This summer, Texas cities will begin maneuvering through their budgets knowing that the state has lessened the revenue they’ve come to expect. The last session resulted in two immediate stoppages: no more revenue from red light cameras and a limit on fees that municipal governments can charge telecommunications companies for using public right of way. Then, in 2021, cities won’t be able to grow property tax revenue collections by more than 3.5 percent without voter approval. This has been written about before locally, but the Texas Tribune’s new urban affairs reporter corralled responses from all major Texas cities and what they’re expecting.

Across the board, municipalities are reporting an immediate hit in a ballpark that ranges from $4 million (Austin) to $27 million (Houston) from the telecom limitations alone. Dallas and Fort Worth expect about $7 million to $8 million less than they received last year. Red-light camera revenue doesn’t seem like it’ll hit the cities as hard—San Antonio and Houston had already outlawed them—but Dallas and Fort Worth each say they’ll lose out on $1 million next year. (The year after, the city projects a loss of $2.4 million, presumably because existing contracts are allowed to expire if they were signed before May.) It’s by no means a huge portion of their general funds, but these captures can help lead to things like police raises and longer hours for libraries.

The real pain comes the following budget cycle, in 2021, when the Lege’s property tax reform begins. Previously, cities didn’t have to go to voters unless they wanted to jump revenue collections by 8 percent. Now, the cap is at 3.5 percent, and all municipalities are going to feel it: Austin is expecting a shortfall of $52.6 million by 2023-2024; San Antonio’s could be as high as $81 million, which is what it estimates it would’ve cost the city if the cap was in effect in the last decade. Dallas says it would’ve been down $25.1 million if the law was in place last September. The law won’t affect tax bills much, just how much the cities can collect.

The five-year forecast that the city’s budget office presented the Council in June is even more grim.

Shorty had a curse word for the world stuck in his throat that even the sweetest Boone’s Farm strawberry wine couldn’t wash down. A curse word he slurred effortlessly at everyone who walked down his block of Wayne Street. And it truly was his. While Annette Strauss was the mayor of the city of Dallas, Shorty was the mayor of the 1800 block of Wayne Street.

“You don’t know nothing about no damn dominoes, so step off, youngster.”

“That has got to be the ugliest damn dog on this whole planet.”

“Mr. Ice Cream man! There ain’t no reason to be playing that music that damn loud!”

In May, more than 40 people were murdered in Dallas, an unexplained spike from the 15 in May of last year. The investigation files crowded the desks of a skeleton homicide crew, prompting Dallas PD to boost the unit from 14 to 22 detectives. By mid-June, the number of homicides here had already notched over 100, on pace to surpass last year’s total of 196.

With election season behind us and City Council out for the summer, rhetoric around the issue has slowed. But it’s way too easy to find examples illustrating that the problem hasn’t gone anywhere.

Not all of these killings involve guns. But gun violence has long stretched the city’s limited resources while leaving neighborhoods and families reeling from its effects. To get a grip on how deeply Dallas is impacted by gun violence, we analyzed five years of DPD incident data. The results are staggering. They show that on average, the city sees at least one gun-related murder or shooting involving an injury per day.

Over the past five years (June 2014 through May 2019), there have been at least 2,285 people injured by shootings in the city of Dallas. Of those people, 482 died. Because the city’s public incident data excludes sensitive records, such as offenses involving minors or sexual assault, the numbers are surely low. But the statistics presented here offer some of the most comprehensive tallies yet of how gun violence impacts our city.

Chief Hall Taking Leave of Absence After Surgery. DPD Chief U. Renee Hall underwent major surgery and is now on a leave of absence and recuperating. Executive Assistant Chief David Pughes will fill her role in the meantime.

Carolyn Davis’ Daughter Also Killed in Car Crash. Melissa Lashan Davis-Nunn, the 27-year-old daughter of former City Council member Carolyn Davis, also died as a result of Monday’s crash. Jonathan Alger Moore, who crashed his Mazda SUV into Davis’ Oldsmobile Cutlass, faces two counts of intoxication manslaughter. He is now in the Dallas County jail.

Dallas Cops Arrest Two People on Sex Trafficking Charges. Jerry Duncan and Kathryne Sneed were arrested on sex trafficking charges in three states, one of which is Texas. They’re in the Dallas County jail with bail at $100,000 each.

The kumbayah of the 86th legislative session’s comity and bipartisanship led to the passage of historic and costly school finance legislation. It was one without fist fights or bill-killing massacres. But the gloves are off: 2020 is upon us.

For the first since 2009, when Republicans only held a two seat majority, both parties are on defense.

Texas House seats in Dallas County—and even neighboring Collin, Denton and Tarrant counties—are in play. Both parties need to defend what they have, including the six Democratic Dallas pickups and the two remaining Republicans in the local delegation. With the first major campaign finance reports of the season now available, a glimpse of what is to come predicts a wild ride.

Here’s where we stand:

Over the weekend, the Dallas Morning News editorial board published its take on the Texas Monthly interview with Mayor Eric Johnson, which we also spoke about last week. In the interview, Johnson tells TexMo that he believes regionalism is fine when it comes to big economic engines like Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. But when it comes to services like public transit, he argued that Dallas needs to start delivering for its own residents. To my ears, that sounded like Johnson pointing out that sometimes the region’s interests and the city’s interests don’t align. In those cases, the mayor of Dallas must stick up for the city.

If that’s what Johnson really meant, it’s a striking shift in tone compared with his predecessor. Nonetheless, the News’ edit board, one of the former mayor’s biggest champions, tried to close the gap on Johnson’s comments. Johnson’s comments were “nuanced,” the editorial says, and they demonstrate that “he deeply understands this difficult dance” between regional and urban interests. “We don’t hear from the mayor a ‘Dallas First’ motto that excludes our important partners in this region,” the edit board writes. “What we hear is a ‘Dallas Also.’”

I’m not sure what exactly “Dallas Also” means, but I find something pejorative about the phrase and the way it implicitly frames the city’s interests as subordinate to a greater regional project. More importantly, the general tone of the editorial—the way it brushes off criticism of DART’s light rail, its fawning at supposed “nuance,” its suggestion that the future success of DFW requires a delicate dance between large urban centers and suburban partners—underscores a complacency and a general failure to grasp the real stakes of the city’s—and the region’s—future. It is a lack of urgency that also seems to be shared by a large subset of Dallas’ civic leadership.