To explain the significance of a wonky shift in policy transpiring in the Trump administration, it is worth briefly revisiting how Dallas got into the streetcar game. It began in the 1980s, when some trolley enthusiasts created a nonprofit that helped get the historic McKinney Avenue Trolley restored. They raised the money, part of it through a local taxing jurisdiction known as a PID, and managed to get it built. Then, in the 2000s, a more modern-minded crew of trolley enthusiasts thought it would be cool if Dallas restored the streetcar line in Oak Cliff. Local officials were less than enthusiastic.

All the typical transportation powers-that-be — the North Central Council of Governments, the city, DART — thought this new generation of streetcar nuts were hapless hipster dreamers. Nonetheless, the Oak Cliff streetcar nerds applied for a TIGER grant from the federal government and won it. That essentially twisted the arms of the city and region to start thinking about streetcars. Now there’s a plan on the table to connect the McKinney line to the Oak Cliff line that was constructed after the TIGER grant award, and even more conversation about how to utilize that connection as a springboard for building out an entire network.

That’s the power of a federal grant: it can serve as a catalyst, a way to circumvent entrenched local thinking and shift attitudes around transportation policy. The TIGER grant program was founded by the Obama administration as a way to help push a more broad-based approach to funding mobility projects of all sorts. Sadly, the new administration has taken the hatchet to the TIGER grant program, reworking it into a program that generates more federal funding for road projects. They’ve also renamed the thing, from TIGER to BUILD.

How surprising is that? Well, not at all, of course. 

The State Fair of Texas will be at Fair Park for another 10 years. The City Council approved an amendment today that extends the fair’s contract another decade, from 2028 to 2038. The deal includes protections for minimum wage payments for hourly employees, who are guaranteed to receive a base of at least $11.15 per hour through 2020. Afterward, the minimum will scale up each year based on the city’s cost of living calculator.

The amendment also requires the State Fair and the Dallas Police Department to agree upon a set amount of on-duty and off-duty officers that will be needed for security. They’ll begin meeting six months before the fair opens its doors each year. The contract calls for DPD to invoice the State Fair for “services provided, including full cost recovery of both on-duty and overtime assignments based on actual hours worked.”

“Within thirty (30) days of receipt, State Fair shall pay the full invoice amount,” reads the contract.

This has been a point of controversy around the horseshoe at least since 2016, when the short-staffed and cash-strapped DPD revealed that the fair had rung up more than $1 million in staffing costs that year alone. Last year’s fair also exceeded $1 million. Fair officials had previously vowed to pay $550,000 for security annually. On Monday, the Quality of Life committee voted 4-3 against recommending the Council approve the amendment. And on Wednesday, councilwoman Sandy Greyson, of North Dallas, immediately requested a motion to defer the vote until 2019. And then the familiar arguments for and against the fair reared their head.

As of Friday, with Election Day happening today, just 804 people have voted in the special election runoff to determine District 4’s next City Council member. This is the Oak Cliff slot vacated by Dwaine Caraway, who stepped down in August as he pled guilty to felony corruption charges.

The lackluster numbers come after a whopping 14,297 people cast votes in the District 4 special election in November. At that point, 13 candidates were involved. Previous Council member Carolyn King Arnold and activist Keyaira Saunders received the most votes, but neither won a majority, so the decider became this mid-December runoff.

In 2017, Caraway edged Arnold by taking 1,760 votes compared to her 1,553. District 4 did not require a runoff that year, but the ones associated with that election—Districts 6, 7, and 8—yielded between 2,000 and 2,500 votes, give or take. It would require an unlikely final push to reach those numbers this year; during those runoffs—which were in June—only about 18 percent of the total vote came on election day.

But despite the poor turnout, there is plenty at stake here for the slice of Oak Cliff covered by District 4, and for the rest of Dallas. The winner holds influence during a crucial five-month stretch for the city, leading up to the election of a new mayor, while grabbing an inside track to their own re-election for a full two-year term in May.

