This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.
This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth we have: early voting turnout news for the Saturday election; local issues raised in the Lege; PACs active in area elections and who funds them, when you can find out; various immigration stories, including a lawyer who got sacked for providing pro bono advice; news about new Dallas PD Chief Daniel Comeaux that explains why his interim predecessor is out; the latest from the Tarrant County Jail (nobody died this week); school district updates, including the possibility that Fort Worth ISD may get taken over by the state; the latest on Austin Metcalf’s death and the social media frenzy around it; mass shootings in the state in 2025 so far; and babies named after Luka Doncic. And more!
This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Missy Mazzoli, whom I was lucky enough to catch one year at SXSW in an ensemble at a classical music show. Her work in the last fifteen years is a lot broader and deeper than I imagined.
This week we have another grab bag, so let’s jump in:
- First, we have an election coming on Saturday. Early voting ended Tuesday, which happened to be the day I could get in to vote my two-race ballot. The DMN says early voting numbers spiked on Tuesday but KERA says turnout is lower than normal, and normal is pretty weak. Meanwhile, in my neighborhood, voting was up from 2024 but down from 2022 and 2023. And in Tarrant County, just under 5% of registered voters turned out early.
- You may remember Prop S, the lesser of the two odious Dallas HERO bills that passed in November. It’s the one that removes the city’s sovereign immunity to lawsuits. My state senator, Nathan Johnson, has authored a bill to recognize sovereign immunity as granted by the state instead of something localities can vote on, making Prop S unconstitutional. I’m usually not in favor of state law superseding municipal law, but this time I’ll make an exception.
- The Texas Senate is moving forward with a law that will prevent contractors who use state facilities from banning guns, specifically aimed at the State Fair’s gun ban. The bill moves on to the House and I need to call my representative to tell him to vote against it.
- Local journalist Steven Monacelli researched two PACs active in the May 3 city election here in Dallas. The Revitalize Dallas PAC is a front for AirBnB to get short-term-rental-friendly council members into office. The Committee for a Strong Econcomy [sic] PAC is a front for the Dallas County GOP. By front, I mean each of these PACs has only a single donor. Know your interests and vote accordingly.
- Dallas is updating its residential code to allow small multifamily housing (up to 8 residences, like townhomes) of three or fewer stories to be regulated under the same rules as single-family residences. Before they would have been regulated like giant apartment complexes.
- Last week we talked about how somebody miskeying a spreadsheet cost Dallas $8.6 million in commercial remodeling permitting fees. Unsurprisingly City Council fixed that pretty quickly.
- An interfaith coalition of religious leaders spoke out this week against local immigration enforcement, by which they mean ICE disappearing people to El Salvador.
- A local attorney gave some pro bono advice to some undocumented immigrants and lost his job for his trouble. He talked to Radley Balko about the incident, which started with him getting asked to help, talking to a family, and questioned by some unidentified men who were apparently federal agents. Hours after Balko’s post went up, the lawyer was sacked. Judd Legum of Popular Info is also on the story. His former employer is Fidelity National Financial.
- Last Sunday we had another round of anti-Trump protests in downtown Dallas. One of the things that made this protest different is that Dallas PD arrested two of the organizers, one of whom is an official with the Tarrant County AFL-CIO, as the protest wound down. Pick your story: the DMN, the Star-Telegram, or WFAA.
- I have a couple of items about new Dallas PD chief Daniel Comeaux for you. First, his offer letter shows he’ll be making at last $310K annually. Second, he’s now said Dallas PD will partner with federal agencies when those agencies need DPD to assist, which puts his hiring and the resignation of interim Chief Michael Igo in a whole new light. Igo, who was promoted from within, got into a hot water in February for saying DPD wasn’t helping ICE.
- The Star-Telegram’s Bradford William Davis has some scathing commentary on Fort Worth PD’s $7,000 field trip to New York to learn about why the Sally Mann photos at the Modern weren’t obscene. Five Fort Worth officers visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art over the course of a few days. Nice work if you can get it.
- After two local gadflies were thrown out of Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court at the end of January, they’re being charged with “hindering proceedings by disorderly conduct”, a Class A misdemeanor that could cost each of them a $4,000 fine and a year in jail. One of them clapped for something after being told not to by County Judge Tim O’Hare; the other used swear words that contravened the court’s rule of decorum.
