Philip Kingston

On Fair Park Fund Audit, Were You Going to Mention the Missing Five Million Dollars? Ever?

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 ... More >>

Dallas Keeps Red Light Cameras, Right to Screw Up Your Credit

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 comp ... More >>

Philip Kingston Starts the Drumbeat to End Red Light Cameras in Dallas

The problem, according to City Council member Philip Kingston, is that red light cameras seek to fix a problem that doesn't exist. "[Red light cameras] are based on two fallacies," Kingston says. "The first is that there are a bunch of people out there who intentionally run red lights. Those people ... More >>

Hey, Dallas City Council, Instead of Lecturing DISD, Why Don't You Fund Your Libraries?

Last week Dallas school board member Dan Micciche had an op-ed essay in The Dallas Morning News urging people to push their City Council members and the mayor about the chronic under-funding of public libraries in the city. The numbers he cited for the city's support of libraries were abysmal -- the ... More >>

Somebody Wake Up Dallas City Council and Tell Them to Get to Work

Ran into a retired city department head on a parking lot in the afternoon heat yesterday, thought I was gonna die. This guy had an entire career's worth of anger and frustration to unload, and there I was in the sun with my head uncovered. I think I lost a couple IQ points just listening. Lucky I ha ... More >>

The Cotton Belt Rail Line May Still Happen, Despite Objections from Nearby Residents

Despite having received zero proposals for private investment and an expected zero dollar contribution from DART until the agency's cash flow issues loosen in 2035, plans for public transportation along the former Cotton Belt Line in northern DFW are moving forward. According to a DART presentation ... More >>

Dallas Will Allow a New Katy Trail Mid-Rise, Highland Park's Objections Be Damned

Over the objections of their Park Cities neighbors, the Dallas City Council voted this afternoon to approve a zoning change that will allow for the construction of a new luxury mid-rise apartment building on Cole Avenue site currently occupied by the Saltillo Apartments. See also: Highland Park, Fi ... More >>

Full City Council Takes First Swing at Transportation-for-Hire Ordinance

Back from its July recess, a divided Dallas City Council took up work again on a package of regulations for cabs and ride-sharing services that aims to bring the city up to date with the changing transportation landscape. Wednesday's hearing was one more step toward a final vote on the new rules, i ... More >>

City Council to Seek More Research for Mayor's Proposed Sex Offender Restrictions

After receiving the presentation from the city attorney's office and the Dallas Police Department that we told you about on Monday, the Dallas City Council affirmed its unanimous distaste for sex offenders but raised questions about whether the city should enact tougher restrictions on where registe ... More >>

$800 Grand, Sex Extortion, Pit Bull Attacks: No Red Flags Seen at City Hall.

Late yesterday, just before finally answering my days-old question about it, the city manager sent a memo to the City Council characterizing $800,000 repaid to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a kind of technical accounting error and no big deal. Most of it involves money stolen ... More >>

Dallas City Hall Has Repaid $800,000 to HUD in the Last Year, but for What?

WOW. Looks like bigbexardaddy knows whereof he speaks. Little over a week ago bigbexardaddy commented on an item I had posted here about the Bexar Street boondoggle, giving away a lot of detail that sure sounded like it came from inside City Hall, including a claim that Dallas, even in advance of ... More >>

Dallas Repeals Bike Helmet Law for Adults

After a thankfully brief and largely unfocused debate this morning, the Dallas City Council amended city ordinances to allow bicycles in public buildings, remove unwieldy prohibitions against stunt riding and racing, and allow bicycle riders older than 17 to choose whether to wear a helmet. Changin ... More >>

Dallas Wants to Kill the Bike Helmet Law for Adults but Keep It for Kids. Is That Constitutional?

