Dallas City Council remains on vacation till August (well, not everyone), but City Manager Mary Suhm and her staff remain at work needing to trim $20 million more out of the FY2011-12 budget to balance that sucker. Hence the memos sent to the council and mayor last night: One deals…
For those faithful few following the dramatic twists and turns in the Love Field concessions bidding process, you may recall that proposals were due Wednesday, following yet another extension given in June when prospective vendors had questions and concerns in need of answerin’. Well … at the beginning of this…
Just for the sake of historical accuracy, I would like to point out that the city of Dallas has claimed in court filings that the Sixth Floor Museum was behind the June 10, 2010, arrest and incarceration of Kennedy assassination author Robert Groden, who is charged with illegally selling literature…
I’ve heard from a few folks furious that council member Sheffie Kadane, a vocal proponent of gas drilling within the city limits, sat with the gas drilling task force yesterday during its inaugural meeting. As Marc McCord, an anti-drilling activist, put it in the comments below: “He showed up, took…
Earlier this year, state Rep. Marva Beck looked up at the elegant light fixtures above the House floor in Austin and decided they would be ruined by “squiggly” energy-efficient bulbs. So she delved into the bulb issue and co-authored a bill, recently signed into law by Governor Rick Perry, that…
Feels like it’s been a long while since we’ve touched upon the U.S. Senate candidacy of former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, last seen gigging David Dewhurst and who’s still insisting that the Trinity River Corridor Project is worthy of federal earmarks. Anyway. On Saturday he was down at the San…
At last, an interesting Redistricting Commission meeting. And a vaguely star-studded one too. Among those in attendance at last night’s meeting: council members Dwaine Caraway, Carolyn Davis and Tennell Atkins (who didn’t stick around the whole time), Schutze debating partner Sandra Crenshaw, preservationist Virgina McAlester and former plan commissioner Neil…
Gov. Rick Perry will be in Denton this week, according to his office, at which time he certainly will not address if and when he’s going to announce whether he’s running for the White House. And so, the day after the governor met with former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in…
This would be … what, round three? And here you thought the Living Plaza was a one-timer. Nope. It may be a 192 degrees tomorrow, but that’s not going to stop the City Hall staffers who’ve taken over where Jason Roberts, Brent Brown and William Whyte started. And so, beginning…
Leslie just got back from the first meeting of the city’s gas drilling task force; her wrap-up’s due shortly. But I tried tuning in earlier, thinking surely the city would live-stream this much-ballyhooed occasion. Instead I got to see Mike Rawlings conduct his first meeting as mayor (from June 27)…
Steve Thompson beat me to it, but no matter. Because, see, in advance of this evening’s meeting of the city’s Redistricting Commission, some of us were sneak-peeking the public’s submissions made to the commission, and lookie there: Among the stacks of maps is one turned in by a rather familiar…
About a month back we sneaked a peek at the city’s fingers-crossed attempt to find someone interested in buying the naming rights to the Elm Fork Athletic Complex off Walnut Hill Lane just west of Stemmons, a project expected to run upwards of $38 million and funded with 1998, 2003…
While Mike Rawlings is off in France, Rudy has a pay-walled piece in the morning’s paper recapping the to-do list offered when he was a candidate and the we’ll-see-about-that realities facing him as mayor: “Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings must find a way to deliver on promises.” Speaking of: As Leslie…
About 40 homeless people descended on Main Street Garden this morning, beginning just a little before 6. They congregated on the patio of the Lily Pad Cafe; as far as we could tell there were no “bums” in the crowd. These people were midway through their morning run. The group…
Last week, just outside of Houston, a little boy’s parents were scrambling. Doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital had told them there was nothing more they could do for the boy, 14-year-old Jordan Allen, whose brain is dotted with inoperable tumors. He was on a ventilator and in a coma, and…
On Monday, Texas Comptroller Susan Combs will cut the city of Dallas a sales-tax revenue check for $16,658,081.23, as you can see above; City Manager Mary Suhm says that’s 13 straight months the city has seen a “slight increase” in tax revenue, among the “slight, slow signs of a recovery.”…
If you were were strolling through Main Street Garden late this afternoon, perhaps accompanied by Angela Hunt and a homeless acquaintance or pausing to let your dog take a leisurely crap on its spacious green lawns, you may have seen a group of increasingly sweaty teenage boys running towards a…
Over the last several months, reporters here and at some of our sister papers have published stories about the mythical child-sex-trafficking pandemic allegedly sweeping our nation. Prodded by activist researchers and research-adverse activists, the media has obsessively repeated bogus claims that hundreds of thousands of children are being held in…
This morning the city posted the agenda for the first-ever meeting of the Gas Drilling Task Force, which kicks off Tuesday at 2 p.m., don’t be late. The agenda’s mostly a bunch of introductory what-whats: Chair Lois Finkelman will give some opening remarks, outline its scope and schedule, review the…
The in-box is filled this morning with more news concerning Rick Perry’s “day of prayer and fasting” in Houston next month — you know, The Response. Let’s begin with this: Several Friends of Unfair Park have forward a piece I first saw this morning on Startlegram great Bud Kennedy’s Facebook…
Tuesday night, I was on the phone with Park and Rec second-in-command Willis Winters, who happened to be standing near the Lily Pad in Main Street Garden. Mid-sentence, he stopped talking, said, “Excuse me,” then said, rather loudly to someone standing near him: “Are you going to pick that up?”Ah,…
On a certain local man’s 65th birthday, The New York Times wonders whether Dubya and Gov. RIck Perry’s relationship will help or hurt the latter’s more-n-likely run for the White House. After all, they’re frienemies now — have been for years, with Perry insisting since at least ’07 that “George…
