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Nadine Lee, Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s chief executive, is thinking about how the agency operates. Growth, she says, doesn’t necessarily mean expensive infrastructure projects. Which is a radical statement considering the agency’s history. It has rarely met a capital project it didn’t like.

Lee was hired about two years ago, when the $2 billion downtown “D2” subway was still in the cards and the Silver Line construction was just beginning through the suburbs and Far North Dallas. Throughout its nearly 40 years, DART built by sprawl, running light-rail trains along unused freight track. It created the largest system in the country and also one of the most inefficient in the world. Its bus system followed the same strategy: a hub-and-spoke network that covered a lot of land and required a lot of transfers.

In 2022, it rolled out a new bus system that flipped the strategy, running buses on fewer routes that were longer and more direct, with stops within walking distance from more frequent core routes. It shelved the D2 subway earlier this year, after ridership numbers failed to meet the thresholds that warrant its existence. That decision freed up significant borrowing power that could go toward improving its operations.

Lee will deliver her first “state of the agency” address this evening at the under-used Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station, which is perhaps the first such presentation in DART’s history. (She couldn’t find another example, at least.) She is thinking smaller, focusing on ways to improve service and make transit more useful to more people. To her, the agency’s future is tied directly to how its 13 member cities plan to accommodate growth and how reliable her agency’s services are.  

“We have 4 million people coming here in the next 20 years,” she says, referring to regional estimates projected by the North Central Texas Council of Governments. “I certainly don’t want them moving outside of the DART service area.”

Anchoring a large storefront at the Bruton Masters Village Shopping Center in Pleasant Grove, the Inspired Vision Compassion Center serves thousands of families each week. It provides food, clothing, medical care, job training, school supplies, and uniforms. Sometimes it even gives out prom dresses. Families bake in the heat waiting for their turn to come in.

A line of people frequently stretches out into the expansive parking lot. It offered little shade or comfort for those families as they waited. A new partnership between the city of Dallas, the Center, and the Better Block Foundation is aimed at solving that problem, organizers said this week.

Founded by pastor Karen Belknap and now run by her daughter Teadran White, the Inspired Vision Compassion Center launched in 2014 in the parking lot of Belknap’s Inspired Vision Church. By 2019, the Center moved to its current location. Through the pandemic and its aftermath, the organization has seen the number of families needing assistance grow exponentially. It serves nearly 2,000 people each day.

Belknap said she is “very excited” about the prospect of improving their experience while they wait. 

The Texas Department of Transportation closed Central Expressway a few weeks back to put in a cool new bridge that allows pedestrians and cyclists to cross between the White Rock Creek and Northaven trails. It opened on Monday. It took fewer than four days for an SUV to give it a try.

Another driver recently took in White Rock Lake from the pedestrian trail, well before our SUV went cruising over the highway.

Maybe bollards would help?

The Polyphonic Spree hasn’t put out a new album of original music in 10 years. That changes on Friday, when the most populated rock band in Dallas—22 musicians, with another 20 backup vocalists sometimes in the studio—releases Salvage Enterprise, an album that took years for to pour out of frontman Tim DeLaughter.  

The Dallas indie rock stalwart sat down at the Old Monk this week to talk about the new album and his unique way of bringing it to listeners away from TikTok snippets. The record has been done for two years, but DeLaughter has been trying to figure out how to play it for a “captive audience.”

His plan started last summer with a Sprinter van and rented speakers. He drove to Joshua Tree, California, to a festival with art installations and about 3,000 attendees. He arranged the speakers in a circle and put out blankets and pressed play on the 43-minute album. The next day, he got in his van and drove four hours west to Ojai, California, and did it all over again.

Next year will see the Spree broadcasting the album in planetariums, starting at the University of North Texas in Denton. But the first proper show happens on Wednesday, November 22 at the Granada Theater. (The band’s annual Holiday Extravaganza returns to the Majestic Theater on December 15 and 16.)

Salvage Enterprise took a lot of time and work—and patience. DeLaughter says he was in a depressive state leading into COVID, and the music just wasn’t coming. “I could not write a song to save my life,” he says. When he makes music, “I dip my toe in it, and it’s either there or it isn’t.”

And then it was. Listen to the full podcast below.