OK. So maybe the bike-helmet mandate the Dallas City Council passed 18 years ago wasn't really about protecting people's heads. Maybe it was really about giving cops in general an extra reason to interrogate suspicious-looking people in poor, minority neighborhoods, and for one cop in particular to ... More >>

Dallas City Council Sure Seems Eager to Give Itself a Raise

God bless Lee Kleinman. While his colleagues on the Dallas City Council were busy this afternoon working themselves into an oratorical lather -- this time over council pay raises -- he staked his position with a single sentence. "As a fiscal conservative, I can't support any sort of raise at this t ... More >>

Dallas' Bike-Helmet Mandate Is Basically Toast

When Dallas City Council members first entertained the idea of doing away with the city's 18-year-old bike helmet requirement two weeks ago, they left promising to give the proposal "strong consideration." At this morning's meeting of the Quality of Life committee, it became clear that they will do ... More >>

Dallas Still Trying to Decide Whether to Meddle With Virgin's Love Field Deal

The exciting part of the Virgin/Southwest/Delta feud for America Airlines' two up-for-grabs gates at Love Field (i.e. Richard Branson crowd-surfing and doing tequila shots at The Rustic) is over. Today was the excruciatingly boring part when the Dallas City Council spent a couple of hours debating ... More >>

Dallas Isn't So Sure It Wants to Let Virgin America Fly Out of Love Field

There was an odd little dance on Friday between the city of Dallas and Virgin America after the carrier announced that it had struck a deal with American Airlines and would begin flying out of Love Field on October 13. Company executives predicted city approval would come swiftly and was little more ... More >>

Dallas City Council Is Giving "Strong Consideration" to Repealing Bike Helmet Law

On the Wednesday in May 1996 when the Dallas City Council passed a law requiring bicyclists of all ages to wear a helmet, dozens of helmet-clad kids from Kramer Elementary burst into applause, according to The Dallas Morning News report the next day. They apparently hadn't heard of bike share. "Th ... More >>

Dallas PD Wants to Use the Feds' Cache of Private Financial Info to Take Down Drug Dealers

Dallas Police Chief David Brown didn't think his proposal to secure access to a federal database of private banking and financial information would be controversial. It sailed through the City Council's Public Safety Committee unopposed last week. Then again, that committee didn't have City Councilm ... More >>

Downtown Dallas' Tunnels: Are They Really All That Terrible?

Nowadays, Dallas' network of tunnels are pretty widely reviled as an urban planning nightmare that have sucked the life off downtown's streets. They are a "sordid story," Downtown Dallas Inc. CEO John Crawford told the City Council this morning. "Frankly, we're trying to do away with them as quickly ... More >>

Dallas Now Has a Bike Task Force, and It's Hellbent on Killing the Helmet Law

In case you missed it, NPR ran a piece yesterday about Texas' moderately surprising move toward bike-friendliness. The state, especially its cities, have been adding trails, bike lanes and pro-cycling policies at a respectable, if not quite Portland-esque, clip. Just look at Dallas' ambitious bike p ... More >>

Too Many Wrinkled Guys in Mayor's School Takeover Campaign

Monday I said Mike Rawlings was about to announce a pause -- a tapping of the brakes -- in his public school takeover campaign. I was a little off. Instead it turns out he has been meeting with three really old guys. I guess that could have the same effect. What? That's not a slur. I've got nothing ... More >>

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, Philip Kingston Divided over Whether You Should Eat Meat on Thursday

In further proof that Mike Rawlings' tendency to craft major policy initiatives in secret is ruffling feathers at City Hall, some (or at least one) City Council member is pushing back against the mayor's newly hatched plan to curb Dallas' meat consumption. The blowback comes on the heels of Rawling ... More >>

Trinity East's First Mistake Was Trusting Dallas City Hall

Trinity East Lawsuit Depicts City Hall as that Proverbial Wringer in which not To Get Caught

Drill down into the Trinity East lawsuit against the City of Dallas, and it tells one hell of a story about how Dallas City Hall really operates. The question is whether or not to believe it. That story started in 2007 when the city was facing a $90 million budget shortfall in an operating budget ... More >>

Dallas City Council Pushes Trinity Lakes Plan, Says Toll Road Opponents Wasted Millions

The Trinity River lakes were never going to be humongous. Seventy-five or 80 acres each, according to the Balanced Vision Plan developed for the Trinity River Corridor Project in 2003. But now the plans have been reduced to something so small -- a couple of 20-acre ponds reaching a depth of 10 feet ... More >>

Maybe Dallas City Council Should Use a Public Defender for Its Lawyer

Yes, I, too, love the Shakespeare T-shirt about first kill all the lawyers, and I bet I've got five good lawyer jokes to your one, but then again, I do dearly love it when good lawyers get elected to the City Council. In Dallas, as a result of having had a city manager system for the better part o ... More >>

Did Dallas City Council Just Put the City's Water Supply at Risk For $1,600?

