I am still trying to absorb the 189-page ruling of U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood J. Duval yesterday in the Corps of Engineers Katrina lawsuit in New Orleans, but an early read of it produces this clear and overwhelming impression: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just took one big…

Supposedly we just had ethics reform at Dallas City Hall. Let’s talk about ethics. But let’s talk about the real world. There’s this thing in Dallas I call death by a thousand tables. It was at the center of the recent Dallas City Hall corruption trial in federal court in…

Your Trinity River correspondent and advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist, which would be me, had two interesting experiences yesterday. First up was a screening of Living with the Trinity, KERA Television’s hour-long documentary by award-winning producer-director Rob Tranchin, which airs Monday at 9 p.m. The second experience was a “scoping meeting” (which, as…

This is so sad. It’s tragic. I’m going to write about the Trinity River project again. I did all 12 steps. For what? After the voters of Dallas, in their infinite and manifest wisdom, voted in favor of the project (for the second time) in a referendum two years ago,…

Almost 200 people squeezed into a stuffy Dallas Center for Architecture conference room last night to see plans for the deck park being built over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway, and guess what, Dallas! A New York architect has designed a vast mainly treeless expanse with glass buildings for us! Those…

This morning the city council is debating lobbyist reform, and the lobbyists are all here. And nervous. They have their own corner of the city council chamber, front row, extreme left (from my direction in the peanut gallery, extreme right from the council’s perspective). They’re all over there looking like…

Oh, you caught me here at my desk doing a little quick calculation, totting some things up, always a dangerous exercise for a history major. I picked up what I thought was jarring news during a routine city council committee meeting this morning. I’m trying to see how things might…

In an editorial today The Dallas Morning News gives all the credit for better ethics at City Hall to Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert because, “In the end, Tom Leppert didn’t blink.” They must have sent a greenhorn over to cover the city council’s straw vote on ethics reform last week…

The Dallas Morning News op-ed page always bends over backward to give both sides their say. If somebody turns in an opinion piece saying babies should not be cut into chunks and eaten, they’ll hunt around all week until they find someone else to write the opposing view. But if…

Here’s proof, as if we needed it, that Woodrow Wilosn is the one high school in Dallas capable of producing high-achieving graduates not afraid to appear in international situations wearing odd pants. We offer this photo of Woodrow Wilson High School Over-and-Over Achiever Thomas Simpson and the Princeton University Tigertones…

Wait a minute. I know I almost promised last week that I wouldn’t write about the Dallas City Hall federal corruption trial again soon. But you know—almost promising is when you really wish you were going to keep your promise, but you can’t promise you will. So, tell me. The…

Two more things about the Dallas City Hall corruption trial. Then I’m done. I almost promise. I’m having trouble with something. Many people I talk to who know Don Hill, our former mayor pro tem recently convicted on seven of nine corruption counts in federal court, feel sorry for him…

Angela Hunt is putting the bite on the mayor today on the issue of ethics reform.The council is being briefed on possible new ethics rules growing out of the City Hall corruption case. Council member Hunt and four other members signed a letter a couple weeks ago asking City Attorney…

This terrible City Hall corruption trial we just went through—11 people either found guilty of federal crimes or pleading guilty to them—wasn’t about black Dallas. It was about Dallas. To see the real story, try to focus on this one small chapter. This little play within the play, about events…

Grudgingly, I have to say that the two Dallas City Council members who asked the best questions at today’s council briefing on downtown trolleys were Ron Natinsky and Dave Neumann. Both of them wanted to know why the proposed governing body for a downtown trolley system would put the City…

What am I doing here with a notebook, waiting for DART trains and being abused by people? I’ve been out here trainspotting for the last few days, and it’s not much fun. They made a movie about trainspotting, I know, but I think all the people in that movie were…

Lots of speculation going on around town about whether the next shoe to fall in Dallas’s ongoing City Hall corruption woes may be a Gucci to the head of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. Today, matter of fact, Kevin Krause has posted a tidbit on The News’s City hall…

At a mid-afternoon press conference dealing with the blizzard of guilty verdicts earlier today for five defendants in the Dallas City Hall corruption case, U.S. Attorney Jim Jacks of the Northern District of Texas seemed to wag a cautionary finger in the direction of Dallas voters: “At the end of…

So, it turns out Patrick “Buzz” Williams was right. No matter how you do the accounting, how you structure the contracts, how you interpret arcane campaign finance laws and city ethics policies, getting caught on camera accepting 10 grand in cash out back of a church is still like getting…