Dispatches from Dallas, August 29 edition

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

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 a lot of budget news in Dallas, the suburbs, and almost every taxing agency in the greater DFW area; Dallas has to fire a new city hire for failing to meet charter requirements; Mayor Johnson’s summer vacation; Monty Bennett has financial problems; the latest on the Dallas Morning News sale; trouble in Commissioner’s Court in both Dallas and Tarrant County; the Dallas County Jail fails a state inspection; another death in the Tarrant County Jail; Tarrant County cuts polling places by a third in what local columnist Bud Kennedy thinks is an anti-Fort Worth disfranchisement effort; Bo French runs his mouth, or at least his typing fingers, on Xitter again; DART keeps trying to make everyone happy or at least kicks some of the cans down the road; the latest in sports news from the Cowboys and the Mavs; and last, but not least, the State Fair food winners.

To get this down to a readable length, I had to do a lot of trimming; next week I hope to talk some about local issues around redistricting, immigration, and schools, all of which took more room than I had this week. The end of the summer has been busy.

Let’s start in Dallas and go from there:

  • Dallas is doubling its facilities budget after figuring out that they hadn’t been spending nearly enough on them. D Magazine has a nice piece on the problems with Dallas’ facilities and even the numbers we’re seeing now are probably an underestimate. Watch the charter amendments, especially Prop U, bite us in the butt again.
  • Speaking of Prop U, people are starting to see what it means and they don’t like it. We’re probably going to lose five library branches, including Skillman, the subject of a major effort to save it last year. Also we’ve had a lot of press coverage about closure of the city’s nine community pools over the next three years. That’s not all our pools but the nine oldest that need the most repairs and are at the end of their lifespan (some of them were built in the 1940s). And as the Dallas Observer notes, most of the closures will hit the southern half of the city. We’ll still have 11 pools and aquatic centers, but the older ones won’t be replaced for now. The Dallas Morning News editorial board, as usual, is the voice of financial reason but somehow its discussion of the fiscal realities of the city neglects to mention Prop U.
  • We’re also fighting about how developer money will be spent for park space, which is an inside baseball story about park fees, new state laws, and the Park Board vs the City Council, which wants to be more developer friendly.
  • Another charter amendment hit: when the city hired its new Inspector General a couple of months ago, they missed the new charter requirement for that post to be filled by an attorney. So they hired someone who isn’t a lawyer and just had to sack him. This was not the search firm who botched the City Manager search last year, with the brochure featuring the Houston skyline. No word on the next search firm the city will be hiring.
  • Wandering back round to the actual budget, our property tax rate may drop but between inflation in general and the rise in property values in Dallas, we’re probably not going to get an actual reduction in taxes.
  • In other Dallas news, our party-switching MAGA mayor wants to rename one of our city departments in a sort of DOGE-ish fashion as part of his effort to streamline the city. He also wants to get rid of City Council’s ability to attend virtually and require them to show up to City Hall in person. He put this rule on the agenda following his own eight-day trip in July to Tanzania to sign a sister-city agreement with Dar-es-Salaam. In addition to his official work, Mayor Johnson visited two luxury safari lodges. The trip cost almost $45,000, some of which will be paid by donors but the rest of which will come from taxpayers.
  • Local billionaire, Dallas Express slime-spreader, and Dallas HERO amendment-sponsoring troublemaker Monty Bennett has been having financial problems with his hotel empire. Read up on the details if you’re into that kind of thing. Couldn’t happen to a nicer, and especially a hotel magnate dependent on leisure money Americans are being squeezed out of and foreigners can’t get here to spend.
  • DallasNews Corp. is putting its sale of the Dallas Morning News to Hearst to a shareholder vote in September. The controlling shareholder, Robert Dechard, also a former chair of the board, is determined to sell to Hearst instead of “vulture” Alden Global Capital, which has inserted itself into the bidding uninvited. D Magazine’s analysis of the sale triangle remains good. I’m not enthused about any of the options: Alden will strip the paper for parts; Hearst owns too many papers in Texas; and the current ownership hasn’t managed the paper very well. But if it’s Hearst or Alden, I’d vote for Hearst too.
