In Dallas, the political atmosphere for payday lending reform is optimistic. After three years of ordinances limiting lending practices, the local movement has spread to 17 other cities across the state. Today, Dallas City Councilman Jerry Allen went before the Amarillo City Council to try and recru ... More >>
For decades, doubtless dating back to the advent of home mail delivery, the dog-bites-mailman trope has provided cartoonists and joke writers (and now meme creators) -- with an easy source of cheap humor. The U.S. Postal Service, whose employees were the victims of 5,581 dog attacks last year, is n ... More >>
It's a wonderful time to be an Atmos Energy shareholder. The gas distributor's profits -- and dividends -- keep going up. It's much less wonderful to be an Atmos Energy customer, who is fueling those profits through increasingly large bills. Despite its profitability and despite getting six rate h ... More >>
For all the complaints about taxi service in Dallas -- drivers often refuse to take credit cards, they dislike short hauls and sometimes they're slow to arrive -- making a living driving a cab in Dallas can be an iffy proposition. For our look at living car-free in Dallas, Amy Silvertstein talked to ... More >>
Grid managers at ERCOT, the manager of Texas' electric grid, issued an emergency alert Saturday. Apparently, a single power plant malfunctioned, went offline and single-handedly cut into the 2,300 megawatts of extra capacity we keep on reserve for just such occasions. To keep that number from plun ... More >>
After a frack job is complete, can we be certain that the energy industry is taking care to ship the oil as safely as possible? Two United States senators are gently questioning that as a series of crude oil train explosions have made the news. On December 30, a crude oil train operated by Fort Wo ... More >>
Freight trains are the little engine that could of the transportation industry, really janky-looking and slow but refusing to die. In fact, the freight train industry is doing better than ever in states sitting on top of shale, enjoying a massive increase in business thanks fracking. There are over ... More >>
The payday lending industry in Texas has managed to wrap its tentacles around just about every level of government there is, repeatedly killing any move toward meaningful regulation on the part of the state legislature, skirting rules set up by municipalities, Dallas included, aimed at curbing its w ... More >>
An NBC5 report last night shows just how desperate Yellow Cab Co. was to run Uber, the rider-summoned, smartphone-app car service, out of its territory. In emails dating as early as May, a lawyer for the biggest taxi company in North Texas hectored the city manager's office about citing Uber drivers ... More >>
Remember last year's BrewFest? Yeah, it's a little foggy for me, too. I do remember large quantities of humans drinking large quantities of good booze, though. Beer snobbery was in full effect, too: The lines for the craft breweries were significantly longer than those that lead to the conventional ... More >>
If you're a craft beer fan, you may want to charge up your cordless drill. On Friday Governor Rick Perry signed off on a five-pack of bills relating to the craft beer industry that will, in part, allow them to expand brewery operations. For over a decade the Texas craft beer industry has been push ... More >>
Earlier this week, the Texas Senate approved a family of bills dear to the heart of Texas craft brewers. The legislation lets brewpubs sell a limited amount of beer through distributors, while craft breweries will get to sell their products to consumers on-site. See also: - Public Hearing Set for C ... More >>
Beer-drinkers across the globe are growing ever more thirsty for American craft brews, and more craft breweries are opening as a result, according to two not-remotely-unbiased reports from a craft-brew trade group. On Monday, the Brewers Association, which represents small and independent crafter b ... More >>
Craft brewers had one week to reach a compromise with the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas (WBDT) regarding five pieces of legislation recently introduced through Senate Committee on Business and Commerce. Senate bills 515, 516, 517 and 518 were a set of bills carefully crafted after a year of w ... More >>
Just in case all this temperate whether has lulled you into the perception that the Texas power grid doesn't have the thinnest margin of safety between lights on and lights out anywhere in the country, here's a reminder: Summer is coming. ERCOT, the grid operator for most of Texas, says the odds th ... More >>
Recently we wrote about four bills Republican state Senator Kevin Eltife of Tyler introduced that would open new revenue opportunities for craft breweries around the state. As the law stands now, Texas requires a clear separation between those who make, distribute and retail beer in Texas. None of t ... More >>
State senator Kevin Eltife, a Republican from Tyler, filed four bills yesterday that could breath new life into the craft beer industry in Texas. The legislation "will modernize laws that unfairly advantage out-of-state beer producers over Texas' small businesses of the beer industry -- craft brewer ... More >>
Jack Bewley and Jeff Finkel have spent the last several years methodically strengthening their position in the Dallas taxi market. Their company, Irving Holdings, was established with the merger of five local cab companies. In 2007, they brought Freedom, Eagle, and Jet taxi companies. Earlier this y ... More >>
Not that we could know anything here at my house about a matter so remote and complex as the looming budget crisis at the U.S. Postal Service, subject of an editorial in today's New York Times. We did notice and observe here last March that it was way more difficult for us to get the postal service ... More >>
Every so often, we get to wondering what people in the local music community do all day. So, we asked them. Today, Ken Shimamoto checks in with Doc's Records employee Dave Howard, and learn a little about the life of a record store clerk in 2012. I grew up in record stores: from the musty, dusty s ... More >>
