This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.
This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, it’s all elections all the time, both the May 4 general election and the May 28 runoff. Plus, student protests, more on the Tarrant County Judge’s dislikes, book banning, the Arlington nuns, the Dallas firm that wants non-competes back, the Pennsylvania billionaire that’s dropping big cash on pro-voucher PACs in Texas, problems in the Tarrant and Dallas County jails, the Dallas Wings are coming to Dallas, Texas documentaries at the Dallas International Film Festival, and a new lake in North Texas. And more!
This week’s post was brought to you by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, whom we saw this week. They were a lot of fun and we recommend catching them if they come to your town on this tour.
Let’s start with some talk about the May 4 general election, which is currently in early voting. (Get out and vote, this weekend if you haven’t already done so. That’s my current plan.) We have a lot of local stories that cover what you need to know about the Tarrant County races, the Dallas bonds, DISD trustees, and even one of the DCAD races.
- Star-Telegram: Early voting begins in city, school elections: Key races on ballot in Fort Worth area.
- Also Star-TelegramEarly voting is under way in Texas. Find all of our Tarrant County endorsements here.
- D Magazine: Early Voting for May Elections Starts Today. Here’s What You Need to Know..
- Also D Magazine: A Voter’s Guide to the 2024 Bond Package.
- Dallas Morning News: Who is running for Dallas ISD school board?.
- Dallas Free Press: Here’s your cheat sheet for the Dallas ISD District 9 election.
- DMN: North Texas schools want $2.5B for safety, upgrades and more. About all the bonds on the May ballot.
- And a bunch of stories from the DMN about the bond: What to know about Dallas’ $1.25 billion 2024 bond program; Dallas bond election to decide fate of $19 million to shelter homeless people; Dallas’ bond package proposes upgrades for a dozen city libraries. They also have an op-ed on the arts bond package.
- Howdy Politics on Instagram has has some school board recommendations for all of us in Texas. Related, as always I think you should check out The Book Loving Texan’s Guide to the May School Board Elections for recommendations and anti-recommendations.
- Fort Worth Report: Tarrant Appraisal District anticipates election will cost $645,000. The story notes the election is an unfunded mandate.
- And last but not least, local blogger Mark Steger weighs in on the DCAD race and the Dallas College race. Even my local Democratic party folks haven’t weighed in on DCAD place one.
That’s a lot, but when we’re done, we also get a primary runoff election on May 28, about which we’re getting a lot of coverage already. To wit:
- DMN: These 3 runoff races will affect the North Texas political landscape. Specifically the Republican primary races in HD 33 in Collin County and CD 12 and the Democratic race for Dallas County sherriff.
- NBCDFW: Tarrant County Texas House seat sees a rematch in May runoff election. This one is about the Republican runoff in HD 91.
- Texas Tribune: Republican North Texas congressional candidates debate Ken Paxton’s impeachment, Ukraine relief funding. This is about CD 12.
- Texas Tribune: North Texas Senate runoff creates strange bedfellows, divides usual allies within GOP. This one is SD 30’s runoff.
And with that all under our belts, let’s go look at the rest of the news coming out of the Metroplex and surrounding areas.
- Statewide, student protests about the situation in Gaza have been in the news, particularly at UT Austin. While we haven’t had anything so spectacular in North Texas as I write, we are having protests. Pro-Palestine students held a sit-in in the hallway in front of UT Dallas’ presidents’ office this week and UT Arlington had about 150 students protesting near the library. The Dallas Observer has more.
- Our only junior senator has been running his mouth on the subject of those protests. He told a Fort Worth audience UT ought to arrest and expel pro-Palestine protestors at a fundraiser for Cheryl Bean, who is the hard-right candidate in the runoff for HD-97.
- The Dallas Observer has some thoughts about what we should be looking for in a new City Manager from Dallas. Meanwhile, Mayor Johnson would like you to know that he really got along fine with T.C. Broadnax and it’s just the rotten mean press, complete with standard Republican anti-press talking points, making up their feud.
- I mentioned last week I thought there was something interesting about our local preacher Reverend Haynes quitting Rainbow PUSH less than three months after he started. Turns out Jesse Jackson still wanted to pull the strings which surprises me not at all. Best of luck to the Reverend in his local work here in Dallas.
- This piece came in while I was writing: Who is Jeff Yass, the TikTok billionaire pumping millions into the Texas voucher fight? I’ve been keeping an ear out for him and what else he was doing for a while now and had these two Guardian stories about his efforts in his home state of Pennsylvania marked. Per the DMN link, he’s given a bunch of money to school voucher PACs including one linked to Club for Growth and he’s spent $46 million nationally on the 2024 election. This guy, like our homegrown troublemaker Harlan Crowe, needs more light shining on him.
- Speaking of troublemakers, let’s talk about Tarrant County’s County Judge Tim O’Hare. Local activists denounced his recent treatment of Commissioner Alisa Simmons in a recent Commissioner’s Court session as racist, misogynistic, and generally disrespectful. O’Hare is mad about it and moreover his Black Republican friend says he’s not racist.
- Absolutely unrelated to any of this is O’Hare’s interest in the Big Thought for Creative Solutions Summer Program, which was discontinued after O’Hare called it out for politicizing our children. The program helps youth in the juvenile detention system using visual, performing and digital arts. But they used the words economic and racial equity in their web site, so the program had to go.
- You may remember that O’Hare’s election security cronies decided Tarrant County should use numbered ballots in elections going forward. Turns out they may not legally be able to do that. Reading through the linked article gives more context to O’Hare’s relationship with Alisa Simmons, as well.