Few people on the Dallas City Council seemed to be aware that the city owns over 21,000 square feet of land in Kaufman County until Wednesday, the day the land was up for sale. "I do not even know why we own that property, frankly," councilman Philip Kingston tells Unfair Park. As it turns out, ... More >>

Omni Hotel Helps Relieve Convention Center Debt? Great. All We Need Is 10 of Them.

When the Omni Dallas Hotel opened next to the convention center in downtown Dallas in 2011, the story was that it would dig the convention center out of its financial hole. That was a big part of the pitch in 2008 when then-Mayor Tom Leppert was selling voters on bonds for a city-owned hotel. Wow. ... More >>

Dallas Adding Mandatory Rate Hikes to Its Drought-Response Arsenal

Councilman Philip Kingston's lonely quest to kill off the Lawn Whisperer appears like it's doomed to fail. Mr. Whisperer, a character in advertisements, features prominently in the city's long-term water-conservation plan, which was briefed to the City Council's Quality of Life Committee this mornin ... More >>

A Totally Not-Depressing Look at Downtown

City center's future is so bright, it's gotta wear shades.

Downtown Has a Great Future. Forget the Past.

Had an interesting chat a while back with Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston about downtown office vacancy rates. Hey! What? It's what people like us talk about. Just be glad you didn't get stuck between us on an airplane. It's interesting. Really. According to the Dallas Business Journal, ... More >>

Dallas Traffic Lights Are Terrible, So City Wants to Spend $250 Million on an Overhaul

You're right. Your mind, however warped it may be by traffic-induced rage, is not playing tricks on you. Dallas' 1,500 traffic signals are just as terrible as you think they are, maybe more so. By the city's own admission, they're plagued by outages and are far more likely to topple in a stiff wind ... More >>

As City Hall Battles Activists' Lawsuit, Dallas Moves to Ease Rules on Street-corner Protests

The city of Dallas swears it wasn't violating anyone's free speech rights when it ticketed a half dozen activists last January protesting the soon-to-open Bush Library by holding political signs along the Central Expressway service road. As the city has explained in court, police were simply ensurin ... More >>

Dallas Councilman Philip Kingston Is Going as Angela Hunt for Halloween, and It's Terrifying

This photo, of Councilman Philip Kingston and his predecessor Angela Hunt (or vice versa?) was posted on Facebook over the weekend. "I do not make an attractive woman, but my legs are dead sexy," Kingston said of his attire on his Facebook page. We sincerely hope this is a Halloween costume and not ... More >>

Dallas Councilman Philip Kingston Wants to Kill Off "Wrongheaded" Lawn Whisperer Campaign

You know the Lawn Whisperer. He's the vaguely irritating bearded gentleman, inexplicably decked out in safari garb, whose mug is plastered on buses, billboards and television sets by way of encouraging North Texans not to water their yards so much. Philip Kingston, the freshman member of the Dallas ... More >>

Dallas Swears It's Not Trying to Crush Uber, Just Regulate it into an Unrecognizable Form

The local Twitterverse is currently exploding with people explaining why Dallas needs Uber and why City Hall shouldn't shut it down: Because cabs in Dallas suck; because it increases competition; because you can't stop progress. The city, meanwhile, says everyone is overreacting. The proposed ordin ... More >>

Kingston Wins Council Seat. The City Yawns ... and Grows No Matter What.

