Schutze

Well, If Architectural Digest Thinks Calatrava Bridge Is a "Parabolic Pylon" of Virtue ...

By Jim Schutze Wed., Feb. 15 2012 at 12:00 PM
Categories: Schutze
CalatravaLighting2.jpg
Photo by Justin Terveen
​I don't want to suggest that my wife is a sharp stick in the eye, but from time to time she does like to "point things out." To me. So this morning when I reached for the place on the bedstead where I had neatly and carefully laid out my trousers for the day, what should I find but a copy of the March 2012 Architectural Digest on top of them opened to a full-page photo of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge under the headline "Well Connected."

Digest senior writer Samuel Cochran describes the bridge as "the most dramatic addition to the Dallas skyline in recent memory." He calls it "a parabolic pylon" and goes on (a bit): "Laced through that soaring arc are 58 cables, some eight inches thick, which extend in weblike sweeps to either side." More »
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Schutze

Item Involving Charter School's Bonds Pushes Council Into Passionate Philosophical Debate

By Jim Schutze Wed., Feb. 8 2012 at 1:07 PM
Categories: Edumication News, Schutze
RawlingsatUpliftBriefing.JPG
"We will not be great city unless DISD becomes a great school district."
​This was a good day -- such days do occur -- to study democracy in action at Dallas City Hall. The city council engaged in a smart debate on a proposal to help a charter school organization sell bonds to build more charter schools.

The mayor and council decided not to decide. If you listened to the whole thing, you had to agree with the final non-decision.

This was all about a group called Uplift Education asking the city to give a certain kind of legal imprimatur to Uplift's upcoming attempt to borrow a bunch of money to build new schools. If the city ever agrees, Uplift will be able to borrow the money at a lower interest rate.

According to the lawyers for Uplift and to city staff, the city will never be on the hook for anything even if Uplift gets in trouble making its payments.

Seems like one, two, three, right? The city creates this legal agreement to "sponsor" Uplift's borrowing. That way Uplift saves $300,000 on its mortgage. Uplift spends the three hundred grand on kids and classrooms instead. No skin off the city's nose.

The problem was that somebody tried to slide this whole thing under the council's nose. Whoever was running it, they stayed silent on the issue until the very last moment, beyond the time when the city council would be able to ask a lot of questions. Then they said they had a big deadline and everything had to be approved immediately. Then they slipped it into a part of the city council voting agenda that normally is reserved for small housekeeping items most council members don't even look at.

So what did all of that accomplish? It made the whole operation smell like a Nigerian banking scam. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that Uplift also is involved right now in an effort to build a school in the middle of a bar and entertainment district in what skeptics in that neighborhood are suggesting may be a shady real estate scam.

All of this comes right in the middle of an extremely contentious campaign by the Dallas school system that will shutter 11 schools in areas where the district says there aren't enough kids.More »
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City Hall

What's the Hurry? Why Does Council Have to Vote on Helping Uplift Sell Bonds This Week?

By Jim Schutze Mon., Feb. 6 2012 at 4:33 PM
Categories: City Hall, Edumication News, Schutze
MapofUpliftSchools.jpg
The map of Uplift schools, present and future, as presented in this morning's briefing to the council's Economic Development Committee
​You know the cell phones must have been burning all weekend when the first city council committee briefing of the week at City Hall on Monday morning starts off with a rebuttal. Wait, rebuttal already? While those of us out here in the peanut gallery are still wiping the weekend from our eyes, could you give us a hint what you're rebutting about?

Actually, I knew. I got some of those cell calls over the weekend.

Last week a few alert council members (cough, cough) noticed (ahem) somebody had slipped something into their "consent agenda" about authorizing the city to create something called an "Education Finance Corporation."

Wow. The city has never been in the education business before. The school district has always been in charge of the education business.

