At the beginning of every Dallas City Council meeting, long before most spectators (and many council members) are fully awake, a religious leader of some stripe stands at the podium and offers a brief prayer. A few months ago, we wondered whether the U.S. Supreme Court might declare such displays…
Dallas City Councilwoman Vonciel Hill: steadfast opponent of LGBT rights, veteran race baiter, lover of poorly designed inner-city freeways, and … passionate advocate for walkable urban spaces? So it seems. During a lengthy City Council discussion this afternoon on a pilot program aimed at revolutionizing how Dallas does downtown parking…
Dallas knows how to do car ownership. It’s kinda sorta embraced Uber and Lyft. But short-term car rental? That’s to be determined this summer, when the city dips its toe into Zipcar. The inaugural neighborhoods — downtown, the Arts District, Uptown, Oak Lawn and Mockingbird Station — have been selected…
On Wednesday afternoon, as the Dallas City Council gathered in a Trinity River Audubon Center conference room overlooking a shrunken pond and sea of marsh grass, there was a solid thunk of bird hitting glass. No one seemed to notice, save for maybe the security guard standing at attention with…
OK, we need a new word here, people. Help us out. Something that describes a simultaneous feeling of great joy and nausea, laughing with delight while urping up a little bit at the same time. That word, whatever it might be, describes the reaction here at Unfair Park headquarters to…
The exciting part of the Virgin/Southwest/Delta feud for America Airlines’ two up-for-grabs gates at Love Field (i.e. Richard Branson crowd-surfing and doing tequila shots at The Rustic) is over. Today was the excruciatingly boring part when the Dallas City Council spent a couple of hours debating who it thinks should…
If Fred Jackson wins his bid for Justice of the Peace in the upcoming Democratic Primary, lawbreakers should prepare to face a man packing a hard, award-winning body under his judicial robe. Here are other things they should prepare for: a DWI conviction when he was a cop in which…
It’s a wonderful time to be an Atmos Energy shareholder. The gas distributor’s profits — and dividends — keep going up. It’s much less wonderful to be an Atmos Energy customer, who is fueling those profits through increasingly large bills. Despite its profitability and despite getting six rate hikes out…
Eccentric British billionaire Richard Branson’s last visit to North Texas — in 2010, to launch Virgin America’s service from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — he brought along an absurd cowboy getup, barbecue, and a small herd of longhorn cattle. This time, God-willing, his arrival should be much more low-key. The…
Last month, Collin County Judge Keith Self received what in normal times would be an unremarkable letter from the Bureau of Land Management. The agency’s Oklahoma office, the letter explains, is beginning an environmental impact study on about 40,000 acres in and around Lake Lavon. It’s part of a larger,…
Dallas has a funny way of easing neighbors’ concerns about the Dallas Executive Airport. Just as nearby homeowners have worked themselves up into a minor frenzy because City Hall has kept them in the dark about a runway extension to accommodate heavier and louder aircraft, the city surprises them with…
Turns out, Dallas and TxDOT didn’t need the Trinity Parkway in order reconstruct the Mixmaster or S.M. Wright or to build the lakes and parks packaged with it when voters twice approved the project. Nor, people now seem to be realizing, is the completed road going to look anything like…
On the Wednesday in May 1996 when the Dallas City Council passed a law requiring bicyclists of all ages to wear a helmet, dozens of helmet-clad kids from Kramer Elementary burst into applause, according to The Dallas Morning News report the next day. They apparently hadn’t heard of bike share…
The Black Hebrew Israelites are still around. Some of them, apparently, are spending weekends in downtown Dallas
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…