- USA Today has a fact check on a claim that two million people have registered to vote without photo ID in Texas, Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2024. It ain’t so, friends.
- This week we’ve seen two more deaths in Tarrant County’s jails. The Star-Telegram has more about the first death and KERA has more about the second.
- The Dallas Observer has an updated list of books banned in public schools in Texas. And the Star-Telegram has a review of Fort Worth ISD’s book bans now that some books are being returned to classrooms there.
- The head of Dallas’ IT services is resigning to take a job in the private sector. He oversaw the recovery from last year’s cyberattack. He says his departure is not related to that of City Manager T.C. Broadnax.
- Our host has expressed interest this week in the current doings in the saga of the Arlington nuns. The latest is that the nuns are seeking a restraining order against Catholic officials, aka the Bishop and the Association of Christ the King. The DMN and the Star-Telegram have more. My opinion, after having read quite a few things about this story (including this Texas Monthly story, which I’m sure both Charles and I have linked before) is that the Bishop is a jerk and it’s not surprising the nuns don’t like him, and the land that nunnery is sitting on is worth some money so the nuns fear they’re going to lose their home. Unfortunately after a year and more, it’s going to be very difficult for the nuns to trust the Bishop even if he’s willing to reassure them they’re not going to be kicked out of their premises. I wish the nuns luck and peace.
- It was Earth Day on Monday and there were protests leading to a handful of arrests at the GAF shingle plant in West Dallas.
- We’ll see how long it takes for the Lege to undo this: Plano has new zoning rules that ban new short-term rentals in single-family neighborhoods. You know that cities protecting families over investors is not going to fly in Greg Abbott’s Texas. The DMN has more.
- Axios says flippers in the Metroplex are making less money than they used to but there are still a lot of fixer-uppers out there. People just want to fix houses themselves.
- You may have heard that the Federal Trade Commission banned most noncompete agreements recently. The first suit against that ruling has already been filed by a Dallas tax consulting firm. If you want to know more about this firm, you can read this American Prospect story, which describes the principal it’s named after as Trump’s tax adviser and mentions in passing that they’ll sue their own clients if the clients don’t go after certain refunds the company suggests. Yikes! But of more interest to readers is their general counsel and particularly the GC’s wife, who spent a couple of years on the Board of Trustees for Carroll ISD (Southlake). She’s a lawyer and had worked for Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. So that’s who is against noncompetes.
- We had a fatal school shooting in the Metroplex this week at Bowie High in Arlington. The shooter was 17 and is in custody. Unfortunately related is this poem from the Texas Observer: Poem: Elegy for the [Insert School Shooting] Children’s F-.
- The Dallas Observer has its list of every mass shooting in Texas in 2024 so far.
- Dallas County has had a lot of IT problems, as we’ve noted. Here’s a really bad outcome from the Odyssey rollout: a parole violator was held for two months longer than he should have been last summer. Dallas County just settled with him for $100,000. The County had no comment for this story.
- Speaking of the county jail in Dallas County, the jail facilities advisory committee just submitted a report on its state that says the current jail is not fit for purpose and cannot be renovated. A new jail will cost $3 to $5 billion for a 7,200 bed facility, with the midpoint of the construction being 2032.
- I learned a lot about private policing in Dallas from this article about it in the Dallas Free Press.
- The Dallas Police Department would like you to join Dallas CONNECT, a registry for your security camera. At this time, the police can’t look through registered residential cameras without the permission of homeowners.
- We were speculating about a secret sports initiative called Project X that Dallas City Council was working on a few weeks ago. I think we now know what it was: Council just signed off on $19 million in incentives to bring the Dallas Wings of the WNBA back to Dallas from Arlington. They’ll be playing in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Dallas Memorial Arena. The DMN has more. I used to enjoy going to Comets games now and then when I lived in Houston, so maybe I’ll try out a Wings game.
- What does it cost to live in Dallas? Refinery 29 has a money diary for a week’s spending for a writer who lives in Dallas. She seems like a lot of my neighbors: eating a lot of Mexican food, and spending big on dog treats and food.
- The Dallas-based auction house whose auctions I post about helped the OG Enterprise from the original Star Trek series get home to the Roddenberry family.
- Some Texas history for you: the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, mother of Quanah Parker, who was taken by and adopted into the Comanche tribe in 1836.
- This is a wild story about a Denton band scammed by AI music that was put on Spotify under their name. This makes me worry for some of my local/regional musician friends.
- The Hollywood Reporter tells me that DFW is now an Oscars eligibility market: films can be released here for one week in 2024 to be eligible for the 2025 Oscars. And on that note, the Dallas Film Festival is premiering two interesting Texas documentaries this week: the Uvalde doc Print It Black and Dark Sanctuary: The Story of The Church, about a Goth club here in Dallas that closed in 2020.
- And finally, in good outdoor news, Texas has a new lake. Bois D’Arc Lake is in Fannin County, about an hour’s drive northeast of Dallas, and it’s a reservoir for the North Texas Municipal Water District.
The last link is HORRIBLE news, not good, and indicate that neither Ginger nor Kuff is that much of an environmentalist. Having once lived in the area, and knowing the last landowners forced to sell, I can tell you that:
A. This lake will likely turn into a giant mud puddle half the time in summer with climate change.
B. Its recreational boost is way overstated.
C. It wouldn’t be needed if people in the Metromess like Ginger didn’t waste so much water.