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This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, more on Eddie Garcia’s departure from the Dallas Police Department and the resignation (ahead of the sack) of Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Angelica Ramsey. We also have election updates; the latest on the State Fair gun ban; Tarrant County jail business; protests in my neighborhood; a growth moratorium in the Dallas suburbs; the DART budget; connecting the dots on how a North Texas Nazi in trouble for threatening the DA in Nashville is linked to an old not-favorite; a Dallas home rental compay settles with the FTC for screwing over rentals; the manager of the shelter in Denton that euthanized a family pet against its own rules loses her job; and a professor at UTSW gets a major medical award for research that might improve my life.
This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Oneohtrix Point Never.
The biggest news this week in Dallas dropped as I was writing last week: Eddie Garcia, the much-courted chief of Dallas’ police department, was leaving. I knew we’d see more and here it is: he’s retiring from law enforcement (which gets him out of his implicit contract with the city of Dallas) and moving to Austin to work as assistant City Manager with T.C. Broadnax. The move blindsided the Council here. In an interview with the DMN, Garcia says it wasn’t the HERO initiatives on public safety that drove him out, and that he’d been thinking of retiring anyway, but it’s hard not to read between the lines that Broadnax’s departure to Dallas drove the change.
DMN also has an explainer about the DPD chief’s job and speculation about who could be next.
The biggest news in Fort Worth is that Angelica Ramsey, the superintendent of Fort Worth ISD is out after weeks of controversy around her tenure. She’s out next week, on October 1. The Star-Telegram has an explainer about the problems with the district: declining enrollment and the need to consolidate schools, poor test results compared to other districts, and Ramsey’s arrival during a change in reading instruction. They don’t mention the tax shenanigans in Tarrant County and the politicization of the appraisal district, but that can’t help on the money side either. The Star-Telegram also has an editorial asking when the FWISD board pays for its share in the district’s problems, which I suspect is not in the near term.
In other news:
- Axios has a ballot explainer with the big statewide and North Texas races. The DMN has an explainer about the educational issues on the ballot: vouchers, free speech, school safety, and DEI bans.
- As noted by our host, Rep. David Cook (R-Mansfield) seems to be the choice of most of the folks looking to boot Dade Phelan as Speaker. The Star-Telegram has the local view on the matter with a story misnaming/typoing the current speaker’s name as Dave.
- This KERA article has some wild numbers about the True the Vote-driven effort to clear the voting rolls in North Texas. Just 11 people brought more than 15,000 challenges in Tarrant County this year. Collin County has had about 13,000 challenges this year, of which more than 12,000 came from one person.
- As our host reported, Attorney General Paxton’s suit to get the gun ban at the State Fair overturned failed. He’s now appealing to the Texas Supreme Court. The State Fair opens Friday so by the time you read this post, we’ll have an answer. As a Dallas resident who would like to go to the State Fair this year, I’m hoping the ban stands.
- Bud Kennedy, the sort of liberal columnist at the Star-Telegram, opines about the circular firing squad on the Republican side of the Tarrant County Commissioner’s Court around their voting site fiasco.
- KERA has another attempt to explain ForwardDallas 2.0 and what people are so upset about.
- The Fort Worth Report has a story about how the Tarrant County Appraisal District’s changes to tax policy are becoming a model for other counties. Bonus: they may be illegal, according to no less of a source than Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the former Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector.
- That private prison in West Texas that Tarrant County was sending prisoners to? The one that had all the problems (which in the same breath as the Tarrant County jail, is saying a lot)? Tarrant County and the jail’s other customer, Harris County, have stopped using it, and it’s shutting down.
- Speaking of the Tarrant County jail and its many problems, the family of Chasity Bonner, who died in the jail in May, are saying that the sherriff won’t close the case into her death so he doesn’t have to release her autopsy. They think Sherriff Bill Waybourn doesn’t want the autopsy out before the election, and he may be trying to run out the two-year statute of limitations.
- Fort Worth’s Human Relations Commission has a LGBTQ advisory subcommittee and the City Council has opinions both against and for it.
- The new chief of the Denton Police Department has the confidence of most officers despite reports of problems in her previous position in Pflugerville. Reading the article, it sounds like Pflugerville’s force was a boys’ club and didn’t like having a Hispanic lesbian chief diversifying their force. I wish Chief Robledo luck in her new job, which should be confirmed by Denton’s council on Friday.
- You may remember that the DMN had an expose on the failure of the city to use lead abatement funds. Now the City Council wants answers. I rag on the DMN for their coverage angle a lot of the time but this is an example of the good community service journalism they do.
