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Edward Okpa

Mayor Tom Leppert and Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway -- whom I have always wanted to describe as the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of Dallas City Hall, but I can’t figure out which one’s Butch -- have nominated Nigerian-born businessman and former mayoral contender Edward Okpa to fill the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board seat of the late Lynn Flint Shaw. Okpa, you may or may not remember, was the favorite long-shot mayoral candidate of the late Matt Pulle. (Matt’s actually alive and well in Nashville. He’s just late.)

This means that Butch and Sundance’s last candidate for the DART board, Dr. Beverly Mitchell-Brooks, apparently has been placed into the political vaporization chamber and caused to disappear without further ado or whimpering. Zap! What Mitchell-Brooks? Who’s that? She’s history.

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Today’s agenda at City Hall is a great example of the low regard they have down there for the wretched taxpayers of the world.

Drum roll, please: Big and bright, up front and public at 9:30 this a.m. for your entertainment and enlightenment, ladies, gentlemen and hard-working farmhands -- a big discussion of this unbelievably stupid street renaming ritual they’re going through for Industrial Boulevard.

What? Why on Earth would anyone in his right mind give a shit what they call Industrial Boulevard? Ah, maybe it has something to do with the next item on the agenda for today’s 11:30 a.m. meeting of the city council’s Economic Development Committee. It’s a case of misdirection.

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I’m getting a big stall this morning from Dallas Independent School District HQ on a question I put to them regarding the Deloitte Touche external audit, which is months late and in no hurry to poke out a hole and see its shadow. That usually means DISD bigwigs are preparing a cover story to float in The Dallas Morning News. I’m not quite ready to name the person involved -- maybe later today, we'll see -- but I do want to get the basic story out there before the district has a chance to step on it with a party-line denial.

The story is that the district has placed on indefinite administrative leave a high-level person in its internal auditing function -- a person who happens to have special expertise in Oracle, the zillion-dollar financial management software that the district is trying to blame for its current auditing woes.

Readers may be aware that the district is now four months overdue in producing its financial audit. Officials have conceded that the audit, if and when district officials ever let loose of it, will reveal that the district has not been handling its money the right way. But in preparation for the release, top district officials in recent weeks have been scapegoating their own employees, blaming problems on “poor training.” Interesting excuse -- coming, as it does, from the trainers.

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From the Collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library

Pacific Avenue, circa 1920

In last week's paper version of Unfair Park, I wrote about the mess we’re going to have next year when Dallas Area Rapid Transit spills a whole new rail line of traffic down Pacific Avenue in downtown Dallas.

According to a contract signed with the city 18 years ago, DART should have begun building a second reliever route five years ago, preferably in a subway, for trains going through downtown. But because the city got slicked by the suburbs, the way it does in all so-called regional governance, DART spent its money instead building trains out to the boondocks, where nobody needs mass transit anyway.

So next year train traffic on the DART tracks down Pacific will go through the roof, significantly exceeding safe peak levels. And car and bus traffic downtown will be screwed for however many years it takes to build a subway (unless we adopt the Schutze Solution, described after the jump). In the meantime, after my article ran I received an intriguing phone call from preservation expert, author and activist Virginia McAlester, who told me about the great “Spike-Pulling Ceremony” that took place at the corner of Pacific, Live Oak and St. Paul in 1921.

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Texas Association of School Boards

I wish Wilonsky would take the amazingly long list of comments on my recent Woodrow Wilson High School item, bind them in pigskin and publish them as an anthology. Taken together, the whole package is a fascinating specimen of blogography.

The original item was one I consider sort of sub-so-so in terms of reporting and all-around trenchant analysis. Basically, I found this crumpled-up, muddy piece of paper in the alley that turned out to be an underground flier circulating among students at Woodrow. Thought it was funny. Posted it.

What ensued was an outpouring of feeling about schools, kids, race, government and life, most of it far more eloquent and provocative than the original post. I just re-read through all of it, and I was struck by what may be its only central theme:

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WXIA-TV

When Terrell Bolton got forced out as Chief of Police in Dallas, there was a certain amount of heart-bleeding among persons who saw his fate as somehow tragic. Maybe he was elevated too rapidly, they said. You know, like maybe he didn’t have enough oxygen in his head. And so on.

I myself confess to having worried about whether or not he got a fair shake. Not worried a lot, but a little. So, every once in a while, just to reassure myself that we were damn lucky to have shaken that wingnut loose when we did, I go look at the blogs in Georgia, where he is now Police Commandant of DeKalb County or some such. Or I go look at the YouTube channel maintained by "dekalbofficers."

Man o’ live. Talk about destiny repeating itself. --Jim Schutze

Former (and future?) DART board member Joyce Foreman

Pretty good fireworks this morning at the city council meeting over a last-minute decision by the mayor to delay consideration of appointments to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board. Several members clearly thought the mayor and his partner, Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway, were pulling a fast one. Personally, I think the Leppert-Caraway duo is turning out to be the not-so-fast team, but there you go.

The council was supposed to vote on whether to send former DART board member Joyce Foreman back to the board of DART, our regional mass-transit agency, or give the post to Dr. Beverly Mitchell-Brooks, CEO of the Greater Dallas Urban League.

But everybody I has been talking to all week was sort of bumfuzzled about what was going on anyway. The city attorney had never said or done anything about a whole list of conflict-of-interest issues that came up when Brooks was interviewed for the DART post a week ago.

