzalez and his top staff an unusual if very velvet-fingered push-back for showing the council a video presentation about how the next city budget will fix the streets when in fact it won’t. Uh-oh. It’s not nice to tell the…
Dallas Animal Services, the city’s animal control agency, is under-funded, its managers and supporters say, and has just over 100 full-time people on staff. Among people who follow such things, the general impression is that 101 people actually work full time for DAS, since the city gave the agency a budget…
Dallas City Hall X-Files. OMG. I am so ready. Wednesday Eric Nicholson had a story here which seemed to confirm at least in part a conspiracy theory I have touting for about 50 years. It’s about a secret under-the-radar City Hall effort to steer major resources into land at the southwest corner…
There has long been fevered speculation in certain circles that a cabal of rich businessmen are conspiring with high-level city staffers to funnel taxpayer dollars into the southwestern corner of downtown Dallas in a massive secret real estate play. As evidence, these conspiracy theorists point to the strange confluence of public…
Despite his campaign being so low on cash it’s no longer paying staffers, former Texas Governor Rick Perry reiterated Wednesday that he’s in the 2016 GOP presidential race for at least the medium-haul. In Austin to watch his successor Greg Abbott posthumously award the Texas Legislative Medal of Honor to “American…
The white pit bull with no collar charged toward Charlie Howell as his wife restrained their own dogs behind him. Howell felt he had no choice but to tackle the animal. “I made the split-second decision that I was not going to let it get past me,” Howell says. As…
Tanya Ragan made her first foray into Downtown Dallas’ neglected southeastern corner in 2007 when she bought a piece of commercial property there. The Bridge, the city-funded homeless shelter, opened in 2008. In the seven years since, Ragan, who lives in a town home near the Farmer’s Market, has established…
Jan Mickelson should be radioactive. Just last week, the conservative Iowa radio host issued a ringing endorsement for enslaving undocumented immigrants who refuse to leave the country. Mickelson thinks the United States should give any resident without the appropriate paperwork two months to leave. If they don’t, Mickelson says, they…
Don’t know what was going on at the beloved Lakewood Theater in Old East Dallas when I stopped by this morning – either a very serious remodeling or the first stages of demolition. When I went inside, workers seemed to be ripping out the stage and a bunch of interior…
Maybe we need to accept a certain bottom line here and prepare to deal with it. Dallas is becoming a much cooler city — almost more cool than it has a right to be — because of the coming change in who’s in control. But the change-over is not here…
Dallas streets are bad. It’s axiomatic at this point. When the city asked residents what it should prioritize in its new budget, the resounding first choice was road repair. The city’s awkwardly beautiful video explaining next year’s budget touts the extra $16 million to be spent on “improving streets.” Everyone…
A couple of weeks ago, we told you about a push led by Downtown Dallas Inc. to bring more cops into Dallas Central Business district to combat what DDI sees as rising nuisance crimes. The meta-culprit for many of the crimes — like panhandling, public sleeping and public urination —…
The selling point for a professional “city manager” system of city government — we’ve got one of the biggest ones in the country here in Dallas — is that everything will be run in a professional or “businesslike” fashion, not all loosey-goosey and a mess like it would be if…
Last Thursday, during a routine stormwater inspection, city staff came upon an unsettling discovery: 300 to 400 dead fish in a West Dallas drainage pond on the landward side of the Trinity River levee near the Pavaho Pump Station. Workers plucked what fish carcasses they could safely reach — almost…
The state of Texas’ obstinacy about changing a Conroe man’s death certificate continues to have positive consequences. Last week it led to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the interim commissioner of the Department of State Health Services, Kirk Cole, being brought up on potential contempt charges. The state caved…
Wednesday’s decision by the Dallas City Council to allow Love Field vendors to charge higher prices in exchange for those vendors guaranteeing a higher minimum wage for their workers was standard-issue horse trading. Vendors got what they wanted — the ability to charge 10 percent more than street prices for…
David Jensen is a guy I have written about over the last six months who lives in a West Dallas warehouse in the path of a big new apartment development that is favored by the city. He showed up at City Hall Wednesday to try to stop the city from…
Call it a small, mostly symbolic victory for the anti-toll road bunch. Late Wednesday afternoon, the Dallas City Council unanimously approved a half-measure drafted by freshman council member Adam McGough that keeps the bond money already raised for the city of Dallas Trinity project — some $47.7 million — from being…
Today as the Dallas City Council returns from its summer slumbers, it takes up a number of prickly questions, none more so than the debate over asking developer Trammell Crow Co. to include some affordable housing in exchange for the company’s getting an enormous grant of extra development rights from…
A secret but common belief among political professionals here is that only people over 60 really care about local politics, and all they want is more stop signs. Yet here we are on a very warm summer evening at The Foundry, an indoor/outdoor bar that shares a small repurposed industrial…
