Maybe nobody else cares, but my wife and I got curious over the weekend why the city’s water mains break in cold weather, since we were left without water for several hours Saturday night. We live in a neighborhood of old houses with poorly insulated pipes. Most people leave their…

I covered a community meeting last night at Winfrey Point on White Rock Lake to discuss plans for a community garden off Fisher Road in East Dallas, and … what can I say? It was pretty much a total rout for the gardeners, portrayed as an ominous invading horde by…

Apparently on the TV news tonight we will see a story I can only describe as the Dallas’s First Truly Awkward Moment of 2010. Dallas Police Lieutenant Regina Smith will lead a cortege of a dozen uniformed officers and several television news crews to strew rose petals at the apartment…

Speaking of Craig James, here goes a big mistake. I’m going to invade Richie’s territory and offer an opinion on a sports story. I was actually prohibited from writing about sports once when I was a daily newspaper reporter because of my appalling lack of knowledge. Maybe I’m about to…

Dallas City Auditor Craig D. Kinton just published his department’s audit of maintenance of city-owned buildings, which makes for some mildly amusing reading this morning. It’s after the jump, but what would you imagine the biggest problem might be, in terms of gauging how well the city maintains its buildings?…

Normally what newspaper writers do at the end of year is fulminate—rant and rave. But I do that all year long. So for me the end of the year ought to be time to get a grip. You know what really does calm me down and cheer me up this…

Reading The Dallas Morning News is easy. I don’t know why people complain. I had at least three conversations Sunday with grumpy people all upset and confused about the Gromer Jeffers story in the Sunday paper: “Issue of Dallas’ next mayor isn’t so clear cut.” “Where does this come from?”…

How many people in Dallas know that our downtown farmers market is outclassed and out-performed by the farmers market in Detroit? Or that Dallas, which thinks of itself as a kind of capital of free enterprise, is way deeper into government control and regulation of farmers markets than Detroit? Irony…

I want to confess in advance. I, Jim Schutze, am a party to the KwanzaaFest scandal. It’s all going to come out now. I knew this would happen. I’m ready for my hands-over-the-face paddy wagon shot now. Rudy Bush has posted excerpts from the findings of Danny Defenbaugh, the private…

The cabal that has always controlled the Dallas school district—and that includes the editorial page of The Dallas Morning News—doesn’t even know what hit it in the recent school board election. I do. One word. Labor. The teachers unions, traditionally fractured and at odds with each other, banded together very…

As Unfair Park already noted earlier this morning, The Dallas Morning News has a hell of a story this morning about the Dallas Police Department and the feeling of some experts and involved citizens that it has been cooking the books on violent crime. It’s a journalistic triumph for reporters…

Now, it’s on to that community gardens and neighborhood farmers market briefing. Follow along at home. Try to keep up.A city staff guy, Eric Griffin, is talking to the city council about community gardens. I interviewed Griffin for my story about how City Hall does everything it can to screw…

Linda Koop, chair of the city council’s Transportation and Environment Committee, and Gary Thomas, president of Dallas Area Rapid Transit, are having a mutual smooch-fest today at this afternoon’s committee briefing, congratulating each other on what a terrific job DART did carrying passengers on the day of the Texas-OU game…

I owe an apology to the members of the Dallas County Commissioners Court for remarks in my column this week. I write that they sat idly by and did nothing during a recent outburst by Commissioner John Wiley Price, during which he gave the impression he was about to hit…

Here’s the question. Who’s ever going to finally kick John Wiley Price’s ass? Here’s the answer: Me. I have made up my mind. John Wiley, you better run. I just can’t take any more of his shit. One day soon—let’s keep it a surprise—I’m going to go down there to…

[Editor’s note at 4:27 p.m.: Jim has opted to turn this item into a live blog concerning the afternoon’s doings at Dallas City Hall. The Simon David debate has wrapped with a vote in favor of the store’s expansion, so the council has moved on to the University of North…

Well, looks like Randall’s Food & Drugs, which owns the Simon David at 7117 Inwood Road, thinks they’ve got next week’s zoning vote at city council in the bag.I wrote to Connie Yates, their PR person, earlier this week, asking questions about their plan to demolish houses and re-route a…

I love plaintiff’s lawyers. I wish they were way richer. I hate “tort reform.” Plaintiff’s lawyers are cool, because they sue the socks off bullies. That’s what this column is about. I would urge any plaintiff’s lawyer who might be reading this column to snip it out of the paper…

Pins and needles here.At 2:30 pm the Corps of Engineers releases its report on the city’s proposed fix for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. They’re doing it not at any public venue but at the Oak Lawn offices of The Trinity Trust, the private lobby group for the Trinity River…

I have been a reporter all my working life, half of that time for daily newspapers, so who knows what volume of fish-wrap I must have ground out over the years, how many tens of thousands of interviews I’ve done. Yet in all that volume of chat, a very few…

After the jump, you’ll find a letter Angela Hunt sent today to the Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in which she begs Troy D. Collins, the deputy district engineer, not to hurry up the approval process for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. She wants the…