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AUDIO: In radio ad, Rawlings compares proposition to raise Dallas City Council pay to U.S. Civil Rights Act

A campaign postcard supporting Proposition 8, a Dallas charter amendment that would increase City Council pay. (Tom Benning/The Dallas Morning news)

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has been the public face of a campaign to encourage voters to approve a raise for City Council members to $60,000 from $37,500 and for the mayor to $80,000 from $60,000, as we reported in today’s paper.

Rawlings — who wouldn’t benefit from the increase, if it’s approved and if he wins re-election — hasn’t shied away from stressing the the vote’s importance. Pitching that it will encourage more qualified and more diverse candidates, he called it one of the most important ballot measures in the last decade.

But in a radio ad that’s airing on some Dallas radio stations, the mayor takes it a step further.

As we mentioned in today’s paper, Rawlings compares voting for the charter amendment — Proposition 8 — to passage of the landmark U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. Listen to the radio advertisement above or read a transcript of the ad below:

“Hi, I’m Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. You know that 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, the law that opened the doors of opportunity to millions of Americans who were unfairly locked out. We have a chance right here in Dallas to open the doors of opportunity even further by passing Proposition 8 on the Nov. 4 election ballot.

“Prop 8 would provide a middle-class salary for future Dallas City Council members and future mayors after me. This increase is long overdue. Council members work hard, between 40 and 60 hours per week. Raising the pay to a modest level that can help support a middle-class family would allow people from a much broader and more diverse background to serve our great city.

“So let’s all do our part to open the doors of opportunity in Dallas. Go to the end of the election ballot and vote for Proposition 8. Dallas is worth it.”

High school football comes to Fair Park as this year’s ‘South Dallas Super Bowl’ moves to the Cotton Bowl

Back when the Cotton Bowl was home to Your Dallas Cowboys (File photo)

For now, at least, the Dallas Independent School District 2014 varsity football schedule shows Lincoln and James Madison high schools squaring off November 7 at Forester Field, the regular site of their annual rivalry game. Officially, though, that will change tomorrow: At 12:30 p.m. Wednesday city and DISD officials will gather on the steps of the Cotton Bowl to announce that this year’s game — the so-called “South Dallas Super Bowl” — is moving to the Cotton Bowl.

Council member Carolyn Davis, who went to Madison, publicly began pushing for the move back to the neighborhood — “the community,” as she puts it — in December, during a council committee briefing on the latest Cotton Bowl makeover that looks every penny of its $25-million price tag. Less than a year later she got what she wanted, thanks, she says, to her Park Board rep (Tiffinni Young), Park and Recreation Department Director Willis Winters, Fair Park Executive Director Daniel Huerta and DISD trustee Bernadette Nutall. Among the issues that needed resolving, she says: “making sure everything was in place, and making sure everyone was safe.” It didn’t take too long.

“We’ve been working with a number of people here at the city, and then both schools wanted to see it stay in the community,” she said Tuesday morning. “We’ve been having to go outside of the community for the South Dallas Super Bowl, but because Fair Park is in the heart of the South Dallas-Fair Park community I thought it would be fitting for that. We don’t ask Fair Park for a lot of things. That community minds its business when it comes to the park. But I thought it was right that this ‘super bowl,’ even though it’s a high school game, be at Fair Park. It’s going to be exciting. And it’s the right time to do it.”

And then some: The move to the Cotton Bowl comes just as Mayor Mike Rawlings’ Fair Park task force is suggesting turning over the park to a private nonprofit that might — might — better utilize the historic property. Bringing high school football back to the Cotton Bowl would be a significant win for Fair Park; after all, if it’s good enough for AT&T Stadium, where high school playoffs kick off the following week, it’s good enough for the most historic stadium in Dallas.

“From my understanding, the Park Department wants to look at doing more high school games there,” says Davis. “This will be the first to see if it’ll work. It used to happen at Texas Stadium, and they have them at Jerry’s stadium. It’s time for it.”

Of course, there have been high school games at the Cotton Bowl recently: As our Corbett Smith notes, the Cotton Bowl hosted two different weekends of playoff games two years ago, and is likely going to do so again in 2014, according to Mesquite ISD’s Steve Bragg. And high-schoolers played there, on and off, though the 2011 season.

Winters says the park department hopes to put as many high school games in the Cotton Bowl as possible in coming years, though that could be difficult during the three weeks when the State Fair of Texas takes over the fairgrounds.

“When I was a kid, it was exciting when you had the South Dallas Super Bowl,” says Davis. “It was fun. People were happy. The PTA was involved. These are all the things I am hoping will instill some pride in the community.”