Grand Jury Indicts Man in 1997 Shooting. A Dallas County grand jury indicted Michael Edward Nevarez for the fatal shooting of Damond Wittman outside a Deep Ellum nightclub in 1997. Martin Santillan was exonerated this year after serving 25 years in prison for the crime, despite having an alibi. DNA evidence proved his innocence.

AMBER Alert Continues for Wilmer Boy. Ian Aguilar, 10, was last seen near his Wilmer home on Tuesday. He remains the subject of an AMBER Alert, and his mother was found dead inside the family’s home the same day. Authorities believe the boy is with his father, Juan Aguilar-Cano, and said he is a suspect in an active homicide case. 

Irving Police Say Wrong-Way Crash Was Intentional. Diamond Brown faces a manslaughter charge for a wrong-way crash that killed Zainab Monsoor. Irving Police said Brown drove in the wrong direction down I-635 last week with the intent of crashing her car and killing herself. Officers believe she was intoxicated at the time.

Twenty Now Suing State Over Abortion Laws. Seven more women have joined an ongoing lawsuit over Texas’s abortion laws, bringing the total to 20. The suit alleges that the state’s exception permitting abortions when a patient’s life is in danger is so narrow it becomes dangerous and harmful during complicated pregnancies. Five plaintiffs filed for the lawsuit in March and more joined them shortly before a July trial when a district court judge ruled in their favor. The state has since appealed that ruling.

Last month, a Missouri court found the National Association of Realtors and two brokerage firms liable for $1.8 billion in damages related to how its members collected commissions. Two North Texas companies have now filed a similar suit against the Texas Association of Realtors.

The suit, which also names the real estate associations in Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, was filed on Monday by Granbury-based QJ Homes LLC and Dallas-based Five Points Holdings LLC. It also names a handful of other local brokerages or their parent companies, including Dave Perry-Miller and Associates and Ebby Halliday Realtors. 

In October, a Missouri court found that NAR conspired to artificially inflate real estate agent commissions. Homeservices of America and Keller Williams Realty were co-defendants in the suit. However, Re/Max and Anywhere Real Estate were also initially named in the lawsuit before settling out of court.

NAR and the brokerages say they’ll appeal the verdict.

Dallas residents who live near a nuisance business can petition the city to shut it down in a process called amortization. However, that process was recently turned on its ear by a new state law that requires cities to pay up if they determine that the bad neighbor needs to stop operating.

This year, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 929, which requires cities to tell a property owner if it is proposing zoning changes—especially if it would mean the business no longer conformed with the zoning. If the owner must close, the business could be entitled to compensation from the city that ordered the closure. 

Every municipality in Texas that uses amortization to regulate land use is now grappling with the ramifications of the new state law. On Tuesday, the city of Dallas’ Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee met to discuss changes to the process proposed by the city attorney’s office.

Last month, those proposed changes drew criticism from residents and advocates because they also would eliminate the option for citizen-initiated amortizations. Instead, the City Council would have to initiate the process. That, critics say, is beyond what SB 929 requires.

“Under what staff has proposed, the City Council will still be allowed to request a compliance hearing from the board of adjustment,” said assistant city attorney Bert Vandenberg. “And residents will still have the ability to go to City Council meetings and sign up to speak and request their City Council members to do so.”

On Tuesday, the city attorney’s office stopped short of creating another option for residents to request amortization. Attorneys insisted that the public comment portion of City Council briefings and meetings provided residents with the ability to lobby the council.

Critics said that was unrealistic to ask of residents. Council meetings often last for hours and happen when people are working, excluding those who cannot take time off. 

“I’m sorry, but we will not be able to print your obituary.”

It was an editor at the Los Angeles Times. I had called to ask why my mother’s obit still had not appeared in the paper more than a week after I had submitted it. You would think getting a few final words published about America’s first woman rocket scientist would be easy, but such was not the case. Despite a long career that included numerous achievements in the early aerospace business, Mary Sherman Morgan’s legacy—as I was about to discover—had vanished. No one had seen fit to document her accomplishments.

“We cannot verify any of the information in your article,” the editor said. “We cannot even verify that your mother ever existed.” After pointing out that in the absence of my mother’s existence, we would not be having our conversation, I hung up. 