The Inland Port, the sprawling warehousing and transportation center meant to be an economic boon for southern Dallas County, has never really taken off. It opened in 2005 and has seen some development, but the project was stalled by a rocky economy and the bankruptcy of its largest property owner, ... More >>
Piracy is theft. Piracy isn't theft because nothing physical is being stolen. You are taking money out of the hands of artists. Artists were already being ripped off by labels. Artists can make the money back by touring. Kickstarter. Here is a bulleted list of numbers showing how much it costs ... More >>
Southwest Airlines co-founder Herb Kelleher and a gaggle of other titans, from former U.S. Spec Ops commanders to Sam Gilliland, chief executive officer of Dallas-based Sabre Holdings, reject outright the idea that we can drill our way to energy independence. In an Energy Security Leadership Council ... More >>
Yesterday the farming trade publication Farm Futures carried a story on the potential rise in beef prices after the recent uproar over pink slime, or LFTB (lean finely textured beef). CattleFax, a beef industry research group, estimates the pink slime news cycle "is costing the U.S. beef industry $1 ... More >>
A company that supplies electricity to Texans called American Electric Power filed to renew its application to export electricity to Mexico with the U.S. Department of Energy back in December. It operates a 720-megawatt coal-fired power plant near Vernon, and apparently it has been supplying our so ... More >>
We've known for months that the United State Post Office might shutter the Dallas Processing and Distribution Center on IH30; the USPS has been talking about doing it since, oh, 2009, for that matter. But today it's official: The postal service has announced that it's moving the Dallas Processing ... More >>
We watch a three-hour House State Affairs Committee hearing so you don't have to! Seriously, though, the future reliability of the Texas electrical grid is really starting to freak state legislators the fuck out. The watchword these days is "resource adequacy" -- bureaucrat-ese for "Remember those o ... More >>
Photos by Anna MerlanDallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price attended, but did not speak at, last night's town hall. He sorta mailed it in.Technically, the U.S. Postal Service hasn't yet made a decision about whether it will close the processing center at the main post office near Sylvan ... More >>
As it turns out, the United States Postal Service is looking at shuttering several post offices in the city -- not just the main processing facility on IH-30, but also its locations in the Earle Cabell Federal Building (known as "Station C"), the Belmont Finance Station on Greenville Avenue and t ... More >>
Here we go again.Ever since I read this last month, I've been trying to nail down whether the United States Postal Service intends to shutter the Dallas Main Post Office on IH30. I went so far as to contact Eddie Bernice Johnson's office; two weeks ago her spokesperson said, "We are going to hold ... More >>
I guess if you took a pickax and a fire hose to it, you could have dug out a little bit of the truth from this morning's City Hall briefing on the inland port, but you needed to have your tall rubber boots on. Before we wade into the bullshit, please allow me to tell you what's really going ... More >>
Click to embiggen ... or just go to Page 29 in this budget briefing.I mention this in the comments below, but the 5.91 percent increase in our Dallas Water Utilities bill comin' this fall won't be the last one any time soon. Matter of fact, per this morning's council briefing, this is but the fir ... More >>
"Queens for a day" could be a sign that feds are getting really ambitious.
The Haskell Avenue post office in danger of being shuttered following USPS's studyThis morning the United States Postal Services announced it's looking at some 3,700 retail offices that may be in need of shuttering to save dough. Because, per the release, "As more customers choose to conduct thei ... More >>
In a few weeks, Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm will present to the city council some revenue-generating brainstorms she hopes could offset some of this year's $60-million-and-maybe-more budget shortfall. Among her proposals, she tells Unfair Park, will be one familiar to anyone paying attention la ... More >>
About a month back we looked at docs the Texas Department of Transportation submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration in the hopes of landing some federal money dough for that loooooong-discussed Dallas-Fort Worth-to-Houston high-speed rail line. Long story short: The state wanted $18 mill ... More >>
Photo by Mark GrahamMike RawlingsMike Rawlings called this evening to discuss, sort of, those ads in which Mayor Dwaine Caraway blasts the mayoral candidate as the "Payday Loan King," a reference to Rawlings's six-year stint on the board of directors of Ace Cash Express -- the very sort of high-i ... More >>
A Store-by-store Breakdown of this Year's Record Store Day Events Around Town
Hispanics represent a growing share of Texas' wine drinking population, but wineries are still grappling with how to pitch their products to them. "No information is available about the Hispanic wine market," Natalia Kolyesnikova, assistant director of the Texas Wine Marketing Research Insti ... More >>
The catfish industry is targeting Texas as the next state to adopt country-of-origin labeling legislation. The Catfish Institute's president Robert Barlow is now in Texas, rallying support for a bill introduced by state Senator Glenn Hegar. The proposed law, modeled after similar legislation ... More >>
The nation's second-largest theater chain is opening a dine-in theater at Grapevine Mills tomorrow, suggesting the movie world's major players aren't ready to cede the "watch and eat" model to smaller operators. Grapevine is the sixth entry in AMC's growing Dine-In Theater concept; a seventh ... More >>
U.S. Department of TransportationThis morning, as expected, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood passed out $2.4 billion in funding to 54 high-speed rail projects in 23 states. Among the recipients: the Texas Department of Transportation, which'll take home $5.6 million intended to allow a fu ... More >>