Dispatches from Dallas, November 22 edition

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

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: area election news; ongoing moving and shaking in Dallas’ city hall; Dallas city charter amendment news; news from and around the Lege and our local electeds; area school updates; area church updates; area infrastructure issues; some Black history; some Dallas food news; and more.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Sean Shibe, the classical and modern guitarist. A friend of mine saw him live recently and reminded me of how much I enjoy his music, which includes everything from early lute compositions rearranged for guitar to Steve Reich compositions.

Let’s jump right into the miscellanea this week:

  • D Magazine has some baseless speculation that Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson might be angling for Secretary of the Interior. I’ve been wondering for a while what he was looking for since I didn’t think he had a future in Texas politics, being a former Democrat, not to mention the whole Black thing. But a Trump administration appointment would absolutely make sense, even if it’s not this one.
  • We have our list of semifinalists for Dallas’ open City Manager position, though why anyone would want it right now is an open question. See also D Magazine, the Dallas Observer, and the Star-Telegram on the Assistant City Manager in Fort Worth who’s up for gig.
  • Meanwhile, Director of the Office of Government Affairs Carrie Rogers, another staffer of former Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax, is leaving to join him in Austin.
  • Finger in the wind around Dallas news: a Florida billionaire has bought a significant stake in the parent company of the Dallas Morning News. Blink twice in the videos if you have to post those Sinclair-style pieces, journalists.
  • The election was two and a half weeks ago, but it’s already old news. But in case you were wondering about those Election Day reports of incorrect ballots, it looks like almost 4,000 voters may have received incorrect ballots because of a system glitch. The glitch gave voters the ballot for a different precinct, which could result in voting in the wrong contests. According to this PDF from the Dallas County Elections Department, almost 839,000 voters voted in the November 5 election.
  • Collin County’s elections administrator is quitting in December. He’s held the job since 2015.
  • When I was living in far west Austin, Michael McCaul was my Congressman, in one of those weird gerrymandered districts that stretched around through north Austin and its suburbs, down 290 through Prairie View, and I think into west Houston. He was known as R-Clear Channel because that’s where his family money came from. So it gives me some feelings to report that he was arrested at Dulles Airport for public drunkenness. Couldn’t happen to a nicer.
  • Wandering on to the statehouse, let’s note this DMN op-ed on how Texans (the Lege) must support working parents. The three authors are two local state reps who were recently re-elected, Morgan Meyer (my rep) and Angie Chen Button of Richardson, who survived a good run from Averie Bishop, and, perhaps surprisingly, House Speaker Dade Phelan.
  • Another op-ed in the DMN about the upcoming session is from the Texas Rangers’ COO. He’s in favor of pro sports betting. Good luck with that.
  • The Lege is, as usual, going to be full of terrible bills this upcoming session, and north Texas is sending its share of the folks who bring them on. First up, we have freshmen reps Andy Hopper (HD-64) and his bill about fetal cell lines, which are lab-grown products, not from abortions, and used to make vaccines, and Mike Olcott (HD-60) and his bill to reject the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum in Texas. Lone Star Left has the deets. Next, the Dallas Observer has five bills from Texas lawmakers, including one from Matt Shaheen of Plano (HD-66) that would require school districts to forbid terrorist or gang items in their dress codes. No keffiyehs for Texas kids! I’m sure I’ll have more of these as filing season ramps up.
  • Southlake Carroll ISD is considering armed marshalls on campuses for the next school year but parents have concerns. Remember that the armed guard rule for public schools is an unfunded mandate from Greg Abbott and the Lege.
  • The (Democratic) representative for SBOE district 13 was elected to the Legislature and a new Democratic representative will take the seat next year after running unopposed. Meanwhile, Greg Abbott’s pick, a Fort Worth area Republican organizer, will be voting on SBOE issues, including the Bible-based Bluebonnet Learning curriculum.
  • Fort Worth ISD is looking for schools to close as enrollment declines. Meanwhile, the funds from the 2021 bond to upgrade schools are falling short due to inflation and the board declined to shift funds to meet the new price tag this week.
  • The DMN’s editorial board is complaining that Dallas County schools aren’t educating students sufficiently to get them good jobs. Since the DMN continues to be the newspaper for folks who have stocks, this problem is presumably not about educating the children and grandchildren of the readers so much as the workforces they will command when they come out of SMU or TCU.
  • UT Dallas is in the news this week, and not for good reasons. First, they removed all those yucky DEI words from course titles and descriptions and their faculty didn’t like that. Second, first amendment groups told them to lay off their student journalists who have been in trouble with the administration over their coverage of pro-Palestinian protests at the school. Third, they had an alumni speaker talk about the election: an Executive VP of the Heritage Foundation who contributed to Project 2025. Unsurprisingly there were protests, which is not inherently bad, but what the school is likely to do to the protestors will be.
  • The civil case that the family of Botham Jean, the citizen killed by former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger by mistake, filed against his killer, went to federal court this week. The jury awarded Jean’s family more than $98 million in damages. Guyger didn’t show up and had no attorney, and nobody knows how she would be able to pay the damages when she gets out of prison. Dallas PD was originally a defendant in the case but the federal judge dismissed them. The DMN had an explainer earlier this week if you want to catch up on the matter.
  • It will not surprise those of you who have been following the Gateway Church/Robert Morris scandal that church attendance is down, tithing is down 35-40%, and they are cutting staff.
  • First Baptist Dallas is defending against a million-dollar lawsuit over a sexual assault of a teen during a youth mission trip in 2022 and the alleged coverup that followed. As always with this kind of story, please read with caution and self-care.