- The Star-Telegram has more details about the missing video footage in the Chasity Bonner case. Bonner died in the Tarrant County Jail last May and three minutes of footage was missing from the video initially delivered to investigators.
- In related news, Tarrant County legislators are looking for more transparency in the investigations of jail deaths. As you know if you’ve been reading these posts, almost 70 people have died on Tarrant County Sherriff Bill Waybourn’s watch since 2017, and 26 of those deaths have not been properly investigated by outside parties.
- The Tarrant County Appraisal District plan to reappraise home values every other year is now hitting municipalities as well as local school districts. The city of Arlington is now looking at a $25 million shortfall for 2026. The city is considering closing facilities as well as staff reductions and pay cuts.
- Tarrant County College has a Bo French- and Tim O’Hare-approved conservative candidate in a nonpartisan race for an open seat on its board. There are two other candidates looking at issues relevant to students and the college as well as the gentleman yelling at the clouds about radical campus activists.
- KERA and the DMN have the latest on the Lege’s effort to reduce Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s funding from area sales taxes. Meanwhile, the Fort Worth Report covers the Trinity River Express CEO’s comments on what defunding DART will do for Fort Worth: nothing good.
- The Dallas Observer has a timeline of the events following the killing of Austin Metcalf at the UIL meet in Frisco on April 2. Also, Texas Monthly has a very good story about the online and real-life exploitation of Metcalf’s death for politics, racist ideology, or social media clout and cash.
- Where is the measles in North Texas? Denton County (two stories); Collin County (as noted by our host); and Arlington in Tarrant County. If your MMR isn’t up to date, friends, get vaccinated as soon as possible, because these are the cases we know about.
- Three Irving City Council candidates are being supported by a dark money PAC with connections to the Las Vegas Sands folks to the tune of more than $93,000. Other PACs involved in the race have spent smaller sums, like $15,000, over the same period. Locals are unsurprisingly taking this to mean that the Sands effort to put a casino in Irving isn’t over.
- While we’re talking about dark money, Richardson blogger Mark Steger chased down who’s behind some attack mailers in the Richardson mayoral race. One of the parties involved is a developer with a cosy relationship with the incumbent.
- As you may know, the state finally released those A-F school ratings from 2023. One Fort Worth ISD sixth-grade center, now closed, had an F rating for five consecutive years, putting Fort Worth ISD at risk of a state takeover like the one going on in HISD. The Fort Worth Report also covers the story and has some charts with data about Tarrant County districts that puts FWISD’s performance in perspective.
- Keller ISD is also in the news again. Tarrant County representatives want to ensure no repeats of the attempt to split the district without a popular vote, but the bill is currently stuck in committee. Meanwhile, trustees who favored the split told the Star-Telegram their side of the story, in which the proposal to split the district had nothing to do with race or socioeconomic status and there was no secret cabal. At last report they were not attempting to sell any bridges.
- Jumping back to dark money, the Texas Ethics Commission is looking into whether the Accountable Leadership Committee broke state election laws in donating $50,000 to challengers in the current Prosper ISD school board elections. The PAC money came from Washington, DC, and nobody knows who put it into the PAC.
- Federal agents are performing “welfare checks” on migrant kids in north Texas. Ensuring that kids who came to the US alone aren’t being trafficked is admirable in theory, but understandably nobody trusts la migra right now to deal with anybody, never mind vulnerable kids.
- Bishop T.D. Jakes, the founder of the Potter’s House megachurch, is retiring and turning his pulpit over to his daughter and son-in-law. Pastor Jakes has been leading his church for 50 years; it has 30,000 members in Dallas, Frisco, Fort Worth and Los Angeles.
- The Dallas Observer has started its annual list of mass shootings in Texas for 2025. So far we’ve had 13 mass shootings, just ahead of Louisiana and California.
- The American Lung Association says the Metroplex has the 10th worst ozone pollution among American metro areas. Houston is 7th.
- This week an eighteen wheeler overturned in Wise County, spilling a load of dimes valued at $800,000. The road was closed for hours while the coins were collected with heavy duty vacuums.
- And in some sad news for locals, Luka Doncic says he won’t come back to Texas when he retires. The DMN also has a related fluff piece about Mavericks fans, or at least former fans, who named their sons after Luka.