The easiest thing to say about Dallas City Council elections would be that no one gives a shit. Voter participation in the council run-off election last weekend, counting everybody who mailed in a ballot or voted early, was 4.21 percent of the people who were registered to vote. That would be the w ... More >>

Former Mayor Tom Leppert Wades Into District 14 Race, Endorses Bobby Abtahi

Councilwoman Angela Hunt and former mayor Tom Leppert have never exactly been besties. She was a frequent and vocal critic of the mayor, accusing him of lying, putting his ambitions for higher office before the interests of the city, and generally not doing a very good job running the city. The dist ... More >>

Abtahi and Kingston: Who's the bigger SOB?

It takes a hard case to represent council District 14.

Kingston Opposes Trinity Road, Which DMN Favors, So Paper Endorses Him. Go Figure.

If you were a Martian visiting Dallas for the first time, you might have trouble even believing how obscure the issues are in City Council elections here, as if we were always voting between one guy who ties his shoes left to right and another one who goes the other way. And I do admit, sometimes yo ... More >>

We Ran into Warring Council Candidates Philip Kingston and Bobby Abtahi at a Bar. Awkward!

There wasn't much interest in the City Council elections this year, evidenced mainly by the fact that hardly anybody showed up to vote in them. We don't blame you. It was a Saturday, and there were probably waffles somewhere. But the runoff election in District 14 between Bobby Abtahi and Philip ... More >>

Is Council Candidate Philip Kingston a Neighborhood Advocate or a Bully?

After this month's city elections, we repeated a quote that District 14 candidate Bobby Abtahi gave to the Morning News alluding to Philip Kingston, his opponent in next month's runoff, as "someone who sues their neighbors." Kingston wasn't pleased. He called shortly after to offer a barbed response ... More >>

How Mary Suhm's Departure Could Help Usher in a New and Improved Dallas

Tons of talk already, of course, about this morning's announcement that City Manager Mary Suhm is stepping down. I tend to go with the end of the spectrum that's viewing it as ushering in the End Times. But I would. Oh, not my End Times. Their End Times! The Citizens Council! I'm talking about the ... More >>

Dallas Really Doesn't Care About City Government and Other Takeaways From Saturday's City Council Election

There was a City Council election on Saturday and, if you're like the vast majority of Dallas, you didn't notice. But whether you were paying attention or not, some important things were decided and some interesting trends emerged. Here's what you need to know: Angela Hunt's legacy: Saturday's mos ... More >>

In the Battle Over a Lower Greenville Walmart, Avi Adelman's Bark is As Annoying as Ever

Shortly after being sued last September by a neighbor for registering melissakingston.com and using it to email anti-Walmart screeds, inveterate Lower Greenville shit-stirrer Avi Adelman did something rather unprecedented: he agreed to cut it out. The temporary injunction he signed barred him from s ... More >>

A City Council Candidate's Wife Says She Beat the Crap Out of a Would-Be Carjacker Last Night

Melissa Kingston worked late on Tuesday night, finally leaving her office at Friedman and Feiger at 8 p.m. or so. On her way home, she decided to make a quick detour to the Spec's liquor store at Central and Walnut Hill. She had just pulled up to a stop sign in the parking lot when, she told police ... More >>

Judge Tells Avi Adelman He Can Depose City Council Candidate Philip Kingston

Back in September, attorney Melissa Kingston sued Lower Greenville blogger/rancorous shit-disturber Avi Adelman, memorably calling him "a self-proclaimed vigilante-style neighborhood activist who more accurately resembles a neighborhood terrorist." The whole fight began over the new Wal-Mart in th ... More >>

City Council Tells Greenville Ave.'s Service Bar, Yucatan They Can't Stay Open Past Midnight

Yucatan owner Pete Mylonas getting a ticket for overcrowding Friday night​On this jam-packed city council Wednesday, we now come to the late-night specific use permits that Lowest Greenville Avenue bars Yucatan and Service Bar are asking for -- the ones the City Plan Commission denied, based upon ... More >>

SUP, Service Bar and Yucatan? Not Your Late-Hours Permit. So Sorry. Ask City Council.

Photo by Leslie MinoraPhilip Kingston of the Lower Greenville Neighborhood Association takes the mic in opposition of Service Bar​Today brought another round in the ongoing fight over whether Lower Greenville is a daylight retail district or an evening entertainment strip. This afternoon, the ... More >>