It’s not easy, turning a few hundred acres of environmentally contaminated landfill in a long-neglected semi-rural pocket of southern Dallas into a top-of-the-line golf course. But Dallas does not do things because they are easy; it does them because they seem world-class. And so, three years ago, Mayor Mike Rawlings and…
Last week brought renewed uproar over the Scott Griggs f-word matter (only in Dallas), in which a city council member was accused of attempting to coerce a public official by threatening to break her “fucking fingers” if she did blah-blah-blah with some documents. F. A grand jury three-weeks ago found…
Let’s not talk about the end of the 2015 Rangers season. We’ve dissected it too much already. The Rangers should not have made the playoffs. They had the American League’s seventh best run differential. They were lucky, outperforming their Baseball Prospectus third-order record expectation by almost eight wins. The Blue…
The state of Texas does a terrible job of providing sex education to its teenage residents. Ninety-four percent of the state’s school districts, according to the Texas Freedom Network, only educate kids about sex by telling them not to have it. Arguments against sex are often built around religious notions…
Three weeks ago a Dallas County grand jury looked at a felony “coercion” accusation against City Council member Scott Griggs and found it unworthy of prosecution. The term of art here is “no-billed.” Griggs was no-billed on an accusation that he had coerced a public official by threatening bodily harm…
The dumping of pig blood into a creek that feeds the Trinity River is an awkward moment in Dallas history. The Columbia Packing Co. was caught doing the type of corporate malfeasance that sounded like a story out of a Third World country or the Dark Ages, except the story…
Two years ago, DART proposed running a bus route from the city of McKinney to Parker Road train station. The transit agency was hoping to gain a foothold in the northern boom towns of Collin County, both to advance its vision of a seamless regional transit system and, more pragmatically,…
Just after the 2015 legislative session, Texas Governor Greg Abbott vetoed a bill that would have given limited criminal immunity to good Samaritans who called 911 to report a drug overdose. That wasn’t a very nice thing to do — something we were more than happy to point out. The…
The Texas Rangers have never been through anything like the seventh inning of Wednesday afternoon’s ALDS Game 5 with the Toronto Blue Jays. Neither have their fans, not in the 43 years the team has been in Arlington. It was, from the first pitch thrown to Rangers second baseman Rougned…
To get a flavor of the opposition to “Plano Tomorrow,” the northern suburb’s newly adopted comprehensive plan, you don’t need to listen to the dozens of residents who spoke against it at a marathon City Council meeting this week. Skimming this column by a leader of the opposition group Plano Future will…
Soon enough, this will officially not be happening, so let’s enjoy the possibility while we can. According to multiple reports, Dallas’ Pete Sessions has decided that he wants to be speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, assuming Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, whom Sessions would support, doesn’t toss his hat…
Just curious. In the wake of Monday’s random machete murder of a jogger on White Rock Trail, police have offered pieces of advice. Carry identification. I assume that would make it easier for them to identify my body. Don’t run alone. Sound advice. Even better, run only in the company…
A former employee of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office has filed a petition to remove District Attorney Susan Hawk from her job. Cindy Stormer, Hawk’s former administrative chief, filed the removal suit Tuesday, claiming that Hawk is unfit to serve because of her alleged drug abuse, financial impropriety and…
From the looks of it, what happened last Friday was a good sign for Dallas Police Chief David Brown. After about two weeks of being circled by his opponents, Brown got what appeared to be a robust show of support from nearly all of the Dallas City Council and Dallas…
Under its old policy, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office honored all requests for what’s known as an immigration hold from the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Anytime someone was booked into Dallas County Jail, ICE could request a hold and the person would be kept in Dallas County…
If you want to understand why the Justice Department is making the historic move to release 6,000 federal drug inmates on November 1, do not read any stories clearly intended for terrified gated-community-dwelling suburbanites, like this AP report, warning that “one inmate whose punishment was cut was described in 2012…
Do you ever get Houston envy? It’s terrible. For me it always starts with a scratchy throat, then a splitting headache. What could be worse? Really. What could be worse than being jealous of Houston? I sometimes get Fort Worth and San Antonio envies. They’re not quite as bad as…
Yeah, we know: Dallas is all about big houses with green lawns and a couple of cars in the garage — WRONG! Maybe that was true when your grandma was alive, but this is the 21st century. Apartment living is where it’s at, and in case you’ve been living under…
The state of Texas has won a small victory in its fight to continue dump stuff in water in defiance of new Environmental Protection Agency regulations meant to protect the integrity of the nation’s water supply. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined with other states’ attorneys general to stop the…
Dallas County appears to be about to get itself into another mess centered on the county’s entering into contracts with some of the entities that underpin the nation’s prodigious prison-industrial complex. Last year, the county almost banned in-person visits as part of a plan to implement widespread video visitation at…
Whatever you think is wrong with lazy stupid modern equivalency journalism — “This guy says chattel slavery is a bad thing, but this other guy says it’s great” — just watch out. We hacks are just the canary. The same syndrome is taking place deep in the coal mine of…
If you had just read this week’s Dallas City Council agenda, you might have thought the meeting was a good opportunity to get informed about Neighborhood Plus, the program developed by the city in response to accusations that it illegally concentrated low-income housing in the southern part of town. You…
