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Workshops seek input on Dallas housing and development

Workshop participants Tony Morris and Candace Thompson mark on a map where they live and where they work during a community development workshop Tuesday in Oak Cliff. (Elizabeth Findell/Dallas Morning News)

South Dallas resident Tony Morris and his 7-year-old son Emerson both had opinions to contribute on what their neighborhood needs during a development workshop at the South Oak Cliff High School Tuesday.

Emerson supported houses — all houses — while Morris bemoaned a lack of jobs near communities where many workers live.

“There are no corporate jobs south, so what is Dallas going to do about that?” he asked event facilitators. “At the end of the day, if I can stay in my neighborhood, I’ll take care of it. I have to drive hours away.”

Other south-side residents pointed to grocery options, services for seniors and sidewalks and walkable areas as things missing from Oak Cliff area neighborhoods.

The community workshop was a step in the city’s Inspire Dallas Housing Plus effort, which seeks to broaden city low-income affordable housing efforts to consider whole neighborhoods and what they need for families to be successful there. It was the first of four workshops to ask residents what their lifestyle priorities are, what things their neighborhoods lack and what type of housing they would like to see built in the future.

Other workshops will be held today at the San Jacinto Elementary School on Hume Drive, Thursday at the Walnut Hills Recreation Center on Midway Road and Saturday at City Hall. The two during the week are from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and one at City Hall Saturday is from 9 a.m. to noon.

City-sponsored housing makes up 2 percent of all housing, and other publicly supported units make up 4 percent.

“We know that whatever we do, our efforts are very small — they’re a drop in the bucket,” said Theresa O’Donnell, the city’s chief planning officer, during a committee hearing on housing Monday. “If we can influence the market with a grocery store, if we can influence the market with a healthcare provider, with transportation — what can we do to influence the market?”

The roughly two dozen residents who turned out to Tuesday’s workshop first heard data the city has compiled indicating that job growth in Dallas is outpacing residential building. The median income has dropped from $52,615 in 2000 to $41,960 this year — possibly because of the city’s growth in young people. Dallas is younger than Texas and the United States by increasing margins.

As the city’s 18 to 33-year old “Millenial” population has grown, so has its Hispanic population. Forty six percent of the city’s Millenials are Hispanic, compared to 26 percent white and 22 percent African American. Unlike many cities, many low-income families own homes, while many high-income households choose to rent.

Most of the new housing units being built in the city are apartments or other multifamily units. The workshop asked participants what kind of housing would be best to develop in vacant lots around the city, which most of the options getting some support.

Morris and several other participants said they would like to see neighborhoods develop nicer areas without driving out existing residents.

“To me the perfect mix of income is like Colorado, Bishop Arts,” Morris said. “It’s one of the very few diverse income areas where you have the poorest of the poor and you have nicer homes… That should be the model.”

Peer Frank Chacko, assistant director of city sustainable development and construction, said he hopes to have a draft plan in place by the end of the year outlining regional neighborhood priorities and what the city and the businesses and nonprofit organizations it works with can do to assist with them.

Judy Brooks, a participant in Tuesday’s workshop, said she was interested to see how Inspire Dallas could affect her Kiest Park neighborhood and was concerned about infrastructure as younger families move south.

“I think they’re baby steps right now,” she said of the workshop. “I hope it’s not all talk and no action.”

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings: ‘It’s important for us to continue to lift up our health care workers’

Mayor Mike Rawlings points out a chart about incubation rates for patients in quarantine for Ebola during a press conference at the County Commissioners Court in Dallas October 20, 2014. (Nathan Hunsinger/The Dallas Morning News)

The health care workers who cared for Dallas’ Ebola patients could be cleared of contracting the virus in coming weeks, after undergoing 21 days of avoiding public places and self-monitoring for symptoms.

And when that happens, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said, it “is important for all of us, once again, to accept all of these people back into the mainstream of our world and our life.”

“It’s important for us to continue to lift up our health care workers with pride and with honor,” Rawlings said during a brief speech Wednesday at the beginning of a Dallas City Council meeting. “They are good people.”

The request echoes the call from Monday, when local officials celebrated that 51 people had completed the monitoring period. That group included the family members of Thomas Eric Duncan, the city’s first Ebola patient who died earlier this month.

More than 100 health care workers remain under monitoring and self-quarantine. That group includes those who cared for Duncan or for the two Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas nurses who became infected in the course of that care.

