The U.S. Supreme Court today has ruled against the city of Dallas in its lawsuit over the proposed Neches River Reservoir — an 11th hour reprieve for the state’s last wild river. It’s a two-word ruling – “certiorari denied” – but it means the city is out of luck on…

It will be really interesting to see how city staff handles this week’s stunning announcement of a $23 million federal grant to fund a trolley connecting downtown with North Oak Cliff. This is not at all where the staff wanted to go. Last October I covered a city council briefing…

Can’t let this pass without pointing something out. Two stunning stories that have come down the pike in the past 24 hours — the awarding of a major federal grant for trolley in Oak Cliff and the success of preservationists in forcing DISD to back down, at least temporarily, from…

Trying to get to my post at Unfair Park. Big weather issues here. See photo. Huge branch the size of the Sears Tower fell on wife’s car. Worse: I had inadvertently left money bag containing $1 million-plus in rubles on top of car, part of inheritance I received recently from…

Doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price was telling everybody that County Judge Jim Foster was wacky? Now who wears the wacko jacket every week at commissioners court? This week Price harangued Foster for wanting to direct the county’s constables to carry out background…

Unfair Park has waited all day for a response from Larry Friedman, one of several lawyers representing embattled Dallas County Constable Jaime Cortes, concerning a digital sound recording somebody made of a meeting yesterday involving Cortes and 30 of his deputies. At 9 this morning he said he would get…

Interesting story inside The Dallas Morning News today about cuts in the federal budget for the Dallas Trinity River levee project. I’m not saying The News story is any kind of propaganda. Just saying there’s more there than meets the eye. Here is what is sort of buried or smooshed…

[Editor’s note: Tonight, Jim spoke with sources familiar with the negotiations between the Museum of the American Railroad and the city. Among those to whom he spoke is Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm. His update follows at the end of this item. But, long story short, reports Jim: “This has…

Well, as usual, The Dallas Morning News prints stuff, and then it’s up to me to come along behind them and do clean-up on the story. What am I? Their journalistic janitor? Mariana Greene, The News’s garden editor and author of a column called “Gardening Fool,” has a story in…

So, that was why Richard Allen stood us all up at the altar a week ago. I think I feel…better. Strangely. It’s kind of like: Good news, the groom’s not dead. Bad news: The groom’s not coming. I got the answer to the mystery Wednesday morning when Allen confirmed to…

Over the last year, whenever I have spoken with Richard Allen, CEO of The Allen Group, he has been open at times, guarded at others. But I have to say today, when he and I talked about his entry into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, he sounded better than he has in…

For me, a good City Hall audit report is better reading than a John Grisham novel. You just have to know how to read it (upside down, holding it up to the mirror, between the lines). Today’s offering is the City Auditor’s report on the police department’s Employee Morale Fund,…

Ah, you know, even a blind hog can find the truth buried somewhere in The Dallas Morning News if he knows how to root-hog-or-die. Reminds me of the thing I wrote about two years ago, when The News waited until the day after the Trinity River referendum to reveal something…

You heard it here first. Possibly. If you have already heard it somewhere else, please keep that to yourself. I want the credit. North Oak Cliff is the new Austin. Only better than Austin. Because the new community being created in Oak Cliff is for people who actually have jobs…

Lori Stahl, over on The News’s Park Cities Blog, is making light of a serious situation in my home. My wife got talked into bringing a lost chicken into the house this week. You could talk her into rescuing anything. She’s never come home with a lost gorilla (and I…

The Schutze household has been working on a mystery all day about how to call the city for bulk trash pickup if the trucks keep skipping your block during pickup week. We found that we could not reach 311 — the service number for the city — from our cell…

In order to help Haiti, you don’t have to just sling cash out into the great unknown. Several groups in Dallas have long-standing involvement in relief efforts there — among them Dallas-Haiti Project, which has been around for eight years. It began with nine women connected with St. Michael and…

Well, we’re sort of zeroing in, slowly, on the answer to my question: Who paid for that “One More Thing” promotional video about Dallas shown to the city council yesterday? You know: scenes from around the city with exciting Dallas celebrities, like city council members, doing goofy dances, put together…

Last week I attended a community meeting in East Dallas where an angry crowd of middle-class homeowners denounced community gardeners as a dangerous, invasive horde of “foreigners” and “maids” seeking to destroy the tranquility of their peaceful neighborhood. Gardeners. Who knew? So, City Hall was right. Community gardening is as…

Environment Texas, an Austin-based research group, made available today a report on Texas rivers that lists the state’s most dangerously polluted waterways, particularly those fouled by chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects. And to mark the report’s release, at 1 p.m. the group will gather media types and local…