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 >>

​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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​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 >>

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 >>

​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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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 >>

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 >>

​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 >>

​Digging back through old files, I can see some patterns emerging that I missed back in the day. For example, the connection between Willis Johnson, the luckiest radio host in the world, and Ross Perot Jr.

Johnson is a close personal and political associate of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, target of a major FBI corruption probe. Indications are that the FBI is focusing on transactions dealing with the Southern Dallas Inland Port, sometimes called the Dallas Logistics Hub, a major shipping and warehousing development.

A developer in the Inland Port deal has accused Price of sabotaging him after the developer declined to hire a consulting group in which Willis Johnson was a key member.
One of the firms hit with subpoenas in the Price probe is Hillwood, the real estate arm of the wealthy and powerful Perot family. Hillwood is run by Ross Perot Jr., son of the squeaky-voiced, big-eared man with the dry-erase boards who ran for president in 1992.

The Perots control Alliance Airport, a shipping center near Fort Worth that competes with the Dallas Inland Port. Johnson, a Southern Dallas radio personality, is head of a company, Wai-Wize, that has become one of the city's most prolific minority-owned subcontractors, with no-bid "third-tier" subcontracts at almost every local unit of government -- city, county, transit agency, school system, public hospital and others. Wai-Wize supplies these entities with a lot of things you might not associate with being a radio personality -- everything from security cameras to para-transit to archival services.

But is there a connection between Willis Johnson, Wai-Wize and the Perots? Sure. But you have to go back. Way back.

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​Interesting blow-black -- so muted you might call it whisper-back -- to recent stories and an op-ed piece in The Dallas Morning News extolling so-called economic progress in Southern Dallas.

One instance is on the paper's op-ed page today, a column from respected Southern Dallas blogger-journalist Shawn Williams, who echoes Dallas South News's Michael Hubbard's complaint about people who get excited about "an excess of low-income housing and a couple of fast-food restaurants" in his part of town.

"Citizens are no longer in the mood to give extra credit for window dressing," Williams writes.

I'm getting similar sentiments from callers, some of them from inside City Hall. They point to recent News essays by editorial writer Tod Robberson and minister-activist Gerald Britt, both all ga-ga about recent development projects in Southern Dallas that amount to more public housing and subsidized low-income housing.

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