I know nobody asked me. But the latest development in the story of the police chief’s son is just too much to ignore. Under relentless hectoring by Dallas police unions, City Manager Mary Suhm has hired attorney Terry Hart, a respected former federal prosecutor who worked on Don Hill’s gag-order…

An extremely important thing happened at the city council meeting this morning. Nothing happened. I can’t tell you how big that is. Angela Hunt won. Mayor Tom Leppert told a packed house that the city council had agreed informally not to vote on the contentious Love Field concessions issue, directing…

The Dallas Morning News has been doing stories and editorials about the shrinking population of black students in the Dallas public school system—a phenomenon the newspaper calls “black flight.” In its first story the paper reported: “Interviews with dozens of parents reveal that the exodus is not fueled by a…

The irony here is that true historic preservation activists in Dallas are going to welcome this latest bit of Trinity River toll road news. I began hearing from them long before the Corps went public with its efforts to get some kind of protective historic designation for the Trinity project…

Yesterday’s mail included a couple of letters from the Texas Attorney General, which I will share, regarding two unrelated matters. The first was an opinion dealing with my letter to Dallas Area Rapid Transit on March 23 in which I requested: “All reports generated by DART’s departments of board support,…

I hate it when things work out. From my point of view, it’s not good for business. But it looks like city staff and the Dallas City Council may actually come up with a reasonable way to oversee operations of multiple neighborhood farmers markets. Ah, well. Can’t lose ’em all…

D has posted an item on its blog, FrontBurner, reporting that I traveled by kayak out to the Calatrava bridge site and defecated on the bridge to show my disapproval. The item, written by D Major Domo Tim Rogers, was satirical and not meant to be taken seriously. But a…

Just sitting here drumming my fingers on the desk. It’s been six weeks. I asked City Hall a simple question. I’m still waiting for their call. This is starting to remind me of my teenage dating career. My question to the city six long weeks ago was this: How many…

Roscoe Betz won his lawsuit. I have written about him before. He’s the 91-year-old man who sued DART, the transit agency, three years ago for damming up a creek and flooding his property. DART argued there was no creek. The guy just thinks there’s a creek. Two weeks ago a…

This morning’s daily newspaper provided a sad occasion to reflect on downtown Dallas. Tom Lardner, an early developer of Dallas’s Uptown district, died May 24. His classified-ad death notice is in The Dallas Morning News today but no editorial obituary has appeared yet. I had lunch with him about a…

Last night I joined my cover-story-mate Ed Spencer and his daughter, Amy Hammer, at White Rock Lake, where we poached on the Asleep at The Wheel concert at the Dallas Arboretum from our kayaks. First time we had ever done it, but a regular group gathers on the lake in…

Five years ago a fierce battle was fought to stop the demolition of a house on my block in Dallas’s first and oldest historic district (The Swiss Avenue Historic District). Blogista (and friend) Sharon Boyd called those of us who wanted to save the house “Preservation Nazis,” which I guess…

Someone has posted to YouTube a 1961 film about school desegregation in Dallas called Dallas at the Crossroads. (Parts Two and Three follow after the jump.) I forget what kind of hoops I had to jump through in order to see this thing back in the mid-1980s when I was…

For most people, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert’s campaign to open up the bidding process for concessions at the city airport must seem open and shut. He wants the bidding to be open. But the door is shut because the concessions are in the hands of politically connected people. For insiders…

This morning Rudy Bush and Tanya Eiserer posted a great story on The Dallas Morning News’s Web page about Dallas city council member Dwaine Caraway pressuring the Dallas Police department to lay off a gambling house where Caraway and his father play poker. The story includes a strong quote from…

Yesterday The Dallas Morning News editorial page rolled out the big cannons and opened fire again on Oak Cliff Metals, a metal recycling yard on Pontiac Street in Oak Cliff that the paper wants moved, we know not why. The editorial, which I’m sure was written by editorialisto Tod Robberson,…

Curtis Lockey and Craig MacKenzie, erstwhile developers of the LTV Tower 1600 Pacific Building and subjects of my column in the current edition of the paper, have sent to Dallas City Council members and city staffers a letter alleging deliberate discrimination against low-income persons and families on the part of…

Don Hill, the Dallas City Council member recently sent to federal prison for 18 years for bribery and corruption, didn’t use a baseball bat on people. He was a lawyer. He used parliamentary procedure. The table, I call it. Hill knew developers always have a clock ticking—money sifting away like…

The contractor on the new headquarters of Dallas Black Dance Theatre is suing DBDT founder and artistic director Ann Williams and her daughter for 10 million bucks for “tortious interference” (messing with his money) and defamation. If it doesn’t settle early, this could be an intriguing window on DBDT, a…