This is big.More »
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Get Off My Lawn

This AKA Aaron Michaels Stuff Is Not Making Me Feel Terribly Homeland-Secure

By Jim Schutze Wed., Jan. 25 2012 at 11:21 AM
Categories: Get Off My Lawn, Schutze

SHZ_GetOffMyLawn_TitleImageV2.jpg
Did anybody else feel less than homeland-secure after yesterday's fandango with the Dallas County Homeland Security Advisory Committee?

First, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price tried to re-appoint to the committee the founder of an international anti-Semitic hate group -- a guy best known locally for threatening to bring rifles and shotguns to Dallas school board meetings in the late 1990s.

Showing a very rare independence of Commissioner Price, County Judge Clay Jenkins delayed a vote to confirm the reappointment of Aaron McCarthy aka Aaron Michaels to the Dallas County Homeland Security Advisory Committee. Somehow the commissioners, in their wisdom, had already appointed McCarthy aka Michaels to the committee once.

They were about to do it again when citizens began to point out to them who he was.

They didn't know who he was when they appointed him to their committee the first time? Guess what. Nobody knew what the committee was, anyway, if that eases your mind at
all.

Are we homeland secure yet?


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Schutze

Federal Judge Unseals Suit That Asks: Did Dallas Screw HUD Out of Hundreds of Millions?

By Jim Schutze Wed., Nov. 16 2011 at 4:13 PM
Categories: City Hall, Schutze
hudlogo.jpg
​On June 10, 2010, I wrote a column for the newspaper about an official complaint brought to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by two Dallas developers alleging a decades-old pattern of racial discrimination and fraud by the city of Dallas, the county and other local entities against the federal government. Just now that complaint has re-emerged publicly in the form of a federal "false claims" lawsuit seeking what could be billions of dollars in damages.

U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor unsealed the file on this suit -- which follows -- in an order he signed two days ago, even though his own administrator and the U.S. District Clerk were still insisting yesterday the suit was under seal.

Weird. But take a look at this deal, and you can see why even the judge might treat it as a rogue nuclear device.

The lawsuit, developed by the nation's top false claims law firm in D.C., goes straight at the issue of race in the city's history, claiming that officials here have taken hundreds of millions in federal dollars designed to reduce segregation while using the money to achieve the opposite end.

I sent a copy of it to the city, in case they still thought it was sealed too, and asked them to comment. Haven't heard back yet.More »
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Schutze

"Tired of Being Ignored and Insulted," Paul Quinn Students Round Up Powerful and Familiar Faces for City Hall Protest

By Jim Schutze Wed., Oct. 26 2011 at 9:19 AM
Categories: City Hall, Schutze
sorrelliamnottrashprotest.jpg
Photo by Danny Hurley
Paul Quinn College President Michael J. Sorrell at the flow-control protest before the council's vote last month
​New Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is in for the first serious grassroots challenge to his leadership -- a march on City Hall announced today by a broad-based coalition of young Southern Dallas leaders, Latino groups and the Dallas County Democratic Party. It's that trash thing, back again to bite him.

At the end of September, Rawlings -- batting down a request from students at Paul Quinn College for a delay and study -- rammed through a new ordinance re-directing vast volumes of commercial waste to a landfill near Paul Quinn College in far Southern Dallas. Citing his own campaign promises and the extra fees the city-owned dump will collect from truckers, Rawlings called the move "a business revenue issue."

But it was bad business, as far as the Paul Quinn students were concerned. And now they've got serious allies.

In a press release announcing a November 5 march on City Hall to protest the decision, Paul Quinn student organizer Dexter Evans says, "The leadership that produced this horrendous decision is out of touch with the emerging voices of the city. Marching north, across the Trinity River and towards downtown Dallas is our way of expressing that this generation is no longer willing to adhere to the geographic, economic and mental boundaries of our elders."

Evans, a junior and the student leader of the march, says: "Since few in Dallas are apparently willing to say these things, we felt that it was time for Paul Quinn College and our friends to make our voices heard."More »
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Get Off My Lawn

When Dallas Decides It's Over Being Occupied, That's When Things Could Get Ugly

By Jim Schutze Mon., Oct. 10 2011 at 1:26 PM
Categories: Get Off My Lawn, Schutze

SHZ_GetOffMyLawn_TitleImageV2.jpg
Start the countdown. How long will it be before Dallas City Hall decides to evict the Occupy protest campers from Pioneer Plaza? You know it's coming.

