City of Dallas

We get to vote on it again! Sort of.

Just two days after winning his unopposed re-election bid, state Representative Rafael Anchia has released a survey to gauge Dallas residents' opinion of the proposed Trinity toll road.

The survey was quickly pushed out on social media by opponents of the toll road such as City Council member Scott Griggs, who says it's good that people's voices will again be heard on the issue.

"This is a vehicle for the NTTA [North Texas Tollway Authority] to hear from the citizens of Dallas and the people who will be impacted by the toll road. I think it's wonderful that Rafael Anchia, our representative, is facilitating this communication," he said. "I'm concerned that there's been a disconnect between the NTTA and the people, and they need to know that people do not support this road."

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Dallas Observer

Thinks, correctly, that he can confuse us with jargon.

So, Dallas City Manager A.C. Gonzalez is making his twice-monthly report to the City Council Wednesday afternoon. This time, he's going to be talking about something called the Dallas Center for Performance Excellence which, well, we've read the whole briefing and still have no idea what it is.

Its purpose, as presented, is to "facilitate best-in-class levels of performance across the City of Dallas organization through an integrated systems approach that achieves results," whatever the hell that means.

Before those best-in-class levels of performance can begin to be facilitated, an advisory board and a working group -- featuring Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan -- need to be convened so there can be two levels of bureaucratic icing on top of the bureaucratic cake.

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Kent Wang

Not exactly a bastion of civic responsibility, says Dallas.

Digging through the this year's community survey, which you can see in full below, is like looking at one of those magic eye posters. You have to look past it to see what is really going on.

On its face, the results of the survey are positive. The survey's "major findings:"

1. "Residents generally have a positive perception of the City"
2. "While there are some differences for specific services, overall satisfaction with City services is about the same in most areas of the City"
3. "The City of Dallas is setting the standard for service delivery compared to other large cities"
4. "The City continues to maintain high overall satisfaction ratings even though the results for most other large U.S. cities have decreased"
5. "Although the City is generally heading in the right direction, there are still opportunities for improvement"

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Dallas City Council members were treated to the Commemorative Air Force's cinematic masterpiece "If These Planes Could Talk."

There are known knowns about Dallas Executive Airport. These are things we know that we know. One of the known knowns, courtesy of Dallas City Council member Tennell Atkins, is this: "We know that Dallas Executive Airport is an airport."

Another known known is how much the city of Dallas pledged to lure the Commemorative Air Force and its collection of vintage WWII warbirds to Dallas Executive: $8.7 million in grants, plus generous rent breaks, provided the group builds a museum and meets certain other benchmarks.

There are also several known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. Like whether the CAF will in fact deliver the 60 full-time jobs and $36 million boost to City Hall's bottom line over the next two decades like Atkins and the city's economic development staff are predicting. Or whether CAF's arrival will be the thing that pulls DEA, formerly called Redbird, out of the red ink its been drenched in for years. Dallas Aviation Director Mark Duebner would only say that DEA will be in the black "as soon as possible."

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Dallas Animal Services

Maybe we should leave them alone.

As of Tuesday, Amber Vinson and Nina Pham, the two Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital nurses to get Ebola after treating Thomas Eric Duncan, are Ebola-free. It's remarkable, inspiring news. Seeing the two speak at their post-release press conference was, in a way, like seeing someone back from the dead.

Then there's Bentley. Bentley, as you surely know, is Pham's impish, year-old King Charles Spaniel. After Pham's diagnosis, he was taken from her Marquita Avenue duplex to be monitored for signs of Ebola at Hensley Field in Grand Prairie. The dog's now officially Ebola free, so he's going to be reunited with Pham tomorrow.

That's awesome.

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Amy Silverstein

Eh.

Every hour or so, the Save the Cabana Hotel Facebook page reminds its 900-plus followers to SAVE THE CABANA HOTEL. Dallas' luxury Cabana Motor Hotel opened on Stemmons Freeway in 1962, and photographs on the fan page show legends like John Bonham and Robert Plant hanging out. The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Raquel Welch were also once inside the building.

In more recent years, the Cabana hosted a man named Danny Marvin, who describes his visit in the comments section of a Dallas Voice article:

I stayed there ... the food was horrible, staff wasn't very nice, and the worst part i had to stripe naked in front of other men. Nice architecture though.

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Patrick Michels

Dallas City Councilman Tennell Atkins

During a seven-year law enforcement career as a Dallas County deputy constable and Dallas City marshal, Tyler Atkins says he protected the public from fake security guards.

"I used to take people to jail who used to run security companies without a license," he says.

But for the past several months, it appears that Atkins, the 32-year-old son of Dallas City Council member Tennell Atkins, was doing just that. His company, Dallas Shield Inc., has been providing security guards for University General Hospital in Oak Cliff for the past several months, despite lacking the proper license from the Texas Department of Public Safety's Private Security Bureau. The company has applied for a license, but its application is listed as "incomplete" by DPS. According to the department, companies with incomplete licenses cannot legally operate.

Under state law, operating a security company without a license is a class A misdemeanor, which carries a maximum one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

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Derek Jensen

We'll be dealing with these for a while more yet.

They don't work. At least not in the way they're intended to. Study after study shows that red light cameras are, at best, an inefficient revenue generator and, at worst, increase accidents.

Dallas' red light enforcement is especially bad. Because the city signed its contract with Xerox -- the company that collects red light fines for the city -- in 2006, it is able to ding the credit reports of drivers who fail to pay their tickets. The Legislature made the practice illegal in 2007, but Dallas was grandfathered in because of its existing contract.

City staff recommended extending the current contract, rather than putting a new one out for bid, because that will allow Dallas to mess with scofflaws' credit until at least 2017. Credit reporting is the only thing that gives red light tickets teeth, they say.

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Flickr/Alan Stanton

Dallas has terrible streets. Ask any driver who hasn't been rendered prematurely senile by the constant jostling over disintegrating pavement or any cyclist who's survived a run-in with a man-eating pothole. Hell, ask City Hall, which estimates that it will take three-quarters of a billion dollars to get the city's roads back in decent shape. When you couple aging infrastructure with a long-standing municipal propensity to value shiny new hotels and bridges over nuts-and-bolts governance, this is what happens.

This ground has been well trod, and bitching about the general crappiness of the city's streets is a tired and unsatisfying exercise. But what if Dallasites could bitch about street crappiness with mathematical precision? To not only say, "Sweet Jesus, the potholes on Garland Road sure do suck," but to quantify the precise amount of suckiness those potholes contain.

See also: Dallas Streets Keep Getting Worse and Worse

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The Trinity Trust

Are the three in black and white stripes together, or what?

Say what you will about boring stuff like feasibility -- as surrealist art the latest renderings of potential park-like amenities between the Trinity River levees are pretty damn amazing.

Tragically, the solar-powered water taxis we've all grown to love from earlier sales pitches for the Trinity project are gone, but the latest conceptual images for the lakes near downtown include jugglers, zip lines and a water "spray park." Presumably, the water for the spray park -- like the water for the lakes -- wouldn't come from the river itself because, you know, disease. But in any case, the renderings Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan and the Trinity trust showed a City Council committee on Monday were incredible. By that we mean not credible.

At least that's how some City Council member saw it.

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