This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.
This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, a DFW representative jumps into the House Speaker’s race; Tarrant County keeps making it less easy for people to register and vote, but has to roll back occasionally; the Texas Tribune catches an illegal land transfer to a religious school; Dallas needs to give its next City Manager some actual goals; school district news; the latest from the Tarrant County jail; Dallas gets a sovereign citizen cop-killer; Daniel Perry’s north Texas domestic violence case; Dallas civil rights hero Juanita Craft gets a headstone; and how the FBI investigated a Dallas man for selling missile secrets to the Daleks, no cap.
This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Kelly Lee Owens, whose new album is out this week.
- KERA has an analysis of changing voting patterns in North Texas. Like me, their analyst doesn’t expect any blue waves to take Texas this year, though the suburbs are becoming more competitive for Democrats. At the same time, Republicans are making inroads into urban Latine populations.
- The race to kick Dade Phelan out of the Speaker’s chair is on, and David Cook (R-Mansfield) has joined it. More from the Star-Telegram and the Texas Tribune.
- Tarrant County Commissioners forced voter registration tables outside of county buildings back in July, but they’ve now reversed that policy so folks can register inside and neither registrars nor prospective voters are risking heat stroke. The byplay between County Judge Tim O’Hare and Commissioner Gary Fickes, a Republican, mentioned in the article is pretty interesting. I recommend clicking through and reading, and trying not to let Tarrant GOP chair Bo French get your blood pressure up too much.
- Speaking of voter registration, the Star-Telegram editorial board would like folks to ignore the Fox News lies about registering undocumented aliens and chill out about registering folks to vote.
- In related news, Tarrant County Commissioners voted on party lines not to expand early voting locations as County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig requested because some of the locations were on college campuses. Apparently, according to County Judge Tim O’Hare, that’s a method of trying to get some groups to vote at the expense of others. More from the Star-Telegram.
- The Star-Telegram columnist Mac Engels explains what he thinks it will take to get gambling in Texas and why Jerry Jones is more likely to get another Super Bowl ring than a casino.
- Meanwhile, the DMN has an op-ed on the “Y’all Street” phenomenon and what it means for both the bankers and the city. It’s mostly a puff piece, as you’d expect, but I didn’t know Ross Perot Jr. was involved in building a tower for Goldman Sachs, so I did learn something.
- I’m going to be keeping an eye on the transfer of land in Mineral Wells from a public junior college to a private religious school documented in this Texas Tribune/ProPublica investigation. We all know transferring value and assets from public education to private religious schools is what our Republican overlords want. As citizens and taxpayers, we should be compensated for the land or the land should be returned to the college district. Somehow I doubt that the sort of vigorous enforcement that our law-and-order state government likes will apply in this case.
- The Dallas Morning News thinks the next City Manager is being set up for failure. Specifically, there’s no data-driven accountability and no specific goals, which puts the pressure Monty Bennett is placing for a poll for public feedback on the position in a slightly different light. I like the DMN’s example of DISD’s superintendent’s goals and criteria as an example of how to measure the work of a chief executive. But mostly I agree we have a leadership vacuum in our city at the council/mayor level and we’re going to have to solve that to make the City Manager do their job well.
- The DMN also has an update on ForwardDallas land-use plan that is not zoning. I still don’t understand what it’s doing but whatever it does, it’s going to happen sooner rather than later because the City Council is voting on September 25. In theory I like what I hear about the goals of ForwardDallas, but I don’t like the fact that nobody can explain to me what it is.
- The squeaky wheel gets the grease: after a lot of opposition from my neighbors, it looks like Skillman Southwest Library is off the chopping block. Apparently Skillman ranked eighth out of the city’s 30 libraries in circulation last fiscal year, which is a good reason to save it. It looks like the money to save it will come from the city’s infrastructure investment fund, which is meant to put money in underserved areas. Skillman Southwest is not in an underserved area. We’ll see whether the library survives when the Council passes the final budget in two weeks.
- Grand Prairie, a suburb between Dallas and Forth Worth, has a “do not use water” notice after firefighters used foam to put out an industrial fire on Tuesday and the foam ended up in the water system. Until the water is pronounced safe, you’re not supposed to drink, cook with, or bathe in city water. The DMN has an explainer, including the point that this is not a boil notice.