So while Rawlings again cheered on Monday that “we have gotten over a significant hurdle in this outbreak,” he cautioned that there’s still a ways to go. The “magic date” of when the remaining health care workers should be cleared remains Nov. 7.

The mayor – who, along with Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, has been prominent in the local Ebola response – also thanked corporate leaders, nonprofits, the media and citizens at large for helping one another “through these difficult times.”

After scaling down Trinity Lakes plans, city officials start ‘dreaming’ again with $76M in proposed amenities

Here's a look at where the smaller version of the Urban Lake would be built, on the downtown Dallas side of the Trinity River. (Lara Solt/The Dallas Morning News)

A zip line over the Trinity River. Spray parks. Fire rings. A BMX track. A climbing wall on one of the support piers of the Commerce Street bridge. Jugglers. Kayak rentals. Trails. An 18-hole, lighted disc golf course.

Months after moving ahead with a scaled-down – and seemingly more realistic – version of the so-called Trinity Lakes, Dallas officials and some key Trinity boosters are once again dreaming big with an unfunded $76 million list of potential amenities.

Though there were attempts to temper expectations that the veritable theme park between the levees was what could be – and not necessarily what would be – the sweeping schematics and the grandiose vision behind them proved irresistible for some.

“So many things in the corridor are possible once we allow our imagination to go there,” said Gail Thomas, director of The Trinity Trust, the nonprofit that’s pledging to raise all the funds to build the improvements.

Dallas City Council members briefed on the plan on Monday split in their opinions, as the presentation’s open-ended nature provided fodder for either side. And now the public, as is often the case with the Trinity, will have to wait and see what’s real and what’s not.

Is an additional lake seen in the plans going to be built under the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge or will engineering studies show that it’s not feasible? Will the lakes’ parking lots and access road remain or will they be bulldozed to make way for the Trinity toll road?

Will the plan be even halfway realized or will it join so many other fanciful Trinity proposals that are collecting dust on a shelf somewhere at City Hall?

“We’ve got to get realistic about what it’s going to look like down there,” council member Scott Griggs said. “We need to get the mythology out of this.”

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Dallas council members ask for more details on plan to retain public meeting recordings for longer periods

Here's what a few months of City Plan Commission meetings looks like (Tom Benning/The Dallas Morning News)

A Dallas City Council committee pressed city staff members on Monday for more details on a proposal to increase – but not make permanent – the retention of recordings of key city board and commission meetings.

The city’s current policy allows for the destruction of tapes of public meetings after 90 days. But spurred by council members – and appointed officials who reviewed this year the city’s charter – city staff offered a plan that would extend that period to years.

The affected boards and commissions would include the City Plan Commission and the Park and Recreation Board, among others. The new proposed retention schedule would match those boards’ schedules, between three and 10 years, for keeping meeting minutes.

Members of the council’s budget, finance and audit committee generally supported the idea of better preserving the recordings. But anticipating that city staff will brief the full council in coming weeks, council members said they simply needed more information.

How much would it cost to store the recordings – all of them? How much is the city already spending to retain these kinds of records? Why did the city’s policy shift to 90 days in the first place? What’s the expected lifespan of various storage formats?

“You can see the passion there,” said council member Jerry Allen, who chairs the committee. “So those questions really need to be addressed and looked into.”

The city’s retention policy has been under special scrutiny since the city’s Charter Review Commission raised the issue. The group, which meets once a decade to recommend charter changes, raised concerns about losing key records and history.

The city policy does comply with state law. Meeting minutes for key boards and commissions are kept for longer periods of times. And the city is already preserving recordings of City Council meetings, with audio recordings going back the late 1960s.

But one commissioner – attorney Mike Northrup – described the policy as a “conveyor belt leading to a furnace.” And the commission recommended that the charter be changed to require the permanent retention of recordings for key boards and commissions.

Mayor Mike Rawlings and others agreed that the issue needed to be examined, but the council decided a city code change made more sense than a charter change. But with the debate now fully underway, the city has stopped the destruction of such recordings.

Tonight, a town hall meeting at Winfrey Point featuring fluoride’s greatest enemy (and Sheffie Kadane)

Update at 12:57 p.m.: Sheffie Kadane confirms: He will be there tonight. And he explained why when he called back this afternoon.

“I’ve got stuff from all over the world about fluoride — who uses it, who doesn’t,” he said. “The people who don’t use it have better dental records [than we do]. People just don’t know about it. All I was trying to do was find us some money. I found us a million dollars, and nobody wants to take it. People need to hear about it. Like they say, it’s a drug they put in our water — and it’s also not that good. It’s not even pharmaceutical grade.”

