On the front page of its Metro section last Monday, The Dallas Morning News had a piece reporting that the Dallas Police Department’s attrition rate (i.e. the number of officers who resigned, got fired, retired or died last year) was higher than it’s been in Chief David Brown’s five-year tenure leading the…
When is being fat a legitimate political issue? Ever? Even theoretically? Is it ever right for a skinny person to get mouthy about other people being fat? I winced, I admit, when I read that Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs was talking about people at City Hall being too…
The short of it is this: Dallas’ pension fund for police and firefighters is in big trouble. This week, the City Council heard from an outside auditor that the fund has $5 billion in commitments that it doesn’t have assets to pay, based on the new way the Governmental Accounting Standards…
Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez has ensconced herself in Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s head. It wasn’t even that hard, really. She just slightly — and we mean slightly, none of the changes have had a tangible result yet — changed the way the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office deals with undocumented…
Many of the employees at City Hall are women, and many of those women work in certain areas — Office of the City Secretary, Office of the City Manager, Office of the City Council — where tensions and tempers can run high. Conflict with elected officials is not just probable…
OK, Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs probably didn’t threaten to break a city staff member’s fingers, as he was accused of doing the infamous Affair of the Fucking Digits earlier this year. But he did call city staff a bunch of lard-asses Monday. We know, because we heard him…
Two-and-a-half years ago, around the beginning of May 2013, surveyors working for the city of Dallas staked out the contours of the Texas Horse Park’s centerpiece arena. Judging by the location of the stakes, the arena was going to be built more or less on top of an ancient and…
Half of the battle over moving a concrete plant out of the Trinity Groves restaurant theme park and farther into West Dallas was over in June, but we just didn’t know it. In June, as Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez and the rest of the city staff hurried the City…
Any who predicted last spring that donors to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s then-nascent presidential campaign were setting their money on fire is probably feeling pretty foolish right about now. Yep, that was a boneheaded move right there. In the six-plus months between Cruz’s presidential announcement at Liberty University and Wednesday night’s third…
For a while, since April’s special Dallas City Council meeting about Trinity toll road, the two sides in the city’s never-ending fight over what, exactly, to do with the Trinity River bottoms seemed to reach a cease-fire. Both sides were still suspicious, sure, but many people seemed ready to give…
Aha! Answers exist, after all. The argument against requiring a high-dollar apartment developer to include affordable apartments in his or her project is always that doing so will tank the whole deal and cause the developer to abandon America and live out his or her years on a desert island,…
Trinity Groves, the most exciting restaurant theme park in the world, sits across the street from a 7-acre concrete mixing plant. This is unacceptable. “Right now the plant spreads a lot of unneeded cement dust all over the area,” explained Karl Zavitkovsky, the city’s Office of Economic Development director, at…
In the old culture of Dallas, the one I hope is half-dead already, it was bad form to try to connect the dots. Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow is gone from those pages now, and I sort of miss him: He always painted me as a tinfoil hat crazy-head…
Perhaps more than anything, the ongoing skirmish at Dallas City Hall over whether and how to bump hourly pay requirements for contractors doing work for the city is an object lesson in how ideas that aren’t that controversial often whither on the vine. The way council member Philip Kingston describes…
Oh, we can’t just talk about the f-word 24/7 352 f-bomb days in the year, I know, much as I would like to, but with your gentle indulgence I would like to drop a few more f-bombs here today just to get the f the f out of my system…
It’s not easy, turning a few hundred acres of environmentally contaminated landfill in a long-neglected semi-rural pocket of southern Dallas into a top-of-the-line golf course. But Dallas does not do things because they are easy; it does them because they seem world-class. And so, three years ago, Mayor Mike Rawlings and…
Last week brought renewed uproar over the Scott Griggs f-word matter (only in Dallas), in which a city council member was accused of attempting to coerce a public official by threatening to break her “fucking fingers” if she did blah-blah-blah with some documents. F. A grand jury three-weeks ago found…
Three weeks ago a Dallas County grand jury looked at a felony “coercion” accusation against City Council member Scott Griggs and found it unworthy of prosecution. The term of art here is “no-billed.” Griggs was no-billed on an accusation that he had coerced a public official by threatening bodily harm…
Soon enough, this will officially not be happening, so let’s enjoy the possibility while we can. According to multiple reports, Dallas’ Pete Sessions has decided that he wants to be speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, assuming Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, whom Sessions would support, doesn’t toss his hat…
A former employee of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office has filed a petition to remove District Attorney Susan Hawk from her job. Cindy Stormer, Hawk’s former administrative chief, filed the removal suit Tuesday, claiming that Hawk is unfit to serve because of her alleged drug abuse, financial impropriety and…
From the looks of it, what happened last Friday was a good sign for Dallas Police Chief David Brown. After about two weeks of being circled by his opponents, Brown got what appeared to be a robust show of support from nearly all of the Dallas City Council and Dallas…
If you had just read this week’s Dallas City Council agenda, you might have thought the meeting was a good opportunity to get informed about Neighborhood Plus, the program developed by the city in response to accusations that it illegally concentrated low-income housing in the southern part of town. You…
