Politics & Government

More than a year after a group of Dallas churches and outreach groups began organizing a system for offering shelter to homeless people on nights when it’s too cold to be outdoors, the Dallas City Council considered the latest version of a plan to allow those groups to do the…

Wednesday night, two days after having an instantly vilified quickie hearing just to get it to the floor, the Texas Senate signed off on a religious protection bill that opponents fear could open the door to discrimination against Texas’ LGBTQ community. Prior to its hearing on the Senate floor, Senate…

Wow, Eric Johnson, candidate for mayor in the June 8 runoff election, really has a lot of endorsements. I mean, a ton of endorsements. The list is so long, I can’t even reproduce a screen grab of all the names here. I would need three screen grabs. So why is…

Texas’ loathed Driver Responsibility Program is hanging on by a thread. Wednesday afternoon, the Texas Senate voted 31-0 to kill the long-standing program, leaving it one Gov. Greg Abbott signature from death. The program imposes surcharges on those drivers who do things like driving without a licence or driving under…

A majority of mayoral candidate Scott Griggs’ colleagues on the Dallas City Council, including Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, endorsed his opponent in the mayor’s race Tuesday afternoon. State Rep. Eric Johnson is the best choice to lead the city, Rawlings and the council members said, because he will unite Dallas…

In two mayoral runoff election debates so far between Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs and state Rep. Eric Johnson, half of Johnson’s entire pitch has been that he will bring an end to snarkiness, personal attacks and divisiveness at City Hall. The other half of Johnson’s pitch has been…

There’s a little more than two weeks left in Texas’ regular legislative session. Dozens of bills will pass the Texas House and Senate and make their way to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk between now and May 27. But thanks to an annual Texas House deadline, hundreds more died as Thursday…

Sam Coats, named last week to take over as the interim leader of the scandal-plagued Dallas convention and visitors bureau, called VisitDallas, is the perfect guy. He has a deep international résumé as a fixer of broken companies and a turnaround artist. He has experience as an elected official and mayoral…

After months of back-and-forth between neighborhood groups and those pushing for expanded homeless services outside of downtown Dallas, the Dallas City Council signed off unanimously on a zoning change that will a new campus for the Salvation Army to be built in northwest Dallas. The new campus, located on North Stemmons…

Dallas’ parents, its dads specifically, got a leg up from the City Council on Wednesday afternoon. From now forward, any newly built or renovated city-owned building, privately owned restaurant, theater or retail store will have to provide at least one “safe, sanitary and convenient diaper changing accommodation” in each restroom…

Do we focus on local things because we can’t stand to think about the big picture? What’s really going on in our heads? This week we learned that an upcoming U.N. report based on 15,000 scientific studies will say one million living species are faced with extinction, some within decades,…

Following months of criticism, VisitDallas President and CEO Phillip Jones is out of a job, following what the organization is calling a “mutual decision.” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is expected to announce a new, interim CEO for the agency later this week. Jones came under fire in January after the…

Democrats flexed their newfound muscle in the Texas House on Tuesday, ending a push led by Gov. Greg Abbott to increase Texas’ sales tax, which is already one of the highest in the nation. While there’s a chance a sales tax increase could be shoehorned into another bill already making…

Crazy, goofy and idiotic are not good explanations for people who are hard to understand. I’m going to buy a Cub Scout wood-burning kit that makes engravings on plywood and put that on a plaque. Maybe I’ll hang it from the rearview mirror of my pickup. But for years I…

Texas Senate Republicans are tired of uppity cities like Dallas taking down monuments to the Confederacy. That’s the message from the state Capitol, where the Senate voted 19-12 along strict party lines to require a two-thirds, super majority vote from any municipal government that wants to get rid of their…

If the first round of Dallas’ municipal election taught us anything, it’s that nobody — except D Magazine contributing editor Eric Celeste, who went full-Nostradamus on the mayoral results — knows anything when it comes to low-turnout free-for-alls. Rumor had it before the election that the race between former Mayor…

In 1995, somebody in the business leadership of Dallas figured out that Dallas had a serious amount of catch-up to do to be a contender on the larger stage of history. The answer, brought forward by the city’s business elite, was the city’s first black mayor, a brilliant young lawyer…

A little after 10:30 Saturday night, Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs finally hopped onstage at Trees in Deep Ellum to declare a kind of victory. He’d apparently — because all the precincts hadn’t come in and there’s no Dallas election decision desk — finished second in Dallas’ mayoral election,…

This weekend is about as good as get for Dallas sports fans. The Stars have critical playoff games on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, the Rangers are in town all weekend and the Kentucky Derby is Saturday afternoon. Stir in what should be an entertaining scrap between Canelo Alvarez and…

Dallas’ final early-voting numbers are in, and while they don’t show a wave of new voters like the one that hit Texas’ polls in 2018, they do reflect an electorate that seems at least a little more engaged than it was during city elections in 2015 and 2017. According to…