This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.
This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have a grab bag. There’s election news; Texas stock exchange news, including the return of Governor Goodhair; Tarrant County tax and jail news; news about exonerated convicts in Texas and Dallas County; schools news; an update on the nuns in Arlington; some Fort Worth history; a zooborn complete with Instagram reel; and more.
This week’s post was brought to you by the music of David Byrne’s Women’s Month music playlist. He posts a new playlist at the beginning of every month to his mailing list. I don’t like everything he puts on his playlists, but I always feel like I learned something from listening to them, and I always find something I like. He posts Spotify links, Apple Music links, and puts it on his own website as well. Check it out!
There’s no single story dominating the news this week, so let’s jump right in:
- Following up on the recent scandal where UNT’s med school was renting out unclaimed bodies from Dallas and Tarrant counties for research, er, cash, Rep. Tan Parker (R-Flower Mound) has promised to file a bill to keep that from happening again. Generally I regard bill announcements like this as a whole lotta nothing, but this is a good one and I hope someone sees it through to state law.
- KERA has an analysis of whether Dade Phelan has the votes to keep the Speakership. The answer is a big fat maybe. It says something about gerrymandering in this state that we can try to predict who’ll be speaker so confidently when we haven’t even started early voting.
- Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance is campaigning with a pastor from Keller who says Kamala Harris practices witchcraft. Lance Wallnau is one of the pastors who pushed the “seven mountains” mandate, one of the Christian Dominionist plans to take over the country. More on Wallnau from Judd Legum’s Popular Info.
- My friends in Denton County are disappointed to learn that they won’t be getting countywide voting centers this election. The county could implement countywide voting without the parties’ consent, but they’d rather wait for the parties to get with the program.
- It seems like it’s a little late but we now have a coalition of current and former Dallas officials opposing Monty Bennett’s HERO amendments that will tie the hands of the council on spending money for the foreseeable future, with the next chance to amend the charter in 2034. The DMN has more. And remember if you’re in Dallas, the HERO amendments are S, T, and U on our November 5 ballot.
- It looks like I get to go to the State Fair this year after all: Ken Paxton lost his appeal to the Texas Supreme Court and guns are banned from the fair this year. I’m sure he’ll find a way to force the fair to allow guns next year. The DMN also has the story.
- Dallas has an interim police chief: Michael Igo, a 33-year veteran of DPD and a top commander under departing chief Eddie Garcia. No additional word on the process for finding and hiring a new chief, though I suspect that won’t happen until after the election, when the dust of the HERO amendments will have settled. The DMN also has a piece on how Garcia built trust with the Hispanic community. Igo is white.
- Like some kind of penny, Rick Perry is back and working for the new Texas stock exchange. He’s also working with Dade Phelan, per the Texas Tribune. Remember the good old days when he was as bad as we thought the Republicans were going to get? Now he’s not even a moderate, he’s a liberal by TXGOP standards.
- Speaking of Texas and stock exchanges, NASDAQ is adding a DFW branch. Y’all Street indeed.
- The Star-Telegram has two analyses about the effect of the Tarrant County tax cuts. The first is on the tax cut for JPS Health Network, Tarrant County’s public health system. The second is about the effects of the new Tarrant Appraisal District reappraisal plan, which may open the district to charges of unfair/unequal taxation, which means additional appraisals, which means more taxpayer money spent. Also, Paul Bettencourt still thinks what Tarrant County is doing may be illegal.
- Tarrant County has offered the survivors of Georgia Kay Baldwin, a mentally ill woman who died in the county jail in 2021, $750,000 to settle a wrongful death lawsuit.
- The family of Chasity Bonner, who died in the Tarrant County Jail in May, brought her ashes to a County Commissioners’ meeting in hopes of getting some answers. The county is slow-rolling the release of the autopsy report, allegedly because the sherriff is on the ballot in November.
- Tarrant County has finally found a contractor to replace Youth Advocates Program, the juvenile services contractor they allegedly dropped because they talked about systemic racism and DEI on the YAP website. The winner is My Health My Resources of Tarrant County, which has no record in this area. It’s a local government unit with an appointed board that provides services to folks with intellectual and developmental delays and disabilities, substance abuse disorders, and mental health conditions. If you click through, you’ll see County Judge Tim O’Hare moving the ball on why Tarrant County dropped YAP because he knows a lot of voters still don’t like his actual reasons for doing it.
- Two Dallas doctors were sent to jail this week in a $45 million health care fraud over pain medications, specifically for steroid injections they didn’t perform. I’m a chronic pain patient and the idea that I could go to my pain clinic and not get the injections I was supposed to get is pretty upsetting.
- Amber Guyger, the former police officer who killed Botham Jean in 2018 because she’d gone to his apartment thinking it was her own, became eligible for parole on September 29. If he were still alive, Botham Jean would have turned 33 on the 29th.