Original item posted at 11:20 a.m.: We haven’t been able to reach Sheffie Kadane this morning — he’s at a meeting in Arlington — and his secretary says she’s unable to access his schedule at the moment. So, long story short, we cannot confirm his advertised attendance at a meeting scheduled tonight at Winfrey Point at White Rock Lake on E. Lawther Drive. But it does sound very much like something up his alley: “The Town Hall on Fluoridation.”

Kadane, you may recall, believes Dallas needs to get the fluoride out of its water supply. He’s said it a few times during recent council meetings, nodding along with he anti-fluoridation faction that keeps popping up to do a few sets at the open mic. The District 9 rep who’s about to get term-limited out of out of office has fought against fluoride on two fronts: We don’t need it, he insists, and we shouldn’t be paying for it — especially since adding more to the city’s water supply runs around $600,000 annually.

“Have you seen toothpaste that has fluoride in the toothpaste?” he asked Dallas Water Utilities officials in May. “Have you read the disclaimer which says do not swallow, and if you do swallow this toothpaste go get your stomach pumped? And it’s only on the fluoridated toothpaste.” Anyway. We’re not sure if he’ll be there. But it does seem like his cup of non-fluoridated tea.

Sheffie Kadane

But we do know who will be there: Dr. Paul Connett, the executive director of the Fluoride Action Network and a former chemistry professor billed as “one of the world’s experts on Fluoride.” He’s certainly one of the most controversial, as evidenced by his brief entry on Quackwatch: “Fluoridation is supported by major health organizations and government agencies throughout the developed world and has been listed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention among the 20th Century’s ten great public health achievements. But Connett would have you believe that fluoridation is ineffective, unsafe, and unethical. In effect, he would like you to believe that he’s smarter than all of them put together.”

He actually spoke to the council in June, where he was warmly greeted by none other than Sheffie Kadane. Their back-and-forth is below, beginning at the 3:40 mark. Just in case you can’t make it tonight.

As city of Dallas prepares for next Legislature, officials brace for ‘whole new world’

Evening sun sets over Dallas City Hall Friday, January 24, 2014. (G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News)

A “whole new world” is how the city of Dallas is approaching the next year’s Legislature, according to the staff member charged with marshaling the city’s lobbying efforts.

With a new governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and comptroller – among other notable changes statewide and in the Dallas area – the city isn’t “sure how our issues will be viewed,” said Larry Casto, an assistant city attorney.

“But I don’t think it gets any easier,” Casto said Wednesday at a City Council briefing on the city’s proposed legislative program for the session that starts in January.

The council will vote next week on its legislative priorities, the top of which include issues like blight, code enforcement, urban land banking and group homes. The council will also vote on whether to OK $521,000 in contracts for seven outside lobbyists.

The city’s main focus is broad: issues related to the “degradation of quality of life,” Casto said. City officials plan to target statutes in that realm and push for them to be re-crafted in a way that gives the city more authority to draft “tailor-made” ordinances.

But even with those ambitions – and a host of secondary priorities on down the list – Dallas officials said their biggest legislative task will likely remain the same as always: playing defense.

“We are going to spend the majority of our time on opposing legislation attacking home-rule authority,” Casto said.

The city’s legislative agenda can be broken down into two parts.

First, the city has top priorities that it will actively push from the get-go. And then there are myriad “support” initiatives, which are items that city officials and lobbyists will start touting if they are brought up by others.

The lists are fairly consistent from session to session, a reflection of the fact that it’s “tough” to proactively pass bills, Casto said. One push, for instance, that’s failed to gain traction over the years is to require disclosure of sales prices on commercial properties.

But there are some new areas of interest.

One “support” item is to advocate for the removal of some restrictions on what the city can build in its right of way. The city wants more authority to install streetscape improvements, such as sidewalk restaurant seating, that could boost neighborhoods.

Since the idea “doesn’t have a historical opposition or paid lobby against it,” Casto said, “there’s a decent chance of moving it along.”

Though no votes were taken Wednesday, the council offered broad support for the legislative program.

The only significant challenge came from Mayor Mike Rawlings, who said he wanted to see Dallas better team up with Fort Worth and other North Texas cities. Such partnerships were needed, he said, to develop more clout on legislative and funding issues.

“We’ve got to be bigger and better than Houston,” Rawlings said.

Officials pointed out that Houston’s lobbying budget is notably larger than Dallas’. But they assured the mayor that they were working to improve those relationships, especially when it comes to topics in which the cities would be pulling together anyway.