Dallas council committee says Live Nation’s $7 million Gexa Energy Pavilion makeover is music to their ears

Party at ground zero, or: What it looked like the moment Fishbone played the first Lollapalooza on August 22, 1991 (Erich Schlegel/Staff photographer)

Back in August city officials warned that it’s going to take about $7 million to redo The Concert Venue Formerly Known as Starplex. And there’s just one problem: The city can’t afford it — no way, no how. There’s no spare scratch in the general fund, and it’s highly unlikely that Gexa Energy Pavilion’s going to get all new seats, bathrooms and everything-elses out of a bond program any time in the foreseeable future (or ever). But parks officials had a novel way to pay for it: Live Nation Concerts, which operates the city-owned facility that holds 20,000 concertgoers, will foot the bill and then keep $500,000 in rent money every year until it recoups its sizable investment in someone else’s shed. Based on a new agreement going to the Dallas City Council next month, Live Nation’s lease expires at the end of 2028.

The Park Board’s already signed off on the proposal; the question this morning was, would the city council? So far, so good: The Quality of Life & Environment Committee hear-hear’d the proposal at its Monday meeting, agreeing to send it off to the full council for consideration November 12.

If all goes according to plan, per the briefing, the redo would begin by no later than December 1, 2016, and wrap by at least March 31, 2018. It goes without saying that the city hasn’t put a penny into the place since it opened in 1988.

But there were a couple of Big Questions to be asked and answered first, beginning with: When Live Nation cuts a rent-and-shared-revenue check to the city every year, where does that money go? And if the concert promoter is going to keep half a million a year until the $7 million is paid off, how will the city cover the difference?

Right now, Live Nation’s supposed to ship the city a minimum of $350,000 annually, but it’s far more than that. According to the briefing documents provided by Park and Recreation Department Director Willis Winters, seen below, in FY 2011-2012, Live Nation cut Dallas City Hall a check for $701,262; the next year it was a whopping $965,897. City officials told curious council members that dough goes straight into the general fund, save for the small percentage that lands in the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund per a decades-old agreement cut by then-Dallas City Council member Diane Ragsdale. (The new deal calls for Live Nation to kick in 20 cents out of every ticket sold; right now it’s 15 cents.)

When Thom Yorke and Radiohead played Fair Park in 2008, the shed was known as the Superpages.com Center. Catchy. (William DeShazer/Staff photographer)

A couple of council members were concerned about that disappearing revenue, among them Lee Kleinman and Sandy Greyson. Said the latter, the Gexa redo “sounds like a good deal [but] we’ll have to figure out how to replace that revenue.” At this morning’s meeting, there were no further suggestions.

Maybe that’s because Winters told the council it really has no choice but to allow the extreme makeover, as Gexa is the oldest shed among the 40 Live Nation operates across the country. And the longer it goes without a facelift, he said, the more likely it becomes that Dallas loses the shows that stop at Fair Park during the season.

“If you were to go out there during the day, you’d see the condition it’s in — and the urgent need for these improvements,” he said, noting that among other things, Live Nation needs to replace all 7,400-plus reserved seats … not to mention, well, everything else. “If we were to build this new today, it’d be hard to even give you a figure for it — but, likely, well over $50 million, if not more.” The $7 million, he said, is a bargain.

Winters also noted that this isn’t likely to be the last time the city revisits its deal with Live Nation. He noted the recommendations of the mayor’s Fair Park Task Force, which strongly pushes for a nonprofit to take over operations at Fair Park — including Gexa. Said Winters, “As part of this contract amendment all existing contracts, including that with Live Nation, will be reviewed by the city attorney’s office.” Should the task force’s recommendations “come to pass,” the deal with the concert promoter will be “assigned to a future governance board.” So keep an ear on that.

Council member Rick Callahan said he too was supportive of the makeover, at which point he pointed out another Fair Park venue in need of some TLC: the Band Shell, which he referred to as a “a wasted facility … that needs to be upgraded.” Could not have said it bett … oh, wait. Continue reading →

Today, Dallas City Hall got a sneak preview of the Cedars’ Alamo Drafthouse, which means you get one too

The inside of the new Alamo Drafthouse coming to the Cedars ... (Rendering courtesy Bill DiGaetano)

Back in July Alamo Drafthouse dropped the big news: Come mid-2015 the Cedars is getting its very own eight-screen multiplex on the southwest corner of Cadiz Street and S. Lamar Street, between the Dallas Convention Center and the South Side on Lamar. And they weren’t fooling around. Since the announcement, crews have been demo’ing the former Dallas Music Complex and salvaging the bricks for Alamo’s two-story structure, which will house the auditoriums downstairs and a sprawling bar area upstairs.

You can see it for yourself this morning courtesy Alamo Drafthouse Cinema DFW’s chief operating officer Bill DiGaetano and the city’s Urban Design Peer Review Panel, which got its first look at the Alamo’s plans this morning. Says DiGaetano, he and the architects — Hodges & Associates — wanted to take the design to the city “to make sure we’re giving them the look and feel they want, since the Cedars is such a passion project for the mayor and the council.”