  • The Star-Telegram’s new op-ed columnist has a fascinating piece about the Mercy Culture trafficking shelter zoning fight. The neighbors come off looking small-minded and petty, but Mercy Culture comes off looking worse. It all sounds about right to me, but what a way to jump in with both feet to annoying your newspaper’s subscribers.
  • You may remember that Princeton, a Dallas exurb in Collin County, put a moratorium on development for six months because the town’s infrastructure can’t support more growth at the moment. The Dallas Observer explores the decision, its causes, and its potential effects.
  • The DMN’s editorial board is unsurprisingly in favor of the Marvin Nichols reservoir.
  • The Star-Telegram has some thoughts on what the new administration’s immigration policy and cabinet choices may mean for Texas. The Texas Tribune has some related news about Texas congressmen Tony Gonzales and Chip Roy fighting over those mass deportations the administration is promising.
  • Let’s talk about those Dallas charter amendments, now that we’ve gone and done the thing:
    • The Dallas Observer explains what the fuss about Prop S, the one about governmental immunity, is about. I wish they’d written this before the election.
    • Dallas City Council certified Prop R, the one that legalized small amounts of weed, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the city.
    • Prop U, the one that’s supposed to add all the cops to the street and hands half of the city’s money to Dallas PD, the one that even Dallas cops didn’t want, is turning around and eating the faces of its voters. The credit rating firm Moody’s has given Dallas a negative debt outlook because the amendment will limit how the city spends its money when expenses are increasing. Among other things, the city’s pension fund is already suffering from a shortfall, and when we add more officers, we’ll have to put more money in. The city’s credit rating remains good for now but this is a very bad sign. KERA and Axios also have the story, and D Magazine has more details.
  • This week I learned that University Park, the Park City around SMU, has a 1973 “brothel law” that says more than three unrelated people can’t live together. I found this out because the neighbors are complaining about SMU students living in duplexes because off-campus houses are easier to find than on-campus housing and it’s cheaper with roommates.
  • Speaking of cheaper housing, Dallas and Collin Counties spent about $200 million on services like medical care, hospitalization, emergency shelter, and jail to unhoused persons in 2023. It would have been cheaper to just house them; the report shows it by the numbers.
  • Also this week I learned that one neighborhood in five in Dallas is in the early stages of gentrification. My neighborhood gentrified in the 1960s when developers built my house after buying out the Black community that lived here.
  • The DMN’s editorial board would like the city council to let the short-term rental ordinance go through the court system instead of preemptively reopening the arguments about the ordinance. Last December, a state district judge hearing the suit by STR operators issued an injunction blocking the city from enforcing the ordinance. The DMN, as always, is concerned with civility; the fight between STR operators and householders wanting to keep STRs out of their neighborhood was rough. I’m inclined to agree with the DMN on other grounds they cite: the value of figuring out how to reconfigure the ordinance after the city sees what the courts will accept.
  • UNT Health Science Center, the state’s laboratory for bad ideas in death practice, has been using “water cremation” (alkaline hydrolysis) to dispose of bodies used in medical research. The Texas Funeral Service Commission has now ordered them to stop on the grounds that water cremation isn’t legal in Texas. UNT says they stopped back in September when they were caught renting bodies out.
  • Black Wolf, an armed-driver rideshare service that the DMN calls “Uber with guns” is coming to Dallas, Houston, and Austin early next year. Great.
  • Speaking of too many guns out there, Dallas PD is investigating how a gunshot hit a Southwest Airlines plane near its flight deck while it was on a runway at Love Field on Monday. The plane was on its way to Indianapolis but the passengers were deplaned until the runway was declared safe and, presumable, so was the plane. Yikes.
  • This is a depressing story, but not a particularly surprising one: the first Black bookstore in Farmer’s Branch has been harassed into closing. You may remember Farmer’s Branch as the suburb of Dallas that tried to keep landlords from renting to undocumented folks some years ago.
  • Arlington is about to put changes to its city charter on the ballot in the May election. One of the proposed amendments that won’t go forward is a change to the language around the mayor and councillors. The current charter was written in the 1920s and refers to all officials as men; the amendment was set aside on the grounds that using gender-neutral language to refer to city officials could set off a culture war firestorm and cause other amendments, including one to increase the pay of Arlington’s part-time officials, to fail.
  • Salem Institutional Baptist Church, a 135-year-old Black church in South Dallas, got a Texas Historical Marker this week.
  • Mayor Mattie Parker declared November 15 to be Leon Bridges Day in Fort Worth on the occasion of his sold-out show at Dickies Arena. (Wish I’d gone!)
  • Speaking of Fort Worth, alcohol receipts show that drinking has shifted out of downtown to the Cultural District and the Stockyards. This is interesting as part of the long decline of the Sundance Square area and likely changes coming to that part of town. As an occasional visitor to Fort Worth, I go over there to the museums and to shows, usually at Dickies Arena, and rarely bother to go downtown unless the show I’m seeing is at Bass Hall.
  • I’m sure you were ready to hear the last of Dallasites griping about Michelin, but this interview with celebrity chef John Tesar, who had a Michelin star at his Orlando restaurant and lost it, might still interest you. This is a guy called the most hated chef in Dallas, and he has some spicy takes about Dallas food.
  • Texas Monthly’s review of the new Black-owned Deep Ellum restaurant Kanvas goes deep into the Black history of Deep Ellum.
  • Long-time Houstonians will remember Eatzi’s, which was basically the fancy take-home prepared food section of your grocery store without the actual grocery store. Eatzi’s still operates several stores in Dallas, and while the owner is a jerk (I’m still mad about his mask commentary during the pandemic), the food is still great and I can get a slice of Italian cream cake similar to the one we had at our wedding almost a quarter-century ago. If you want some Eatzi’s nostalgia, here are two puff pieces about them from the DMN.

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