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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hud.gov

Obama's new HUD Secretary Julian Castro: Focus on this picture for a while, and you can see him blink.

City Hall announced late yesterday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has caved on the 4-year-old Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against Dallas officials, vacating most of the findings of a four-year federal civil rights investigation. A settlement signed yesterday by HUD and the city (see below) is a clean-sweep victory for Dallas and a bruising defeat for HUD.

In yesterday's settlement, HUD admits unspecified errors in its November 2013 finding of noncompliance. HUD releases Dallas from any obligation to pay a fine or suffer a loss of federal funding. The agreement makes no mention of compensation for Curtis Lockey or Craig MacKenzie, downtown developers who claimed Dallas scotched their tower re-do deal at 1600 Pacific because it would have accepted too many minority tenants.

See also: The Feds Say Dallas City Hall Has Promoted Racial Segregation in Housing Projects for Years

The accord signed yesterday is a bitter slap for Lockey and MacKenzie and I hope I can say, without sounding too self-referential, for me as well, since I've been pretty much the Lone Ranger around here for the last couple years predicting exactly the opposite outcome.

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It's far too early to render judgment on Superintendent Mike Miles' school-choice initiative. Eventually, he wants to open nearly three dozen specialized campuses that offer an alternative to neighborhood schools but aren't as selective as magnets. Thus far, he's opened just one: Mata Montessori, just south of White Rock Lake.

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BY SEAN CHAFFIN
One morning in 2011, just after sunrise, a swarm of federal agents rolled quietly down a neatly manicured cul-de-sac in Southlake, the city police's SWAT alongside them. They gathered outside the home of their target, a $750,000 spread with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and a swimming pool, all sitting on a tree-lined half-acre lot in perhaps Dallas' most idyllic suburb. Around 7, they knocked on the door, and waited.

There was no made-for-TV chaos, no upturned tables or scattering underlings. After a brief wait, the man they were there for, 57-year-old Albert Sidney Reed, approached the door, sleep still in his eyes. He was in his underwear.

Reed's teenage son looking on, police calmly handcuffed their target, and black-clad SWAT officers shuffled inside to sweep the 5,250-square foot house. When the all clear was given several minutes later, Reed was un-cuffed and allowed to dress. He sat in a chair inside for four hours as investigators sifted through his belongings, looking for proof of what they already knew.

About an hour into the search, another IRS agent stumbled across a satchel in Reed's SUV and shuffled through its contents: printouts of wagers, collection notes, business expenses, printouts of how much his betting operation profited during football season, even notes from a big meeting upper-level owners in the organization had recently conducted. Later, he made sure to introduce himself to the satchel's owner.

"I'm Special Agent Mark Parsons with the Internal Revenue Service," he said. "We're investigating the Global International Corporation bookmaking operation, and you and I are going to get to know each other pretty well over the next six months. You can make it good on yourself -- or hard on yourself."

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Dwight Burdette

No we didn't.

Preliminary numbers are out for Texas' midterm election voter turnout from the Election Project, and they are abysmal. Just 28.5 percent of Texans eligible to vote did so, either in early voting or on Tuesday, the lowest percentage in the country. The last time Texas voted for its governor in 2010, 32.1 percent of eligible Texans voted.

Dallas County weather, and the dearth of competitive races, likely bears most of the blame. In 2010, Dallasites voted at a 37 percent clip, casting 424,511 votes for the top line race -- Rick Perry and Bill White's gubernatorial election. This year, despite the number of registered voters in the county growing by about 100,000, only 406,594 ballots were submitted in Greg Abbott's landslide coronation. That's 32 percent turnout. Prior to the election Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole told The Dallas Morning News she thought turnout would be between 35 and 37 percent.

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Greg Houston

Say what you will about Longhorn Wrecker, one of Dallas' notorious towing companies, you can at least never accuse it of laziness. This is the same company that during the Dallas Gay Pride Parade five years ago descended on a post office nearby and towed a few dozen cars from the parking lot, even though Longhorn didn't have a contract with the post office to tow illegally parked cars. We're sure that Longhorn meant well and was just trying to help the post office make room for all its customers that Sunday.

