Personally, we could do without the clown.

Klyde Warren -- the park, not the kid -- was still just a twinkle in the city's eye when Mayor Tom Leppert unveiled plans to kick the cars off the Continental Avenue bridge and transform it into a linear park over the Trinity River. The original plan was to have the $10 million project open by fall 2012, about the same time the deck park would make its debut a couple of miles away.

But the Continental Avenue redo, like pretty much every other high-profile public works project that touches the Trinity, was delayed. And delayed. And delayed again. But city staff announced last week that work on the bridge will begin next month. For real this time.

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thesanantonioriverwalk.com

Welcome to Dallas?

Right now, the City Council is debating whether to lower fees and loosen the rules governing what businesses can put on sidewalks and public rights of way, the idea being that more sidewalk cafes and awnings and creative signage and landscaping can help create a more enjoyable urban experience. Planners point to Lower Greenville and Bishop Arts as an example of what they have in mind.

Of course, such a sweeping policy change requires a lot of due diligence and debate, so, while both council members and city staff have expressed support, it's moving very, very slowly.

Dwaine Caraway for one is ready to start opening sidewalk cafes. At this morning's Quality of Life Committee meeting, he directed assistant city manager Joey Zapata's attention to the stretch of Cedar Crest Boulevard between Bonnie View Road and Stella Avenue. With a bit more sidewalk activity, Caraway thinks it's poised to become the next Bishop Arts. He's already imaging people sitting on patios eating pizza and sipping glasses of wine.

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Billy Pemberton, drinking from the spring a short walk from his house.

Tucked at the bottom of a hill off Highway 175 in southern Dallas there's a spring. That it hasn't been paved over is remarkable. That you can still cup your hand and drink from it without getting dysentery or guzzling a toxic chemical stew is little short of miraculous. This is the middle of the city, just a short hop from the decidedly less pristine junction of White Rock Creek and the Trinity River.

But there it is, beckoning travelers like an oasis just as it has for centuries. The Caddo Indians knew it. Sam Houston camped there in 1843 en route to a treaty conference with the Comanches and other tribes. John Neely Bryan, Dallas' founder, drew water from the spring for the home he built nearby. Bill Holston, and Dallas Trinity Trails both describe the spring well.

Pemberton Spring -- or Big Spring, or White Rock Spring, or Bryan Spring -- has been threatened before, by plans calling for sewer lines to pass through, or by a gravel operation next door, or by a business that tapped the spring as a handy water source. Each time, the threat has been averted with the help of the city.

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When the city, AT&T and golfing legend Lee Trevino gathered at City Hall last November to announce plans for a PGA-caliber golf course in southern Dallas, they were long on such adjectives as "game changer" and "world-class" but short on details, like where the tens of millions of dollars to build the course was going to come from and what exactly they meant by "semi-private."

Those specifics have largely been hammered out, according to a briefing scheduled to be delivered to the City Council on Wednesday. We now know that the course will be run by a nonprofit called The Company of Trinity Forest Golfers, a recently registered organization that shares an address with a financial services firm on McKinney Avenue.

Here are the other things we now know:

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Dallas Trinity Trails

Goat Island Preserve is a comma of 348 acres hugging the Trinity River as it meanders through an unincorporated portion of far southeastern Dallas County. It's surrounded by gravel pits and crisscrossed with crude four-wheeler trails but is otherwise a rather wild and seldom visited tangle of land.

County officials are looking for ways to attract more visitors to the preserve, which it added to its open space program in 1993 and promptly left alone. They're proposing $45,000 in modest improvements including a monument sign at the entrance; rectangular limestone blocks to cordon off the parking area and serve as benches; the removal of the remains of a demolished building; and the construction of an asphalt parking lot.

The main attraction, though, is one that the county won't be paying for: a network of mountain-bike trails.

The trails will be the responsibility of the Dallas Off-Road Bicycle Association which, according to a briefing scheduled to be delivered to commissioners on Tuesday, has agreed to partner with the county to design, build, and maintain the trails.

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Via.

A half hour after sunset on Thursday evening, a young couple was walking along the White Rock Lake Trail. They were passing through the small wooded area by the spillway at the southern tip of the lake, headed toward the water, when a man passed headed in the opposite direction.

They didn't think much of this until they reached the top of the dam and the man passed them again, going in the same direction that they were. The man stopped a few feet in front of them and, turning, pulled out a gray-handled butcher knife, demanding their money.

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Head over to Klyde Warren Park at noon today and you'll be treated to a lunchtime piano recital. This evening, you can stop by for a zumba class, if that's your thing. Tomorrow it's a stroller boot camp and yoga, all in addition, of course, to the park's myriad other amenities.

It seems that free labor from the park's 10-year-old namesake isn't quite enough to keep a 5.2-acre deck park that draws 15,000 visitors per week up and running. And this, mind you, is before they put in the ice rink. Needless to say, young Klyde seems ill-suited for zamboni driving.

So, the park's operators are seeking to create a public improvement district that would levy a small tax on surrounding property owners ($250 per year per $1 million in appraised value) to help cover the park's operations and programming costs.

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Smile!

The surveillance cameras at Klyde Warren Park aren't exactly hidden. They're rather conspicuous, in fact, with their large white boxes emblazoned with "Dallas Police" and prominent placement on light poles throughout the 5.2-acre green space.

But BearCom, which manufactured and installed the 13 wireless cameras, wants to make extra sure you notice them. The company sent a press release yesterday excitedly touting its role in providing "24x7 Monitoring of Popular Deck Park that Links City's Downtown and Arts District with Bustling Uptown Area."

Cameras at Klyde Warren's entrances offer 360-degree views, while other cameras monitor the paths and green spaces.

"They see everything and everyone that goes into and out of the park," said BearCom's engineering program manager Mike Butler before noting, reassuringly, that the wireless technology allows the park's security director to "see the feed on his tablet computer while he's sitting in his living room."

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The White Rock Dog Park is a wonderful place, and not just because it was the the first official off-leash space in the city. It's a friendly place reliably thronged with good-natured canines and the people who love them. It's part of what makes White Rock Lake such a gem.

That said, the park has a tendency to turn into a mud pit, much of the grass having been worn away by overuse; it's often overcrowded and a headache to get to by car; and it lacks the some of the amenities enjoyed by its newer cousins in Far North Dallas.

All of that is presumably why the city of Dallas is embarking on a $1.1 million renovation/expansion of the park. The Parks Board is set to decide Thursday whether to allocate the money, which will come from 2006 bond funds.

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City of Strawn

The budget ax brought down by the state legislature in 2011 gouged a huge chunk from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which lost more than a fifth of its funding. The result was layoffs and a reduction in staffing and hours of operation at a number of state parks.

The initial spending proposals unveiled this year by legislators would cut a bit deeper, and this this time, it wouldn't just be parks' hours that would be reduced. As many as 20 would be forced to close outright, though which to put on the chopping block has not yet been decided.

But while the legislature debates whether to further gut the state parks system, the Houston Chronicle highlights another byproduct of chronic underfunding: parks that never open.

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