“We got the Wright amendment changed, so I think we can pull this one off,” Rawlings said, referring to the contentious air travel restrictions that were just lifted at Dallas Love Field.



Preservation Texas adds downtown Dallas to its ‘Most Endangered Places’ list

The day they tore down the 129-year-old building on Main Street (Harry Wilonsky/Special contributor)

At 1 today, Preservation Texas will make it official (or at least as official as these things go): Downtown Dallas is endangered.

The group will hold a press conference Wednesday afternoon to announce the addition of the Dallas Downtown Historic District to its Texas’ Most Endangered Places list. And the site of the press conference is no accident: the 1600 block of Elm, where Headington Companies razed a handful of century-old (and older) buildings to make way for The Joule’s expansion and Forty Five Ten’s move to Main Street. Says the release announcing the presser, downtown’s addition to the look-out list is “a direct result of the recent demolition of five historic structures in the Dallas Downtown Historic District, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. This special endangered listing comes at a time when increasing development pressures are resulting in increasing losses of historic places in cities across the state.”

Houston’s Fourth Ward Historic District and the Congress Avenue Historic District and Sixth Street Historic District in Austin are also making the Preservation Texas list.

But Preservation Texas reminds: Just adding something to a most-endangered list means relatively little. It’s not a force field that redirects the wrecking ball. If anything, it’s a symbolic shout-out. Only the Dallas City Council can do something to prevent further downtown demolitions, and it remains far from clear what action the council will take on that subject following Preservation Dallas’ briefing to a council committee last week.

“It’s time for cities to step up their protection for historic places,” says Preservation Texas Executive Director Evan Thompson in a prepared statement. “Galveston and San Antonio took a long-range view decades ago by planning for preservation. They are finding that the economic benefits of meaningful local zoning protection for historic districts far exceed whatever short-term benefits might have been gained by bulldozing and redeveloping those areas with bland and disposable speculative commercial and residential development.”

Adds Charlene Orr, the group’s president, “Historic preservation is a powerful economic tool. In Dallas County alone, nearly $450,000,000 has been invested in federal tax credit restoration projects, but only because of the existence of National Register districts. That investment is wasted when historic districts are eroded for lack of code enforcement, maintenance, and demolitions. And we put preservation architects, engineers, craftsmen and artisans in Texas out of work when we destroy historic places.”

Dallas warns that ‘small number’ of laptops containing patient information are missing from ambulances

If you were in an ambulance in the last three years, you may want to read this. (G.J. McCarthy/Staff photographer)

Dallas City Hall revealed late Tuesday that “a small number” of laptops containing patient information have gone missing from Dallas Fire-Rescue ambulances.

According to the city, those computers disappeared between January 1, 2011, and August 29, 2014. The city’s release did not say how many laptops were unaccounted for — or how they disappeared. Messages have been left for Sana Syed, the city’s spokesperson.

The city does say that on August 15, it discovered that “one of the software applications on these EMS laptops was not properly protected.”

Says the release, “If the EMS laptop used during a patient’s treatment was one of those unaccounted for, and if the paramedics performed an electrocardiogram (EKG) on the patient, that EKG and possibly the patient’s name, age and gender, may have become accessible to an unauthorized person(s).”

The city is notifying the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about the breach, and says it will also contact the patients whose “protected health information is at risk of unauthorized disclosure.” But that will will be far from easy.

“Identities of some of the patients transported or attended to by EMS paramedics whose health information may have been exposed cannot be readily identified,” says the release. “Therefore, notifications will be published in print publications, online and via first-class mail.”

Dallas City Hall says it’s endeavoring to discover how the breach occurred, and will work with an outside consulting firm to “assess potential security risks related to the EMS laptops.”

Says the city: “Patients who have been contacted and who have questions related to this matter can call the Dallas Fire-Rescue EMS staff at (844) 532-5527.”

Bentley, the dog belonging to Ebola patient Nina Pham, is a temporary resident of the former Hensley Field

Update: On Tuesday night, Dallas City Hall released video footage of Bentley in his temporary home. Also, Dallas Animal Services officials reported on Facebook that Nina Pham had called to offer her thanks to those caring for her dog.

Original post: One day after officials said that Nina Pham’s year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel had been taken to an undisclosed location, Dallas City Hall now says Bentley has taken up temporary residence at the Hensley Field Services Center on W. Jefferson Boulevard. The city says in a statement released Tuesday afternoon that “Dallas Animal Services will oversee Bentley’s care over the next few weeks while he is monitored for Ebola.”

