District Attorney Tosses Hit and Run Case Against Former Councilman. Kevin Felder, who represented South Dallas and Fair Park, was indicted by a grand jury in 2019 for failing to stop and render aid after he was said to have struck a teen on a scooter and drove away. The district attorney on Thursday dismissed that charge without offering any comment. Felder has said there was no wreck, but that didn’t stop the spectacle. Former Dallas PD Chief U. Reneé Hall had Felder’s car towed during an off-site City Council meeting. Police kept it for 10 months during the investigation. Felder says all this was politically motivated. (And I have to link to reporters chasing him and taking a tumble in the garage at City Hall.)
Dallas Considers Regulating STRs as Hotels. STRs are short-term rentals, your Airbnbs and VRBOs. The city is trying to rein them in, and council recommended defining them as hotels. That gives the city a lot of control over where the properties can operate, potentially zoning them out of single-family residential.
Unclear Who Will Investigate Council Memo. Mayor Pro Tem Chad West is one of three council members who filed a memo requesting an investigation into how a memo was allegedly filed without his permission. They signed a memo calling for a performance review of the city manager, which cascaded into two other memos that suggested the city’s chief executive could be fired. West says he didn’t give consent to the mayor’s office to file that first memo and wants the matter explored. The News tried to figure out who will actually investigate, but no one from the city responded.
We’re in for a Hot Summer. North Texas generally gets about 20 triple-digit days each summer. May had 20 days in the 90s, which is the fifth-warmest May on record. Our first 100-degree day came on June 11, three full weeks before last year’s, on July 1. WFAA ran the indicators and determined this summer will be hot but likely won’t challenge 2011, when we had 40 consecutive days in triple digits.