Dallas met its new mayor and City Council on Monday. At the Winspear, seven new faces and seven returning ones—with one absence—took their oaths and swore to faithfully execute the duties of the office.

Former Mayor Mike Rawlings earned a standing ovation. He told the packed Winspear Opera House that today was a day for thank yous and for welcomes.

“Our city is special. It will face harsh winds at times, but we are made of something unique,” he said, and then referenced the city’s response after literal harsh winds took power from hundreds of thousands of Dallasites over the last two weekends and did much worse to residents of an apartment complex in Old East Dallas.

But more than anything, Monday was about one man, Eric Johnson, who officially became Dallas’ 60th mayor at about 10:40 a.m. Later in the day, Johnson and his colleagues took their seats around the horseshoe for the first time and unanimously selected Adam Medrano as mayor pro tem.

The new Council then voted down a motion to make fourth-term Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates the deputy mayor pro tem. Johnson and Gates voted for it along with Cara Mendelsohn, Chad West, and Carolyn King Arnold. The Council then unanimously selected Adam McGough for the role instead, meaning three men will again occupy the horseshoe’s highest seats. (The mayor pro tem and deputy mayor pro tem titles have traditionally gone to black and Latino council members when there is a white mayor, to ensure diversity among the leadership roles. Johnson is black, Medrano is Latino, and McGough is white. The mayor pro tem assumes the mayor’s duties should the mayor step down, and also runs meetings in his absence.)

But back at the morning’s inauguration, Johnson took the microphone, declared campaign season dead, and delivered his vision for his next four years. That vision carries distinct similarities to his campaign priorities. It also ventures into new territory and digs deeper into areas he’d only touched on during debates. He did not address the shooting outside the Earle Cabell Federal Building about two hours earlier.

Those who closely followed the race won’t be surprised to see the inclusion of Johnson’s goals to bring greater civility to City Hall, eradicate corruption, and develop Dallas’ workforce. He delivered those as three prongs of his five-part agenda.

Often as an indictment of his opponent, the term-limited Councilman Scott Griggs, civility and divisiveness became some of Johnson’s biggest talking points on the campaign trail. During one debate, he went so far as to say the tactics of former Councilman Philip Kingston, a Griggs ally, helped motivate his run for Dallas mayor. On Monday, Johnson said he’d be keeping an open door and an open mind, and asked that Council members treat each other “with a spirit of grace, a tone of civility, and we need to be coming from a posture of friendship.”

He said he’d work with that Council to solve the city’s well-documented ethics problems. And on workforce development, which he called his No. 1 priority while campaigning, he brought into focus his plan. He will create a new City Council committee focused on education and workforce needs and appoint a “czar or czarina” with the same aim.

If you’ve turned on the news at any point in the last couple of months, you’ll know that airplane manufacturer Boeing is in hot water. Early this year, a couple of its new 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed likely because a malfunction in the plane’s anti-stall system. A total of 346 people were killed in the two incidents, a death toll frightening enough to “traumatize” the airline industry.

Meanwhile, in Texas, an average of 3,609.4 people have died every year on state roads between 2013 and 2017. The reaction? Celebration. After all, state transportation agencies were shooting to limit the number of deaths to 3,791.

How is this okay? How is it that traffic deaths are routine and cause little concern or worry? How are they accepted as simply a part of life? How come we build our cities and economies around a form of transportation in which death is one of several costs of doing business?

One possible answer: the statistics themselves are to blame.

Last week, a commenter on an encouraging post about the presence of scaffolding noted the mess of construction along Knox Street. As it just so happens, our founder Wick Allison was there over the weekend and took a photo.

This is work for Restoration Hardware’s new “RH Gallery,” we believe, which combined eight lots into a 2.2-acre tract of land. RH hasn’t said exactly what will go there, but the city has certainly allowed their contractors to run wild. The sidewalk that was present has vanished, but the parking spaces remain.

Update: The shooter, 22-year-old Brian Clyde, has died. The FBI hasn’t released a motive yet.

Original: Dallas police have a suspect in custody who apparently opened fire Monday morning with an assault rifle outside the Earle Cabell Federal Courthouse.

Here is video from WFAA’s Jason Whitely, in which you can hear a drumbeat of gunshots.

#BREAKING: Shots fired outside the Federal Courthouse in Downtown Dallas this morning. You can hear a volley of gunfire in this clip. This went out as an active shooter. Dallas Police have a person in custody. No reports of injuries. pic.twitter.com/tC9WVnB08q

— Jason Whitely (@JasonWhitely) June 17, 2019

Here’s another from a Fox 4 viewer, where you can see the guy in a black mask running across the street into a parking lot.

FOX 4 viewer Lane Brown shared video of the shooting suspect at Earle Cabell Federal Building. https://t.co/KGSFpr3evU pic.twitter.com/LUiIHYGDYv

— FOX 4 NEWS (@FOX4) June 17, 2019

We Were Hit With Another (More) Crazy Storm(s). It seemed like it rained extremely hard all early Sunday morning, then it was nice, and then came another deluge and a tornado warning. When I was driving home yesterday — after holing up in a Target for about an hour, after hanging out in the meditation room at Cosmic Cafe for half an hour or so after lunch — Garland Road was almost impassable. Based on my tracking, in three years, I’ll be writing about this kind of freak weather in July, should I still be employed or above the water line.

Fallen Crane Remains At Elan City Lights Apartment Complex. The crane that killed Kiersten Smith and injured five others is still there, with no set date for its removal.

Get to Know Adam Bazaldua. I’m already getting a bit more familiar with typing the name.

Uber Wants to Bring the Future to Dallas. “When Uber envisions the future, it not only wants to put urban air taxis and drones in the skies. It also wants to transform how people navigate cities and how they live in them.” No, you know what, I’m sure absolutely nothing could go wrong with this. Nope. Do not see a problem.

Dallasites who commute or live near Henderson Avenue, between Central Expressway and Ross, will be familiar with the recent onset of construction. The craters are a little too close for comfort along one westbound stretch of the road. Reasonable minds could assume the city is doing routine street work on a badly potholed thoroughfare. What they’re actually seeing is the result of years of planning—your 2012 bond dollars finally coming to life with an aim to slow the flow of traffic and make the area more walkable.

By February 2020, the city will install curbs that “bump-out” further, add parallel parking, improve the cracked and broken sidewalks, add new sidewalks, repaint, and put in a new stoplight at the pedestrian nightmare that is the intersection of Henderson and Willis, outside the Old Monk. It’s the latest iteration in Dallas’ “complete streets” program, which counts Lowest Greenville as its greatest achievement.

Cities have long emphasized traffic flow at the detriment of pedestrians, but Lowest Greenville became foot-friendly through city improvements that widened sidewalks, took four lanes of traffic down to two, added parallel parking, and installed touches like decorative pavement that signal to drivers they’re in a pedestrian realm.

Henderson is tricky in part because of the more limited right of way, which means the city won’t be able to widen the sidewalks in many portions of the project. Bike lanes, mulled over, were also axed due to space. But the city hopes to spur more foot traffic by repaving sidewalks that had long ago fallen into disrepair and by closing mostly unexplained blatant gaps in paving. Parallel parking will be protected by curb “bump-outs.” That will reduce the width of the traffic lanes considerably, slowing traffic.