“As our brave healthcare worker told us, this dog is a significant part of her life and we vowed to her family we would do everything in our power to care for her beloved pet,” said Mayor Mike Rawlings in a statement. “I am thankful to the team who has made sure to take every precaution to protect the public health while transporting, monitoring and caring for this dog at a new, safe location. We will continue to monitor and care for this pet while following all guidance and protocols of the CDC.”

Jody Jones, director of Dallas Animal Services, says the dog is doing well and that there are no plans to euthanize Bentley. Syed says the response to the dog and his plight has been “overwhelming.”

Bentley as he was being removed from Nina Pham's apartment Monday (Courtesy Dallas City Hall)

Says city spokesperson Sana Syed, the dog will be housed at the former Hensley Field on Mountain Creek Lake for the next 21 days. While Bentley’s owner remains in stable condition following her Ebola diagnosis over the weekend, the dog is healthy, according to city officials. Dr. David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, said during a Tuesday afternoon press conference that monitoring efforts for the dog are “going well.”

People caring for him have to have Hazmat clearance, says Syed. Dallas Animal Services is limiting access to Bentley to one or two people a day.

According to the city, Bentley’s temporary housing “mimics a homelike environment. The city has provided him with comfortable bedding, toys and other items to help entertain him during his stay at this location. Bentley is in a safe place, away from homes, apartments and other animals.”

Workers are in place to care for the dog during his stay at the one-time Naval Air Station. Hazmat barrels are on site to collect the dog’s waste.

Deputy Chief Santos Cadena, who oversees the southwest patrol division, said he was asked late Monday evening to assign a patrol officer to stand guard near the dog’s kennel.

“Erring on the side of safety is probably the more prudent thing to do,” he said. “We don’t know what the dog’s condition is or if it’s contagious.”

Cadena said he told his sergeant to rotate out the officers so nobody was there too long. He pulled the officer off the duty around 2 p.m. Tuesday after the city arranged for an alternative.

Staff writers Tristan Hallman and Naheed Rajwani contributed to this report.

Expansion of Dallas’ network of bike lanes features some growing pains

New bike lane in Dallas' Deep Ellum neighborhood

A bicyclist makes her way across Main Street from Hill Avenue using bike lanes Monday, January 14, 2013 in Dallas' Deep Ellum neighborhood. The markings no longer exist, thanks to a road resurfacing project. (G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News)

With 16-plus miles of bike lanes already built – and another 55 miles in the works – Dallas’ on-street bike network is starting to come together.

And with that comes some growing pains.

Road resurfacing on a stretch of Main Street near Deep Ellum, for instance, has erased the striping for shared bike and automobile lanes there. Normal wear-and-tear has caused the markings to fade on some heavily trafficked streets.

And perhaps most ignominiously, a utility cut has done in some of the markings on a shared bike lane near the Northaven Trail in North Dallas, City Council member Lee Kleinman said. What remains is “half a bicyclist,” he said.

“I hate to see the work we are doing get lost,” Kleinman, an avid cyclist, said Monday at a meeting of the council’s transportation committee.

For city staff tasked with implementing the Dallas Bikeway System, there aren’t always easy solutions to fixing those problems.

The city’s streets department currently has $500,000-a-year to implement on-street bike improvements – either dedicated bike lanes or so-called “sharrow” lanes where bikes and automobiles share the road.

Nearly all that money has been devoted to getting bike lanes on the ground. And there’s not really anything left for operations and maintenance.

In most cases, the city’s bike team has tried to prod the department responsible for messing up the markers to fix them. But officials realize long-term that they need to carve out some of the existing money for repairs or find additional dollars for a dedicated maintenance fund.

“That would be a budget item for next year,” said Council member Vonciel Jones Hill, who chairs the transportation committee.

Even with those challenges, officials are pleased with the development of the bike lane network.

The first round of lanes focused mainly on downtown Dallas, Deep Ellum and Oak Cliff. Another set, which should start appearing soon, will extend up into Uptown and East Dallas, among other areas. And another upcoming group will feature parts of North Dallas.

By themselves, the lanes appear to be disconnected, aimless squiggles. But many of the on-street improvements actually connect with off-street hike-and-bike trails or Dallas Area Rapid Transit stations.

“These additions to the on-street facilities are going to take pieces of a disconnected puzzle and turn them into something looking much more like a system,” said Council member Philip Kingston, also a cycling enthusiast.