- Since 2009, the state of Texas has paid almost $100 million to people wrongfully convicted of crimes. Of the 93 exonerees, 37 were convicted in Dallas County, with payouts to Dallas County exonerees totalling more than $54 million. I was bothered by the numbers until I finished reading the article and really thought about it; Dallas County has spent more time and money making wrongful convictions as right as they can than any other county in Texas, courtesy of the late Craig Watkins, the Black DA who started the Conviction Integrity Unit. Also, we had a lot of convictions under former DA Henry Wade (of Roe vs Wade) before he left office in 1987 which were ripe for review. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of Johnny Holmes cases in Harris County that are similarly ripe.
- Moving on to schools, we have some follow-up on the resignation (ahead of the sack) of former FWISD Superintendent Angelica Ramsey. The Fort Worth Report has a summary of her wins and losses and the Star-Telegram has a piece about some of the ongoing issues in the district. They also tell me that Ramsey’s getting a $500,000 payout as part of her contract severance. And here’s another story on what to expect in the superintendent search.
- Coppell ISD is closing its oldest elementary school, Pinkerton Elementary, which opened in 1928. The culprits: declining enrollment and budget issues.
- A Lake Ridge High School freshman in Mansfield ISD was told by his teacher to attend a Fellowship of Christian Athletes assembly during an advisory (study hall) period. The kicker is that the student is Choctaw and family members, including his father, were forced into Indian schools, where they were assimilated into white culture and forced to become Christian.
- A while ago, we talked about how the new Grand Prairie ISD superintendent was put on leave. Now we have a bit more of the story: per the school board, he allegedly violated policy on “discrimination, harassment and retaliation involving District employees”. They plan to release a report about the policy violation. Sounds juicy, and also sounds like they’ll be looking for a new superintendent.
- An expired concrete contract meant the city of Fort Worth ran out of concrete and a bridge in Ninnie Baird Park began to sink. All’s well that ends well, though; the bridge should already be repaired by the time you read this.
- Unsurprisingly, a report on the May storms here, the ones that left debris across the city that took months to collect, says that the city’s response was slow and its communication with residents was poor. Oncor, our electric utility, didn’t fare well either. (We lost power for a while immediately after the storm and three times afterwards while repairs were made, and we got off lightly.) The DMN has more.
- We also have an update on the Marvin Nichols reservoir plans, which have been around since the late 1960s and would flood more than 66,000 acres in northeast Texas to provide water to the Metroplex. Supporters and opponents of the reservoir met this week to discuss a preliminary draft of the feasibility study due in January. There’s more from the DMN and the Star-Telegram, whose report was written before the meeting but contains some interesting details about the site of the proposed reservoir.
- The suburb of Lake Dallas is short of funds, so they permanently closed the animal shelter. The $200,000 annual savings will fund road projects.
- Rep. Jasmine Crockett brought home the bacon to her South Dallas constituents: she earmarked $2.5 million for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center. The money will help improve the facility and lead into renovations funded by the $1.25 billion bond package we all voted for in May.
- In November, the Fort Worth Botanic Garden is breaking ground on a new family garden expected to open next summer. The linked piece has a nice history of the Garden Club but I had to do some googling to find this piece which says the new garden will take up two acres.
- I talked several times this summer about heat mapping in Dallas so I’d like to refer y’all to our host’s post on it this week.
- In an update on our friends the nuns in Arlington, the nuns have transferred their property to a foundation whose board is made up of supporters and family members of the nuns. The nuns have claimed all along that the Bishop and the Church are interested in the land their monastery is on, which is worth $3.8 million.
- Phase One of the Cotton Bowl renovations were complete in time for the Fair to start. The next phase will focus on accessibility for disabled fans; it will start in October after the Fair is over.
- The DMN has a bit of a puff piece on how the Mavericks are dealing with the politics of their owners when Miriam Adelson of the Sands group is a well-known Trump supporter and Mark Cuban, well, isn’t.
- Someone sent me this viral story from TMZ but I found it for y’all from a more reliable source. Taylor Swift signed an Eras-themed guitar for am Ellis County charity auction, and the guy who bought it for $4,000 expressed his opinion of Swift by smashing it. The auction spokesperson apparently hinted that the buyer was mad Swift had endorsed Kamala Harris. Whatever, dude.
- The Star-Telegram has a story about the 1911 stage play of Ben-Hur, presented at Fort Worth’s Byer’s Opera House. This was an elaborate travelling production that played for 20 years and was seen by more than 20 million people, and had live camels and chariot racing as part of its spectacle. I had no idea that Ben-Hur was such a big deal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it definitely puts the Charlton Heston film in context.
- Broadway Baptist Church has unveiled a portrait of a long-time Black custodian who died in 1959 and was never allowed to worship in the segregated church. It’s a really nice little story about how the church of today is striving to overcome the sin of segregation by atoning to the family of a man they wronged.
- We now have some renderings of the interior of the new Juneteenth museum on the site of the old Southside Community Center. The museum is expected to open in 2026.
- Last, but not least, we have a zooborn: a second baby mandrill who was born this year at the Fort Worth Zoo. You can check baby Jasper out on the zoo’s Instagram.