With an informal groundbreaking ceremony planned for November 8, along with a free screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the requisite food trucks and beer vendors, DiGaetano wants you to keep in mind that these watercolors (unlike others, maybe) are more than just aspirational renderings.

“The design is done,” he says. “The plans are done. We are going. There may be a few tweaks — for example, that back bar space with the movie screen. Right now it looks like a fire pit. We were playing with doing a wood-fire pizza oven. We may still do that. Little things like that may change, but for the most part this is the design we’re going with.”

... and the outside of the Alamo. (Rendering courtesy Bill DiGaetano)

And while I’ll leave it to brighter minds than I to debate its aesthetic merits, DiGaetano says the intention is to plant something new in the Cedars that looks as old as its neighbors — the old Sears warehouse that became the South Side on Lamar, the former coffin factory that was reborn as the Nylo Dallas South Side.

“We wanted it to have that warehouse feel,” he says. “We didn’t want it to look out of place. This is going to be the entrance into the Cedars. When you’re coming to the Cedars out of downtown, this will be the first thing you see. We want it to be unique and blend in. You’ll walk into this two-story lobby, and wanted it to look as antique as possible, down to the brass buttons in the elevator.”

DiGaetano also notes: The upstairs will no longer be called the Glass Half Full Taproom, the moniker bestowed upon the eat-and-drinkeries at other Alamos, including the one in Richardson.

“We want it to be its own thing,” he says. “A watering hole, a hub for live entertainment, a bar just to hang in. We want this to be its own space and go head to head with the best bars and gastropubs in Dallas. You have The Cedars Social, which has great cocktails and good, and the Soda Bar at the Nylo. We wanted this to feel like an old-school pub with some interesting designs.” We’re interested in the outdoor space. One patio will have the best view of downtown. The front patio will be low-key, and the back area will have an almost 30-foot screen on the wall, like a drive-in with a 4K digital cinema projection. We can do movies, TV events, a stage for live music or karaoke. We want to program the bar as its own separate thing.”

But patience first: mid-2015, nothing more specific. After all, better to keep them guessing them keep them waiting.

The renderings and plans are below. Continue reading →

Plan commission will give Oak Cliff Gateway rezoning another try in November

Zang at Beckley is among the major intersections in the Oak Cliff Gateway rezoning case.

Some government machinery ground to a halt Thursday evening at City Hall. Blame it perhaps on information overload and uncertainty.

After dealing with other matters for about 3 ½ hours, the City Plan Commission returned to the familiar, a rezoning of the Oak Cliff Gateway area.

They will be back.

In recent months, commissioners have received briefings, held public hearings and met with interested parties about proposed new land-use rules for 854 prime acres in north Oak Cliff.

And after yet another hearing Thursday, which drew comments from 19 speakers, it was time to act on what has been an ever-evolving, many-headed beast of a zoning case.

“Here we go,” said commissioner Mike Anglin, the panel’s led on the project as appointee of City Council member Scott Griggs, who represents the Gateway area. “This has been an amazing process,” Anglin said. “Thanks, everyone, for participating.”

The rezoning proposal divides the target area into nine districts, each allowing certain types of uses and establishing maximum building heights – up to 20 stories in some areas.

It also addresses parking, landscaping, building setbacks, design guidelines and more. A 66-page draft ordinance includes recommendations from the city planning staff and a volunteer committee.

Facing such complexity, the commission waded into the decision process in piecemeal fashion, looking to address individual points with separate votes.

Anglin, who has shepherded the rezoning challenge in painstaking detail, offered motions for consideration, in some cases getting down to tightly focused changes in wording or referencing information first presented to the plan commission earlier in the day.

With no single written document for reference, the approach appeared to be tiring or confusing for some of his colleagues, as the evening wore toward 7 p.m. and a sense of inefficiency set in.

“We’re in dangerous territory,” said commissioner Neil Emmons. “I think we should close the hearing, get this on paper and vote on it.”

Anglin was agreeable: “This is not something I need to have done today.”

And some two hours after taking up the Gateway, the commission voted to close the public hearing and postpone their deliberations until Nov. 20.

In the meantime, Anglin will prepare an all-inclusive proposal for rezoning that can be considered in total or in any number of separate votes, as members see fit.

Anglin said he will send the proposal to his colleagues for review within a week or so. But an assistant city attorney told commission members not to communicate with each other or the public about the details until that 11-20-14 meeting.

We’ll see. Stay tuned.

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 InspireDallas 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 planning and neighborhood vitality, 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 InspireDallas 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.”

Continue reading →

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.