  • To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Fort Worth hired former Dallas PD Chief Eddie Garcia, previously seen following former City Manager TC Broadnax to Austin. He’s doing his press rounds in Fort Worth with the usual promises to crack down on crime, be transparent, and strengthen public trust.
  • You may recall that Fort Worth ended its DEI program earlier this month to keep the federal money that the current administration threatened to take away from cities with DEI programs. They’re replacing it with a small business program that went before council on Wednesday. Star-Telegram columnist Ryan J. Rusak says this is the price of being on the federal gravy train.
  • Like every other taxing entity, Dallas County is tightening its belt and considering a tax increase after losing Biden-era federal funding. One particular issue is whether judges should all get a cost of living salary increase or whether increases should be based on merit.
  • Also on the chopping block: Parkland Health could lose half its budget to federal funding cuts.
  • Our Man Downtown, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, is in trouble for yelling at fellow Commissioner Elba Garcia last week. Price, who has been a Commissioner for southern Dallas (and South Dallas) for 40 years now, has a history of throwing his weight and seniority around. Surprisingly, Dominique Alexander, president of Next Generation Action Network, sent him a callout letter. NGAN is the largest civil rights group in North Texas. Nobody is talking about the letter after the initial burst of coverage, but I’m putting a pin in it. I personally think Price is going to leave that seat in a coffin, but I’ve been wrong before.
  • The Dallas County Jail failed a special state inspection triggered by inmate complaints. Specifically, they’ve been keeping inmates in holding cells for longer than the 48-hour limit. The jail also failed to provide one of the men kept too long with his medication for two mornings.
  • Tarrant County is also facing the same budget squeeze everybody else is. Their answer is to lower their budget and their tax rate. They’re also reducing their meeting schedule from twice a month to once a month.
  • Tarrant County is also cutting more than 100 polling sites for Election Day and reducing the number of early voting sites, to the dismay of the Star-Telegram editorial board. Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy accuses the Commissioners of trying to suppress the Fort Worth vote in favor of the more-Republican suburbs by disproportionately cutting the number of polling places in the city. The cuts were also the subject of another brangle between Commissioner Alisa Simmons and County Judge Tim O’Hare.
  • Speaking of Simmons, the Tarrant County redistricting from earlier this year that was designed to force her out of her seat is the subject of another lawsuit. This one was filed by the Texas Civil Rights Project on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County and a Fort Worth chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens.
  • You may remember those lawsuits against the Tarrant County District Clerk by angry divorcing men we talked about recently. The Commissioners are hiring that same well-connected lawyer to defend the clerk.
  • Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare gave the State of the County speech last week. He believes that business-minded folks should run the county. The Star-Telegram has more, including O’Hare’s interview with Sherriff Bill Waybourn.
  • Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French is back at it: on Xitter, he asked the feds to denaturalize and deport Texas House Rep. Salman Bhojani, a Muslim and a Democrat who represents parts of Arlington, Euless and Bedford. Unsurprisingly, local faith leaders don’t like French’s bigotry. But since it’s not clearly directed at Jewish Texans, don’t expect any action from state Republicans.
  • Last, but not least, a fifth inmate this year has died while in Tarrant County Jail custody of a medical emergency. He was identified as Steven Whittley, age 63, and was found unresponsive in his cell; he died two days later in the hospital. As usual, notice the difference between KERA’s coverage and the Star-Telegram version of the same story.
  • Arlington is also broke and considering a three-cent property tax increase.
  • Collin County’s money struggle is hitting the Sherriff’s office and the county jail hard. Note that the county hasn’t raised its property tax rate in over 30 years.
  • Denton is facing a $14 million shortfall and is considering raising rates for water and sewer bills and recreational fees in addition to a one-cent property tax increase.
