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Dallas Gets All Roofie Dropper on Private Land Owner

January 6, 2010 By Trey Garrison 4 Comments

nomeansyesThe City of Dallas is eying private property and, like a guy with a pocketful of roofies, isn’t going to let a simple “no” stand in its way.

It’s a small rectangle of asphalt 25 feet wide and hardly big enough to squeeze a tractor-trailer on. It sits on Young Street, just west of Lamar Street, and is surrounded on three sides by walls protecting the construction site of the city’s convention center hotel.

The land isn’t needed to build the hotel. But it will be necessary for City Hall’s larger vision of a development complete with shops and restaurants and rail lines.

And even though they’re trying to lawyer their way around state law which prohibits theft of real estate eminent domain for economic development, they’ve already admitted the truth.

But city officials acknowledge the land would help support the hotel project, and there’s little question the hotel project is about economic development.

I thought we’d had enough of this nonsense after Kelo which, as a project, ended about the same way the government-run hotel will, if every case study in history is correct.

Filed Under City Owned Boondoggle, Mickey Maoist

Hunt: Why More Debt Is a Dumb Idea When You’re Broke

September 9, 2009 By Trey Garrison 6 Comments

Via Angela Hunt:

Why More Debt Is A Dumb Idea When You’re Broke

You know, the devil’s in the details when it comes to just about everything.  Especially government, and most especially, government budgets. Take next year’s proposed city budget.


I’ve been through this thing line by line, with a fine tooth comb, ever since we got the “final draft” in early August.  It’s a lot to digest.  Lots of numbers and all.  But some numbers are more important than others, and right now I want to focus on debt and its effect on our bottom line.


The city borrows money to make major infrastructure improvements, like constructing new libraries and police stations, building new roads, putting in new playgrounds in our parks.  These are bond projects approved by voters.  When we borrow money for these projects, we’re essentially putting them on the city’s credit card…


Read the rest here.

Filed Under City Owned Boondoggle, Writer on Deadline

Monday Roundup: Violence in South Dallas But Not Really South Dallas…

June 8, 2009 By Trey Garrison 8 Comments
  • Two dead, three seriously wounded Saturday night and none of them — or all of them — or maybe some of them? — were in South Dallas. Except when they were in neighborhoods in South Dallas, in which case that’s not South Dallas. Or something like that. Ask Rawlins. Bring aspirin.
  • You know what will make downtown Dallas great? Besides that the 12 weekends a year when we’ll have drunken conventions at the People’s Hotel? Pep rallies. Yes, pep rallies. (Seriously? I’m beginning to think that even his editors don’t read what he turns in.)
  • And speaking of, Robert Guest asks all the right questions (that a newspaper reporter failed to) about Flower Mound polizie police apparently busting down the door of a residence not based on probable cause, but rather the refusal of residence to let them in.
  • You can look at someone’s hand an know if they’re gay. Seriously.

Filed Under A Gay Old Time, Capitalist Superheroes, City Owned Boondoggle, DISD, Friendly Police State, Politics, The DFW

Cheesus Tapdancing Christ. They Did It Again.

May 18, 2009 By Trey Garrison 6 Comments

rick-louie-gamblingI’m shocked, shocked to learn that supporters of the People’s Hotel at City Hall lied to Dallas voters about the updated feasibility study.

Filed Under City Owned Boondoggle

Tuesday Roundup: And Now, Here’s Ollie Williams…

May 12, 2009 By Trey Garrison 3 Comments
  • If you ever had doubts that local schools should be run strictly by locals, look no further than the federal Title 1 rules. It appears the one bright spot in DISD — its magnet schools — because are safe from cuts but how smart is it that the district can’t, by federal fiat, pump extra funds into schools that need it beyond a 10 percent median?
  • This news will be heartening to more than a few in my network.
  • The Dallas City Council will be voting on its latest revenue enhancer — a daytime curfew for juveniles — which has the added benefit of making kids feel like they only have liberties at the sufferance of their civil masters. Want reasons why it’s a bad idea? Look no further than your friendly neighborhood blog.

Filed Under Bethany Anderson, Capitalist Superheroes, City Owned Boondoggle, DISD, Liberty, Politics, Vainglorious Plugging

Monday Roundup: Do They Have Jokes in Your Country?

May 11, 2009 By Trey Garrison 5 Comments
  • “If they ban smoking what’s next? Fatty foods?”
    “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. That’s a stupid slippery slope argument.”
    Guess what.
  • Good God. Almost three months for skipping jury duty? Which banana republic is this? Oh, it’s Collin County. That’s some fine police work, Lou.
  • picture-2And of course, a congratulations to the Mayor Tom Leppert, James Taggart, Phillip Jones, and Wesley Mouch on a sweeping win Saturday.