If the Occupy Dallas anti-corporate-greed protesters continue to camp out in a park just down the block from City Hall, political pressure will build to get rid of them. At some point that pressure will be felt by City Hall.

So far, the police department has taken a hands-off posture. It won't last. This is Dallas.
As the Occupy movement grows nationally in weeks ahead and becomes more of a factor, the encampment here will become more and more a cinder in the eye of local conservatives. They will want it expunged.


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Trinity River Project

What a Litttle Protection Between Friends? Corps, City Differ Over Levees Safety Standards.

By Jim Schutze Mon., Oct. 3 2011 at 6:00 PM
Categories: Schutze, Trinity River Project
Muraski.jpg
Col. Richard J. Muraski Jr.
​Wow. I think Dallas Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan broke a major national story at today's meeting of the Dallas City Council Trinity River Corridor Project committee. She told the committee that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- the quasi-military agency in charge of the nation's flood control levees -- is thinking about reducing its safety standards for levees by almost 40 percent.

Before we go further, let me tell you that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers major and two PR people out in the hallway with him after the meeting all stared at me with eyes like silver dollars and swore they had never - never ever ever - heard that before.

"I have never heard that," said Col. Richard J. Muraski Jr. "That has never been shared with us."More »
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Schutze

Tag, We're It: Ben Eine, Renowned Graffiti Artist, Leaves His Mark on Dallas Today

By Jim Schutze Thu., Sep. 15 2011 at 6:00 PM
Categories: Schutze
eine1.JPG
Photos by Jim Schutze
​Ben Eine, the international street-art star and former graffiti fugitive, was out on Fort Worth Avenue this afternoon painting a mammoth graffiti-style mural based on his tag -- EYN -- on the side of a building. Listen: This is huge.

Earlier this year Eine was given a big wall to paint in central London, where he lives. Last year British Prime Minister David Cameron gave one of his works to Barack Obama. He's huge. Not as a person. He's a normal-sized person, but you know what I mean. He's headed to San Francisco tomorrow. He was just in Osaka. This guy was talkin' to ME! Jim Schutze.

There was a reporter there from some other paper too, but really you could tell Eine wanted to talk to me mostly. He told me, well, us, that he was jailed 14 times as a kid for tagging. Now he's gone semi-straight as a legal street artist who actually gets permission from property owners before putting up his work.

When I found him he was just wrapping up a huge tag/mural at the top of the hill above the Belmont with a lovely view of downtown in the distance.

I wanted to be the one who asked him the piercing questions, so I asked him if he was at all concerned that here in Dallas, a fairly conservative city, if people started driving by and seeing his art like this, they might all turn into crackheads. I was quite taken aback by his answer.

"I don't know," he said. "There's some truth in it. If I can run down your street and tag my name on every other brick wall and not get pulled in by the cops, then what else is somebody going to do?" More »
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Trinity River Project

Pardon, the City Owes the Corps of Engineers $15 Million For Floodway Work?

By Robert Wilonsky Mon., Sep. 12 2011 at 8:02 AM
Categories: City Hall, Schutze, Trinity River Project
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​The new-look Trinity River Corridor Project Committee meets for the first time this afternoon with two items on its to-review list: Dallas Floodway Extension Repayment Agreement Discussion and Trinity River Corridor Project Overview of Flood Control Components. Shortly after they were posted Friday night I sent them to Schutze, who's off Unfair Park till Thursday whilst he finishes a cover story. Perhaps he knew why the city owes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers $15 million; that, and flood control's kind of his ... thing.

He said he'd review both presentations and send back a few bullet points worth keeping an eye on during the 3:15 meeting. Last night I received the note you see on the other side -- a column's worth of opining. Jump for Jim.More »
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