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Rod Dreher kicked off a lively discussion about Woodrow Wilson High School last week by writing an op-ed about it for The Dallas Morning News that was … well … how to put this in polite terms? Fine -- seriously demented.

Dreher said the white people who send their kids to Woodrow, where whites make up 20 percent of the student body, instead of sending them to all-white private schools, where their kids would be a 95-percent majority, are racists, because way more of the white kids wind up going to college than the children of the black and Latino parents whose kids are at Woodrow.

Just … please, don’t even try.

For a week many honest and well-intended persons have been trying to rebut Dreher, but, you see, we must all remember Schutze’s Fifth Law of Rational Discourse: It Is Not Possible To Rebut a Butt-Head. In the meantime, however, many parents from all points on the racial and ethnic compass have offered interesting opinions and insights into what goes on at Woodrow, including lots and lots of debate about whether or not Woodrow is “safe.”

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Beverly Mitchell-Brooks

The North Texas Regional Council of League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has passed a formal resolution opposing the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board candidacy of Greater Dallas Urban League CEO Dr. Beverly Mitchell-Brooks. The protest is on grounds that she has made public racist remarks about Latinos.

Addressed to Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and the Dallas city council, the resolution states:

“It is our opinion that Dr. Mitchell-Brooks is not the type of person that embraces respect and sensitivity for Latinos.

“During the last couple of years during the great immigration debate, Dr. Mitchell-Brooks, instead of bridging between racial and ethnic groups in our community, has created a hostile environment by her personal beliefs and public comments.

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Former (and future?) DART board member Joyce Foreman

Lots of buzz this week about a bizarre performance on Monday at City Hall by council member Dwaine Caraway. He tried to rattle Joyce Foreman, who was being interviewed by the council for reappointment to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board. Foreman wouldn’t rattle, and Caraway wound up rattling himself.

And I mean rattle, rattle, rattle. I saw it.

The city council’s Transportation and Environment Committee was interviewing candidates to fill a couple of empty seats on the DART board. The whole proceeding was fraught with unspoken tension, because the council had managed to screw up its DART appointments so badly last time around.

A year ago, right after Tom Leppert was elected mayor, he led a coup to take Foreman off the board, just as Foreman was about to be elected chair by the rest of the DART board. That paved the way for Leppert’s political ally, Lynn Flint Shaw, who was already on the DART board, to become DART chair instead.

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The Great Trinity Forest, while it's still great

Hey, just a shout-out here to any nature boys or girls out there who give a shit about the Great Trinity Forest. Because in July the city staff is supposed to pony up its master plan for the forest, and it's rumored to be a 14,000- to 16,000-page document that will be posted on the Web.

Once it’s up, the public will have 30 days to review it. Which means, according to my arithmetic, you’ll have to read 533 pages a day in order to get through it in the allotted time.

Why would anybody do that? Oh, maybe because the staff is planning to do things like pave a lot of the trails. Do what?, you say. Surely not pave the trails. Yes, pave the trails.

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My last few dog-walking tours over the weekend have revealed to me that Rod Dreher, editorial writer at The Dallas Morning News, is the New Great Satan of Old East Dallas and Lakewood. I think I’m jealous.

Lord. I had people coming off their porches at me to complain about him, waving rolled-up Points sections from their Sunday papers. Dreher had an op-ed piece in the paper yesterday about a campaign to get parents in Ancient East Dallas and Lakewood to put their kids in Woodrow Wilson High School, a public school.

He pointed out that the campaign is aimed at white people, which it is, and then he went on to describe Woodrow as two schools: a white one and a minority one, which it is. In fact, I was all with him for the first half of his piece. But Dreher then veered off into a take that I can only describe as painfully convoluted and racially neurotic.

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FrontBurner has posted a long essay by Trey Garrison on why Dallas City Plan Commission member Neil Emmons is the Great Satan. Garrison cites several major development projects he says have been unfairly sabotaged by Emmons.

Garrison clearly is a lot more familiar with the details on these projects than I am, and his arguments are cogent and clearly expressed, so I can’t use my usual screw-you rebuttal for all things D. Besides, Our Boy Merten has many interesting details regarding the St. Regis Hotel project about which Trey writes; he’ll be along before the end of the day.

Till them, let me just say this:

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The New York Daily News is reporting that Dallas, among other cities, may be back in the running for fat “congestion mitigation” grants from the federalissimos, now that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been knifed in Albany on his plan for congestion pricing in Manhattan.

If Dallas gets a nickel of that money, it’ll be a travesty, a tragedy, a treachery, a traducement, and … well, them's all the "tr" words I can think of.

Why? Because we are enormously undeserving. Uniquely undeserving, because of our recent vote to ruin a downtown river park by building a tolled truck route through downtown. In short, we are the congestion Whore of Babylon.

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The expansion of the Deep Ellum Tax Increment Refinancing Zone to pay for a parking garage for the Latino Cultural Center, as mentioned below, flies in the face of the core argument the city makes for TIFs in the first place: the “but-for” argument. TIF money, after all, is tax money taken out of the general fund -- the money we use to pay for cops, sewers, libraries, frou-frous like that -- and given instead to companies and institutions for their own use.

In this case, the money's being spent a parking structure for an institution that has had a very sad attendance record since opening. The argument is supposed to be that TIF money encourages development that would not happen but for the incentives provided by the TIF.

But City Lights, the development being taken into the TIF today, is already happening. It’s on the books and on the ground. So putting it into the TIF just jacks money straight out of the general fund and puts it into the TIF instead.

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