Longhorn's zeal for towing hasn't gone unnoticed by the state. In a massive docket, a prosecutor for the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation has compiled a list of all the laws that Longhorn has violated since mid-2013.

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Would be king no more.

As in any good tragedy, Craig Watkins' tumble from his perch as Dallas County district attorney was preceded by hubris and stupidity. After badly underperforming compared with the rest of his party in his 2010 re-election win against Republican Danny Clancy, Watkins did everything possible to ensure another close race in 2014. He got one, and now, come January he'll be out of a job.

Whether it was the car wreck that Watkins secretly settled using forfeiture funds, the contempt charge saga, a bizarre debate performance or an ill-advised attempt to become the de facto boss of the Dallas County Democratic Party, Watkins consistently found new ways to shoot himself in the foot, and never raised enough money to spend his way out of it.

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U.S .Geological Survey

The Texas Oil and Gas Association and General Land Office are the first, so far, to file lawsuits against the city of Denton.

By the time Denton's city offices opened this morning, officials already had two brand new lawsuits waiting for them. As Denton's attorneys begin the weary post-election process of sorting through a legal defense against this inevitable barrage of suits, it's clear the battle over the ban on fracking voters approved Tuesday has just begun.

Denton's proposed fracking ban, which had gained national attention in the last few weeks, passed Tuesday night in a landslide: 59 percent of voters favored the ban, while just 41 percent voted against. This is despite ban opponents far out-spending and out-advertising anti-frackers. Frack Free Denton raised just $75,000 for its campaign, compared with $700,000 spent by pro-fracking groups.

See also: Frackers Have Launched an Aggressive Campaign to Kill Denton's Drilling Ban

But now that the morning-after glow of victory has subsided, the City of Denton must face the mighty backlash of the oil and gas industry. City spokesperson Lindsey Baker confirms that the Texas Oil and Gas Association and the General Land Office are the first so far, though most decidedly not the last, to lash out against the ban.

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Michael Furrh's shaft officially measures 19 feet, 5 inches, but he tells the ladies it's an even 20.

Everything you need to know about Michael Furrh you can learn from his outgoing voicemail message: Caddie Master at Caddie Club; golf ambassador for Rolling Hills Country Club; Guinness World Record holder.

Hopefully you didn't get bored and hang up, because that last part is key. At Arlington's Rolling Hills Country Club on Monday, Furrh used a 19-foot, 5-inch golf club to drive a ball 89 yards, thus penciling his name in the record book as the human who used the world's "longest usable golf club." We say penciled because records are made to be broken, this one in particular.

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Wikipedia

City Hall staff shown shortly after least real audit, about 100 years ago.

The city auditor's new bad report on a 27-year-old economic development fund in black South Dallas talks about technical problems with paperwork and mumbles on about the need for better "performance measures." Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when, Mr. Auditor, were you going to tell us about the missing five million bucks?

Talk about a performance measure. Here's your performance measure. Where's our five million dollars? Perform that.

The audit of the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund recently sent to the City Council hints broadly that the fund has been handing out a lot of money over the years without much attention to who's getting it or what's being done -- worthwhile matters of concern, to be sure. But Suzanne N. Smith, a member of the trust fund board who has been looking into its underlying finances, told me Tuesday morning she was surprised to read the audit and find scant mention of the missing moolah.

"I'm surprised that this audit report didn't discuss it," Smith said. "It was to me a golden opportunity to come clean and say, 'Look, we made a mistake, and here is how we are going to completely re-do South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund.'"

Smith declined to comment on the five million dollar figure. Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston told me earlier in the day that's how much may be missing from the fund. Kingston said he has discussed the issue with City Manager A.C. Gonzalez who, according to Kingston, promised some kind of action on it several weeks ago but has said nothing publicly since.

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