Après Le Deluge, a Trinity Tour

I paid a visit today to the Margaret Hunt Hill suspension bridge construction site on the Trinity River because a frequent correspondent had expressed concern about the effects of recent heavy rains. His worry was about the two big pier footings right by the river’s edge: When viewed from the…

“Off Course,” | Cheap Bastard, | Same Old, Same Old

“Off Course,” by Jim Schutze, April 23 till it’s gone Building reservoirs to feed Dallas’ growth is Texas’ version of paving paradise to put up a parking lot. Jim R. from Sachse, via dallasobserver.com That reservoir has been planned for decades. Dallas is going to need that water to prosper…

Dallas has trouble locating planet Earth

Atlas shrugged: On Monday, 14th Civil District Judge Eric Moye put the planet Earth back where it belongs, much to the relief of people clinging to its surface in one East Dallas neighborhood. In the infamous “dirt skirts” case, a zoning dispute over building heights, Moye ruled that city of…

Moye Rules: Earth is Flat!

At 2:30 p.m. today 14th Civil District Judge Eric Moye put the Planet Earth back where it belongs, much to the relief of people clinging to its surface in one East Dallas neighborhood. In the infamous “dirt skirts” case, a zoning dispute over building heights, Moye ruled that city of…

Report on Trinity Levees Shows A Failure of Dallas’ Leadership

The crisis over the Dallas levee system represents a total failure of the traditional leadership class in this city. We can and will argue for years about why this happened, but the important thing now is that it did. The mayor lied. City council members, with the exception of Angela…

Enter Sand, Man

Astute Friend of Unfair Park “Wylie H.” drilled into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ report on the Trinity River levees yesterday evening and found the real horror story that goes almost unmentioned in this morning’s Dallas Morning News account of the report: the story of the day we almost…

John Wiley Price, Still Fit at 59!

Month or so ago, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price called me up and reamed me out for suggesting he may be carrying water for Ross Perot Jr. and the Perot-dominated Alliance freight airport in Fort Worth. The commissioner told me he barely knows Mr. Perot and said he couldn’t…

Nyah, Nyah, Nyah: We Told You the Trinity Project Wouldn’t Work

For 11 years the Dallas Observer has been reporting the existence of serious, fundamental life-and-death design errors in the Trinity River project, a huge public-works undertaking to rebuild the river through downtown Dallas alongside a new highway and parks. Above all else, this was to be a flood-safety project, but…

Blow, Steve

Steve Blow writes today on The Dallas Morning News’s Metro Blog about Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, the Trinity River toll road and Blow’s own support of Leppert in the past:Yet I don’t feel misled by the mayor. In thinking about it, I finally hit upon the pertinent word for me:…

Dallas a Great Convention Town — for Nuns

Mayor Tom Leppert and The Dallas Morning News are hell-bent for leather to invest half a billion bucks in public money in a city-owned convention “headquarters” hotel downtown to save the city’s convention business. But should we stop and reflect on the fact that the decline in the city’s convention…