Filed Under City Owned Boondoggle, D Magazine, Media, Novelty Cake Toppers, Police, Politics, The DFW, Zombies

Friday Roundup: If This Lasts More than Four Hours…

May 8, 2009 By Trey Garrison 9 Comments
  • Today’s DMN Opinion home has a roundup of all the recent op-eds for and against glorious People’s Hotel. Notice the pro-hotel folks don’t make a business case for the hotel, and in fact Mayor Leppert spends most of his op-ed attacking Harlan Crow. Pretty telling.
  • Southlake resident Phillip Jones, president of the Dallas CVB, released a list of four organizations that have “committed” to having their conventions if the People’s Hotel is built. But none have signed any contracts, and none have put down a deposit, which is the bar other CVB’s require to consider a convention booked.

Filed Under Capitalist Superheroes, City Owned Boondoggle, Creepy Guys in the Park, Novelty Cake Toppers, Politics, The DFW

Thursday Roundup: You’re Soaking In It

May 7, 2009 By Trey Garrison 5 Comments
  • City council candidate John Jay Myers has the quote of the (yester)day regarding the latest foot-stamping, holding my breath ad from the astroturfers at RIP Dallas: “We want! we want! we want!” They sound like spoiled children. Go out and do, and stop trying to force me to buy you a hotel.” As Wick Allison notes today – it’s just a piss-poor deal for a dead-end industry..
  • If you doubt that government, by its very nature, is a bit of a shady enterprise — a protection racket where some are more equal than others — then take a gander at this.

Filed Under City Owned Boondoggle, Media Driven Panics, Politics, The DFW, Zombies

Wick Allison: It’s a Bad Deal. Vote Yes.

May 6, 2009 By Trey Garrison 4 Comments

sweepthelegMy sometime employer, longtime hero, and the guy I’d most love to see riding a Segway in the office, Wick Allison, sweeps the leg of the People’s Hotel, and offers a merciless explanation of why, even though we may need a convention hotel, the way the city wants to structure this deal is bad mojo and bad business.

To be blunt, the city is often not very good with numbers. For this fiscal year, it is projecting a $100 million operating deficit. For the hotel site, it paid $42 million to buy land appraised at $7 million (I’m still trying to figure that one out). Its projections for the hotel are so rose-colored that the pro-hotel campaign has not used them. The reason it hasn’t used them is that they don’t make sense.

But that hasn’t stopped the pro-hotel campaign from coming up with numbers of its own. For example, it trumpets the fact that the hotel will create 800 permanent jobs. At a $500 million investment (excluding the $50 million reserve fund), that’s a cost of $625,000 to create each job. If there is a case for such startling extravagance, this is a strange economic time to make it.

The pro-hotel campaign also tells us the hotel will not be paid for by our tax dollars. That is only true if we believe the city’s sunny-day scenario. But after the economic thunderstorms of the last eight months, is there anyone who would forecast that all future days will be sunny? A $50 million reserve fund may sound reasonable, until one remembers that the American Airlines Center was budgeted at $230 million but ended up at $420 million. So when the $50 million reserve runs dry, either from cost overruns or operating losses, where will the bondholders look for their money? To the taxpayers.

Money shot at the end — the bottom line is the bottom line:

It is the wrong deal at the wrong economic time based on the wrong numbers. Pardon me if, like our neighbors in Fort Worth, I don’t salute. I hope you won’t, either. Thank heaven Harlan Crow did not salute, or the bulldozers would already be digging the hole. Vote “Yes” on Proposition 1 – for good governance, fiscal prudence, and a healthy future for Dallas.

Read the full column here.

Filed Under Capitalist Superheroes, City Owned Boondoggle, D Magazine

Wednesday Roundup: Taste the Creamy Filling

May 6, 2009 By Trey Garrison 2 Comments
  • The corporate mandated pot-stirring from Belo for the People’s Hotel is bad enough — read any of Steve Blow’s bought and paid for house advertorials? — but is it so bad that writers aren’t putting their bylines on their assigned hit pieces?
  • DUI checkpoints a-comin’ unless they get derailed. “Your papers, citizen.”
  • Coinciding with the posting of my Star Trek movie review, there’s this bit of awesome — the instruction manual for the USS Enterprise.
  • Yes, but what about the local anchors now that the Great Hamthrax Panic is over? Won’t someone think of them?
  • ph2009050403123Finally, U.S. Rep Pete Sessions, R-Oh God It’s Dallas, has been partying it up at Tao in Las Vegas. Here’s the billboard for one of the GOP venues — “Always a Happy Ending.” (h/t Ed Cognoski.)

Filed Under City Owned Boondoggle, Fort Awesome, Humor, Media Driven Panics, Novelty Cake Toppers, Politics, The DFW
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