- The Parks Department is getting pushed to keep pro-Palestine protestors from putting banners on the trail bridge over Central Expressway (75) not too far from where I live. This is not going to go well for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that any attempt to squelch pro-Palestine banners over 75 is also going to have to account for the way MAGATs have been dropping Trump banners from the Northwest Highway overpass for years with no interference from the cops. DPD is apparently monitoring the pro-Palestine protests and they’ve seen none of the malfeasance (damage, rock-throwing) claimed by the folks wanting the protestors stopped. Part of the concern is that the trail bridge is near Dallas’ Jewish Community Center and Jewish folks in the neighborhood are frightened by the protestors and the protests; there’s a legitimate clash of rights going on. Having said that, a sudden push to stop protestors dropping banners now raises free speech concerns. The alternative proposal is to put panels on the brand-new bridge and two other pedestrian bridges coming in the future to make it physically impossible to drop banners from the pedestrian bridges. That won’t keep folks from dropping protest banners, though: they’ll just do it somewhere else.
- Last week Denton County had seven new West Nile cases in humans, bringing the 2024 total to 10. Stay safe out there, Denton friends.
- A couple of weeks ago, during a football game between two high schools in Fort Worth ISD, students from one school yelled racial slurs at the cheerleaders from North Side HS, which is located in Fort Worth’s Hispanic north side. Now North Side students are pressing for action because nothing has been done. A previous article I’ve read about this matter suggested that adults should have stopped the game until the cheerleaders were safe. I’m admittedly not a football person but this seems pretty basic and something that the FWISD board should also look into.
- This story boggled me even though it’s only common sense: Princeton, a suburb in Collin County, has paused all new residential developments because its infrastructure can’t keep up. The moratorium will last at least 120 days and may be extended. Princeton had about 17,000 people according to the 2020 census and its population has since grown to about 28,000.
- The Dallas Free Press has an explainer about what happened to Malcolm X Plaza in South Dallas. Turns out if you want to help the neighborhood, you need to get their input on what they need and how they need it.
- Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s budget for 2025 avoided service cuts but kept a hard line on spending. They’re going to discuss the problem of the suburbs cutting their contributions to DART in a future meeting. Meanwhile, the DMN has a pro-public-transit op-ed from the president of the Greater Dallas Planning Council, who correctly points out our highways are about built out and we need more ways to get people around. I’ve been watching Harris County have this fight for years now and I wish we didn’t have to have it in Dallas, too.
- The Justice Department has alleged in a criminal complaint that a North Texas member of the “Goyim Defense League” threatened to lynch the Nashville (TN) District Attorney after violence at a Nazi protest in Nashville resulted in a group member’s arrest. The Nazi was in a profile of Nazis the Star-Telegram ran last August after a number of incidents where Nazi flyers were distributed around north Texas, including the Fort Worth Botanic Garden and the incident at Torchy’s in Fort Worth that helped unmask the connection between Nick Fuentes and Defend Texas Liberty, the Jonathan Stickland-run PAC financed by Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn. Never forget who these folks hang out with.
- Dallas-based Invitation Homes, the largest landlord of single-family homes in the country, agreed to a $48 million fine from the FTC for illegal tactics against renters. The long list of their shadiness includes: deceiving renters about lease costs, charging undisclosed junk fees, failing to inspect homes before new residents moved in and unfairly withholding security deposits. The FTC is making them clean up their act a little. No word in the DMN story about whether this is enough to make Invitation actually behave or whether it’s just the cost of doing business.
- TCU is getting a medical school. Let’s hope they’re more ethical than the UNT med school down the road that was renting out corpses from the Tarrant County morgue for cash.
- What’s going on with the Dallas Black Dance Theater? KERA will catch you up on the unionization of the theater and the firing of the dancers. I’ve been noticing that DBDT has presentations in the arts centers coming up; I won’t be crossing that picket line.
- You may remember the awful story last week about the family pet that was euthanized against the rules by the Denton animal shelter. The city has now fired the manager of the shelter, though they say it had nothing to do with the poor dog the shelter put to sleep. Apparently she also lied on her employment application and in interviews.
- The Trinity River “trash wheel” that was supposed to clean trash from the river in Fort Worth is on hold because they’re out of money. Unsurprisingly, the price of materials has increased significantly since 2020. Worse, the project may have to refund money to some donors, so the $500,000 funding gap may grow.
- St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in White Settlement has been given a relic of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, who died in 1968. The relic is a bandage stained with blood from the wound on Saint Pio’s side after he manifested the stigmata. This is a subject that fascinates my inner medievalist.
- Dr. James Chen, a professor of microbiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, was awarded the 2024 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Chen discovered an enzyme that appears to explain how our immune system knows to fight wayward DNA that gets into our cells. He’s getting a $250,000 honorarium, and the knowledge that Lasker recipients are often future Nobel winners. As an autoimmune patient, I feel like I’m also winning here, because this research could spawn medication and treatments that will make the rest of my life better.