- Actions have consequences: between flattening property values and the Tarrant Appraisal District’s decision to freeze residential property tax values for 2025, the city of Arlington is looking at budget cuts in 2025 and 2026. Unfilled positions will be eliminated, departments will be merged, and some items will be deferred into a bond issue next year.
- Fort Worth ISD is holding steady on its tax rate despite a proposal to cut it because things are going badly in the district at the moment. (Isn’t that when you need to increase expenditures in schools?)
- Grand Prairie ISD’s new superintendent started a few weeks ago, but he was put on administrative leave on Wednesday. It’s not clear why and at least one of the trustees thinks it’s political. I’ll be keeping an eye on that.
- Texas Monthly tells us about being a queer student in Southlake-Carroll ISD. It’s not pretty.
- The Dallas County Juvenile Department has been in an uproar for a while. The Dallas Observer explains their education program for juvenile offenders in custody.
- You may remember the case of a woman in Euless who tried to drown the children of a Palestinian family back in May. She’s been indicted for attempted capital murder of a person under 10 and injury to a child.
- According to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner, the cause of death for Chasity Bonner, who died in the Tarrant County Jail in May, was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. She was 35 years old.
- Tarrant County Sherriff Bill Waybourn wants a third-party review of his policies and body cameras for jailers after the Anthony Johnson case. Johnson died in the jail in April. Video cameras aren’t doing anything for folks dying in jail; if they were going to do anything useful, Waybourn wouldn’t want them and the county commissioners sure wouldn’t give him the money.
- One of the biggest stories in Dallas this week, though more on the “it bleeds, it leads” principle than anything I’d usually write about, was the tragic killing of a police officer in Oak Lawn. The shooter was himself killed on the freeway in Lewisville; it appears he was a “Moorish sovereign citizen”. The DMN has a harsh editorial about the anti-Americanism of sovereign citizen beliefs and actions which I commend to your collective attention. Our host and I have been griping about these folks for close to a quarter-century now, and we’ve watched a number of tragedies when sovereign citizen types have been asked to live by the same laws the rest of us do. While I am often not a fan of the police, they don’t deserve to be executed by delusional folks with a grudge against the government and they also don’t deserve to be the instrument of suicide, which seems like what happened here.
- Texas Monthly has an explainer about the Justice Department suit against RealPage, the Richardson-based software company and apparent Sherman Act anti-trust violator.
- I didn’t know that Daniel Perry, whom our only governor pardoned for murdering a BLM protestor in Austin, had a record of domestic violence for beating up his sister when he was 18 and living in Carrollton. I certainly didn’t know, but am not surprised, that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was aware of his record when they recommended Greg Abbott make the politically-motivated pardon.
- I remember posting about these two gay dads in the city of Aurora out in Wise County some time ago, but I had not caught up with them in a while. So this update was welcome. If you’ve forgotten this case, it was the one where their landlord, the town administrator, tried to run the restaurateurs out of town and get CPS to take away their kid, and the investigation into that showed that not only had she probably been responsible for burning down City Hall twice, she’d embezzled a quarter-million dollars or so from the city. Only in small-town Texas.
- Juanita Craft is one of Dallas’ civil rights icons and a key figure in desegregating the State Fair and Dallas ISD. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Austin, a historic Black cemetery, and a headstone has finally been installed at her grave.
- New footage of the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas after the assassination has been found and is going up for auction.
- In other auction news, Heritage Auctions here in Dallas is selling props and costumes from Game of Thrones.
- Apparently there’s a gang of Pokemon card rustlers in Texas that has hit stores across the state, including in the Metroplex. Like Magic cards before them, some single Pokemon cards can be worth hundreds of dollars, so a case full of cards can be make-or-break for stores.
- This week I learned that one of our local eccentrics, the guy who used to run the Texas Triffid Farm (RIP), was investigated by the FBI in 1987 for selling weapons manufacturing secrets to the Daleks. For those of you too young to remember the Cold War, it was a deeply weird time. Also, if you’re that kind of nerd, click through for the Harlan Ellison cameo in this story.