The developer Megatel Homes, which is already building “lagoon communities” in West Dallas and McKinney, said yesterday it’s bringing the lagoon craze to Forney. The $800 million Bellagio Lagoon project a little north of Interstate 20 just off FM741 will include 400 homes hitting the market in the $350,000 to $600,000 range with various amenities and a restaurant and bla bla bla—let’s talk lagoons.

Hospital Official ‘Cautiously Optimistic’ About COVID Outlook. Steve Love, the president and CEO of the DFW Hospital Council, said COVID hospitalizations across the region are beginning to plateau, and the number of cases in Dallas County are beginning to decline. He hopes that means hospitalizations may begin to decrease in the next 10 days to two weeks, but warned that not every North Texas county may see a reduction. Dallas County reported a three-day new case total of 3,885 and 16 new deaths, including a man and woman in their 20s. Booster shots may be on the way. Meanwhile, AG Ken Paxton is suing school districts that have required students to wear masks in schools.

For Second Year Running, No Raise for Elected County Officials. At a specially called meeting yesterday, County Commissioner John Wiley Price suggested giving employees a 3 percent cost of living salary bump, and Commissioner J.J. Koch countered with a 2 percent offer. Price’s proposal didn’t pass and Koch’s didn’t receive a second motion, and so the procedural deadlock meant no one got a raise. Now a committee of elected officials and and grand jurors will decided on whether county employees who have filed salary grievances will receive a pay raise.

Construction Company Sues Arlington ISD Over Unpaid Winter Storm Repairs. Robert Jordan Construction says the district failed to compensate them for $1.2 million in repairs related to last February’s winter storm. District officials claim they never entered into a contract with the construction company, which seems weird to me. Did they do the work or not? The district is claiming immunity from the lawsuit, and Robert Jordan has taken their complains to YouTube, posting a seven minute video about their complaint. The lawsuit may take years to resolve.

Texas Fails Foster Children. Around 400 Texas children are spending nights in makeshift foster care facilities like Child Protective Services offices and hotels because of what a federal judge described as the state’s “poor planning and chronic neglect of some of society’s unluckiest children.” The state blames a new federal policy that enforces stricter oversight of foster care facilities with poor health and safety records. However, other states enforcing similar new standards of care have not had the same level of bed shortages that Texas has seen. Most of the children who have been left without access to foster care facilities tend to be older teenager who have bounced around between homes for years, and many have struggled with psychiatric disorders.

Nasher Sculpture Center Awards $100K to Iranian-Born Artist. The sixth Nasher Prize was awarded to Nairy Baghramian, whose work, Nasher director Jeremy Strick told the DMN, speaks to a “feeling a vulnerability, a fragility — of physical threat” as well as “a sense of dependence on others,” which jurors found particularly resonant during our time of COVID.

There are at least two ways to interpret a newly released city audit of the Dallas Police Department’s use of overtime, which was meant to determine whether there has been any waste or fraud at the city’s expense.

“The upshot is that the auditor found no evidence of fraud or abuse,” Mayor Eric Johnson says in his weekly newsletter. That’s good political news for Johnson, who called for the audit last year after another budget season dominated by a heated debate over police overtime. The mayor has staked out a position that favors giving the department all the overtime funding it’s asking for. Last year, a majority of the Council cut the overtime budget by about $7 million. 

But Johnson isn’t adding any gloss that isn’t in the language of the audit itself, which concludes there was no “unusual employee overtime usage that indicates waste or abuse” at the police department between October 2018 and December 2020.

Mayor Pro Tem Chad West, however, sees something different in the report’s findings.

“When you dig into it you can see there’s obviously a huge problem here,” West says. “You have $18 million from last year’s overtime that is just missing, completely unaccounted for whatsoever with no record of where it went. Maybe DPD has a record, but the audit’s not reflecting that.”

Bryce Cottrell kept his Craigslist post to the point: Looking for organic chemist with background in distilling and/or winery brewing.

He figured those 11 words wouldn’t amount to much, not after a handful of chemistry professors at the University of Texas cautioned him that securing a recipe to distill vodka from grapefruits — his plan to break into the beverage industry — could cost upwards of $10,000. To the best of his knowledge, no one had ever tried it before. And what did Cottrell know? A defensive end for the Longhorns, he had never distilled a drop of alcohol in his life.

Then someone replied. Which is how Cottrell found himself at an Austin location of Five Guys meeting a man dressed head to toe in black leather who promised a recipe and a test batch in less than a week. For $80, plus the price of a burger and soft drink, Cottrell was handed the foundation of what would become Noble Wolf Vodka, his Denton-based brand that was named Texas Vodka of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition in 2016.

The 26-year-old recounts the story today while leaning on a stack of boxes inside his distillery, which is housed in a warehouse a few miles up the road from UNT. He has told the tale of his recipe so often that it’s now part of the Noble Wolf mythology, right along with the company’s name being an homage to his high school alma mater, Plano West Senior High. Cottrell sometimes omits one of the finer points, though: he pressed one of his teammates into coming with him as backup that day he met the man in black leather.

“I didn’t want to be a statistic getting killed by a person from Craigslist,” he says with a sheepish grin, implausible though it may sound.

That tracks with plenty else about Noble Wolf’s unlikely ascent.

Arlington has figured out a way to get you and I—and 800,000 other people, per the YouTube stats—to tune into an explanation of the city’s 2022 budget. It’s the Legos.

Much of the credit goes to Jay Warren, the city’s director of communication and legislative affairs, who conveniently had a Lego re-creation of Arlington ready to go. In a story on the best stop-motion animation city budget video you’ll see today, Governing reports:

[Warren] spent the last decade building a LEGO Arlington, strictly as a hobby. But when he hosted a Christmas party at his home, a city freelancer stumbled upon his creation and suggested that it be used for the next budget video. “Every year, it’s a very similar story and this gave us a good creative outlet to do something different from what we’ve done in the past.”

Tonight history will be made (and talked about) in Deep Ellum. For the rerelease of The Accommodation, the most dangerous book in Dallas, Deep Vellum Books and the Communities Foundation of Texas are staging what they are calling “a cause-minded conversation with Jim Schutze and John Wiley Price” on the book. Noelle LeVeaux will moderate. The event will take place in a ballroom at the historic Pittman Hotel, formerly the Knights of Pythias Building. In short, this will be a big deal.

If you don’t have tickets, you’re out of luck — mostly. The gig has sold out. You can watch a livestream that starts at 7 p.m. BUT!! Your buddy Tim has two tickets to give away right here on FrontBurner. So how should we do this? First person to send me a selfie taken in front of the Juanita Craft House? First person to give me the full text of the inaugural post on FrontBurner? I’ve got it!

Call the front desk at D Magazine. 214-939-3636. If a human answers, that will be Jacob. Ask to be transferred to my voicemail. Or do the keypad thing if Jacob is busy. Either way, get to my voicemail. Then record a few bars of your favorite Dallas-related song. The artist might be from Dallas. The lyrics might include the word Dallas. Whatever. Your call. Just sing it. Best singer wins the two tickets. Be sure to leave a name and email address at the end of your song. Contest ends at 1 p.m.

Hope to see you tonight.