  • Steven Monacelli dug up another white nationalist who’s also a court-appointed attorney in Denton County. Jason Lee Van Dyke used to be the national chair of the Proud Boys and used to defend Patriot Front members; he has a Patriot Front slogan tattooed on his shoulder. And he’s defending people of color in Denton County.
  • The city of Garland lost its only hospital back in 2018. Now, in 2025, it’s enrolling people in a telehealth system paid for along with city utilities, with an option to drop out.
  • Ransomware attacks are back. This time it’s the city of Greenville, which was hit on August 5 and is still shut down. They can’t accept utility payments or access city records, and some phone lines aren’t working, but 911 is still accessible. The city has hired a cybersecurity firm to mitigate the damage.
  • This is an ugly story: the sherriff of Johnson County has been arrested on felony corruption charges for harassing female employees and retaliating against witnesses. There are details in the Star-Telegram article on this case that aren’t in the DMN report; consider yourself warned that Sherriff King allegedly behaved like a gross pig.
  • This week I learned about how a container yard full of batteries in Midlothian is bolstering the power grid here in Texas. More like this please! (Assuming they’re not concealing some awful environmental cost.)
  • This week was supposed to be the big Dallas Area Rapid Transit service change vote but it’s been delayed by two weeks on an 8-7 vote. DART did raise fares for next year in this week’s meeting; it had previously changed its plans to cut back on its paratransit system for disabled riders.
  • Meanwhile, if you want to read about the underlying problems DART is dealing with, this D Magazine article is your best source. The short version is Plano is mad they can’t cut their contribution and get paratransit-level service at the same time.
  • Also transit-related: the Trinity Railway Express, which is the rail service between downtown Dallas and downtown Fort Worth, is getting an upgrade to serve as the centerpiece of transportation for next year’s World Cup. On game days, there will half-hour trains stopping at the station near DFW with chartered buses and rideshare vans to take fans to the stadium. (Arlington, home of AT&T Stadium, has no public transit.) No word on where the money is coming from.
  • This is from a couple of weeks ago but I always find it interesting to see who gets a platform in the newspapers here and who doesn’t. Armin Mizani, mayor of Keller and Republican candidate for HD 98, wrote pro-redistricting op-ed for the Star-Telegram. HD 98 will be open in the next election after Giovanni Capriglione decided not to run for re-election because his former mistress came out and didn’t quite say he forced her to abort her pregnancies.
  • And from a few days after the Mizani op-ed, the DMN editorial board slammed Ken Paxton for authoritarianism for trying to jail Beto O’Rourke over Powered by People allegedly giving money to the quorum-breakers.
  • The biggest news in Dallas sports this week is Jerry Jones trading Micah Parsons, which I don’t know any more inside gossip on than this article link provides. That said, I think this trade is going to go down in Dallas sport history next to the Luka trade as a big mistake and a subject of fan discontent.
  • Speaking of Luka, Mark Cuban talked about the Mavericks sale and the DMN and the Star-Telegram both covered it with slightly different angles: he regrets how he did it but not that he did it. My favorite bit, though, was linked in this D Magazine post. Check out the video where Cuban answers a question about GM Nico Harrison. Ouch, and thank you host for going to an ad break there.
  • I like local country singer Charley Crockett, and I really like him sticking up for BeyoncĂ© and Cowboy Carter. Unsurprisingly he took some backlash of his own. Good for him anyway.
  • Dallas PD officers can now wear cowboy hats with their uniforms. Stylin’!
  • Last but not least this week, we’re going to talk about State Fair food. First, a history of how the State Fair food contest got so big. Next, and more importantly, the winners are in! Read about the food coming to the fair in the Dallas Observer and D Magazine. (Eater Dallas, which as part of the Eater network was just hit with massive layoffs, didn’t cover the announcement.) If you don’t want to click through and be tempted, the winners were the Crab and Mozzarella Arancini (savory), the Chill & Thrill Delight (sweet), the Cookie Chaos Milkshake (sipper/drink) and the Wagyu Bacon Cheeseburger Deviled Egg Sliders (most creative). Also for videos, check out this D Magazine post and Axios Dallas’ reviews of the drinks and savory contenders. The State Fair starts September 26 and continues through October 19.

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