As Matt and I wrote last Friday, we were rather impressed with a big new plan for the Trinity River that was unveiled last week by the Trinity Park Conservancy. Unlike so many of the Trinity River plans that have been pushed over the years, the Harold Simmons Park plan appeared to represent a change in direction around some of the fundamental thinking that has dictated official efforts to chart out the future of the river. Past plans proposed transforming the river all sorts of crazy ways, but this new plan appears to have the fundamental nature of the Trinity River as its starting point.

I say “appears” because, as the plan’s authors readily admit, it is still very early in the planning process. If the history of the Trinity has taught us anything it is that politics, bureaucracy, philanthropy, engineering, general incompetence, and other forces that swirl around the Trinity often manage to get into the designers’ plans and muck them up. But at least at the unveiling, the designers were keen on making the appearance that the nature of the river was fundamental to their design.

Let’s highlight the significance of this. It means that after decades of debate over the Trinity, public resistance to the official Trinity narratives has helped reshape the city’s thinking around what we do within its levees.

There was a time not that long ago when everyone spoke about the river like it was an object that needed to be transformed—redeveloped as a road to boost a regional transportation agenda, harnessed to target economic development in areas of downtown, or dug-up and rebuilt as a park. Only in recent years—months, really—did some of the people closest to the project start to recognize that the Trinity was a floodway, and not a river like the kind that exists in east coast or European cities or in the mountains of Colorado. This park project, as pitched, has a core principle of restoring natural ecology in the floodplain.

The designers behind the new plan talked about making “strategic moves” to harness the river’s aquatic physics in a way that can help rehabilitate the ecosystem and open low-impact recreational access.

These ideas are coming from the Trinity Park Conservancy—the recently renamed Trinity Trust—the same organization that once hired the people that drew the jugglers under the overpass and commissioned the doomed whitewater rapid course. The shift in language and attitude should overjoy the old Trinity warriors—their friction and resistance has helped to sharpen Dallas’ understanding of the river and its future.

But this is the Trinity River, Dallas’ oldest punching bag, and old polemical habits die hard.

The two main responses to the new plan—one from the Dallas Morning News’ Mark Lamster and another from the Dallas Observer‘s Jim Schutze—both miss the mark in their reaction to last week’s unveil.

Philanthropist Lynn McBee is running for mayor. She filed her treasurer appointment report with the city secretary’s office and announced her run in an email to media at 5:31 p.m. on Friday.

McBee, the CEO of the Young Women’s Preparatory Network, is a former biochemist researcher who is known for her fundraising acumen for the city’s nonprofits. She has served as the chair of the boards of organizations as diverse as the Dallas International Film Festival to the Family Place Foundation, which supports victims of domestic violence. She currently is the board chair of The Bridge homeless shelter and is a member of more than a dozen other boards throughout the city. The Dallas Morning News last year called her a “super-fundraiser” when she won the Texas Trailblazer Award, which is given out by the Family Place. The nonprofit’s CEO, Paige Fink, said she was instrumental in helping it receive “almost $17 million in under two years.”

I’ll be chatting with McBee on Monday to discuss her platform. County appraisal records show she owns a home in Highland Park, although Shawn Williams—a spokesman with Allyn Media, which is handling at least communications for the campaign—says she recently moved downtown and put the Highland Park home for sale.

Her press release announcer comes with a list of endorsements that include Lucy Billingsley, the CEO of Billingsley Co.; Clay and Lisa Cooley, he of Cooley Auto Group, she a board member of the Callier Center at UT Dallas and McBee’s Young Women’s Prep Network; Richard Rogers, the former CEO of Mary Kay; and about a half dozen others that I’ll list below.

We have more shots fired—oh so many shots—in the feud between ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—also the ex-ExxonMobil Corp. CEO—and excitable Twitter user and current President Donald Trump. It seems ex-Exxon exec Rex has made the president angry.

Let’s recap before we give you the goods, which you’ve probably already seen elsewhere and rolled your eyes at by now, but it’s Friday and it’s slow and so here we are.

Things started with a report from NBC News, back in October 2017, that Tillerson had dropped a “moron” accusation on his boss.

DT figured it was fake news, although did he? Because he curiously offered a retort just in case: take an IQ test against me you cowardly coward. He said that in an interview, not on Twitter, which I will note I was surprised to find out during the reporting of this story.