In all fairness, the Los Angeles Times was right. In journalism, printed facts need to be verified by research before they can be published. The editor was simply following the rules. So what does one do when history has failed to record someone who deserved to be recorded? I decided my mother’s life was too significant to be forgotten. I would put her back into the aerospace record by interviewing former co-workers and collecting what little solid information was still available. And from this information I would write a play. Thus began what has become a 20-year mission to restore my mother’s lost legacy.

Future historians will debate when, exactly, Eric Johnson, the mayor of Dallas, began regularly wearing a cowboy hat. It seems likely that he made the fashion choice when the Stars lost to the Golden Knights in the playoffs. On May 31, Johnson tweeted a video of himself at Wild Bill’s Western Store in the West End, where, to satisfy a mayoral bet, he bought a black felt Stetson for the mayor of Las Vegas. 

Giddy-up. A week later, Johnson was wearing a traditional straw cowboy hat outside the Harry Stone Aquatic Center, giving a shoutout to the Park and Rec Department. And then came August 16, a Wednesday. For an alfresco CBS Channel 11 interview about the Dallas Police Department’s crime-reduction efforts, the mayor wore a thinner-brimmed cowboy hat that we can only hope will become the emblem of his second term. He wore it again on August 28 for an outdoor event at which he lobbied for bond money for parks. Ken Kalthoff at NBC Channel 5, on the scene, reported that it was a “park ranger hat to dramatize his commitment to improving parks.” 

Anyone who has seen Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House could hardly blame him for the mistake.

“Ken does the best he can,” Mayor Johnson told us in an email helpfully sent by his chief of staff, “but clearly he knows nothing about haberdashery.”

Abbott’s Priority Immigration Legislation Passes the Senate. The governor wanted legislators to allow local police departments to arrest people who cross the border, and the Senate approved a bill that will do just that. SB 4 makes illegal crossings a state misdemeanor. It would also “empower” local officers to arrested undocumented immigrants and allow judges to order them back to Mexico instead of prosecuting them here. The bill includes $1.5 billion for “border barriers” and to pay for state troopers to patrol a housing development near Houston that right-wing media has ginned up a fake controversy over it harboring undocumented residents.

Good Ol’ Fashion Tree Trimming Fight Gets Weird in North Dallas. Jeannie Trebisky tells CBSDFW that she trimmed her neighbor’s crape myrtles because they were hanging over her backyard fence and shedding their blooms into her pool. The neighbor responded by putting up creepy art—murals of eyes, then silk-screen images of a distorted character staring into the backyard—on their own property within eyesight of Trebisky’s. She’s gone to the city and plans to sue.

Shooter in Killing Spree Sentenced to Life. Jeremy Rashaud Harris, 34, shot and killed four people from October 31 through November 18 of 2020. He began with the seemingly random drive-by shootings of Robert Urrea, 19, Adam Gautreau, 36, and Kenneth Hamilton, 57, all of which took place in Dallas County. Harris then killed his ex-girlfriend’s father in Collin County and set the home on fire. The sentence does not include the possibility of parole.

Another Beautiful Today. We’ll break into the low 70s this afternoon, but the majority of the day will be sunny and pleasant. Go on a walk.

Few could have captured President John F. Kennedy’s death and the immediate aftermath like veteran reporter and historian Darwin Payne in his new book, Behind the Scenes, Covering the J.F.K. Assassination. He returns to the murderous weekend that ended with the deaths of President Kennedy, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, and accused killer Lee Harvey Oswald.

Payne will speak at 1 p.m. Nov. 17 at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, in the former Texas School Book Depository where the first bullets rang out 60 years ago.

The large museum space freeze-frames Nov. 22, 1963 with the same view, from the sixth-floor southeast corner, that the sniper had. Payne and a handful of other reporters and photographers inspected it soon after the shooting. Earlier that day, after sprinting four blocks from the Dallas Times Herald, the 26-year-old newsman had begun interviewing eyewitnesses at street level.

Behind the Scenes — part memoir, part reporter’s stream of consciousness, part history of presidential visits to Dallas and an overview of presidential assassinations — is loaded with back stories and details to which few were privy. Its immediacy comes from Payne’s notebooks and an unfinished manuscript he discovered in a closet during the pandemic lockdown. The reader feels the urgency of the moment and is reminded of the tragedy’s moving parts that alternately fascinated and horrified. 

The account brackets three days that riveted the world as the police, print and radio reporters, and ascendant broadcast television sorted out the signal calamity of the century in real time, piece by piece.