Plaster was falling from the lath, the paintwork was damaged, decorative aluminum was peeling, the paint finishes on doors and windows were fading, and there was major water leakage into the basement every time a big rainfall happened—all problems that plagued Fair Park’s Hall of State building, a centerpiece of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition.

Several years ago, Dallas architecture firm Gensler was enlisted to repair the crumbling facility and this month unveiled the results of a three-year $14.4 million renovation made possible by a 2017 bond package approved by Dallas voters.

D CEO spoke with project architect Felicia Santiago to learn more about the process.

Early voting starts Monday for the December 8 District 2 Dallas school board runoff, a richly funded nip and tuck between incumbent Dustin Marshall, a Preston Hollow guy, and maverick challenger Nancy Rodriguez of East Dallas. These elections are supposed to be non-partisan.

Forget that. It’s partisan up one side and down the other. But just try to figure out who’s really who and what’s really what, I dare you.

Marshall, who has been a champion of the successful school reforms put in place by former superintendent Mike Miles, is definitely a Republican, but he doesn’t advertise it. Rodriguez advertises the heck out of being a Democrat, but I’m not sure she is, depending on what you mean by Democrat.

I looked up their voting records. The usual way to determine a person’s party affiliation is by which primaries they have voted in, a matter of public record. Marshall’s primary voting record is all Republican. But so is Rodriguez’s.

To be fair, Rodriguez has voted in only one primary in Texas – the Republican primary in 2016. “I did vote in the Republican primary,” she says. “I thought it was important to choose the Republican candidate, especially given who we wound up with.”

Her advertising in this officially non-partisan race is aggressively Democratic, showing off a roster of endorsements from Democratic political organizations. She and her husband, retired lawyer Barry Jacobs, promote her candidacy online as a crusade to “take this seat back from the millionaire and billionaire Republicans.” (That would be Marshall, who owns a freight and logistics company).

Marshall is interesting on this score as well. Most of his endorsers are Republicans, but he appears to be endorsed also by far more Democratic elected officials than Rodriguez – Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, Democratic State Rep. Rafael Anchia, former Dallas school board president Miguel Solis, former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, and former Dallas Mayor and Obama cabinet member Ron Kirk. For a Republican, his list looks suspiciously Democrat. For some serious East Dallas cred, he also won an endorsement from former (nonpartisan) Dallas City Council Member Angela Hunt.

Some small irony may be found in Jacobs’ animus for Republicans, given that his own voting record is at least as Republican as Marshall’s and his history of political contributions maybe even more so. According to the political reporting website “Open Secrets.org,” Jacobs contributed money to the presidential campaigns of Rudolph Giuliani in 2007, Herman Cain in 2011 and Ted Cruz in 2016 (twice). Rodriguez tells me that, “We have always been a bipartisan family,” and she quite properly says she should not be judged by her husband’s political contributions. Her name does not show up as having made any reportable contributions.

But then, part of the puzzle here is that the ostensibly hyper-partisan nature of the race isn’t really what it’s about anyway.

For that part – what it is, what it isn’t – I turned to my distinguished and estimable neighbor, former State Rep. and former Dallas school trustee Harryette Ehrhardt, a stalwart of the Texas Democratic Party and, frankly, the smartest Democrat I know. Ehrhardt started off by decorously and diplomatically telling me to take my questions about Rodriguez’s true party affiliation and put them where the sun don’t shine.

“I have not talked to her about her party affiliation,” Ehrhardt says, “but I did talk about the things that I believe are important, and [her positions on those issues] more nearly reflect the policies of the Democratic Party. To that extent, you don’t have to say, ‘Are you a Democrat?’ You can say, ‘How fond are you of Trump?’ and you know.”

Why is being a Democrat or a Republican so important, if this is a non-partisan school board race? There are several reasons, some of which are fairly transparent, others a bit more subterranean. The obvious part is that the district Marshall and Rodriguez fight for on Dec. 8 is a crazy doughnut around the affluent Park Cities, with a heavily Republican electorate on Marshall’s western end in Preston Hollow balanced against what is believed to be a majority Democratic demographic on Rodriguez’s East Dallas end.

Rodriguez beat Marshall narrowly in the general election, but neither got enough votes to win outright. Hence.

Numbers Off for Second Day Due to State Reporting Issue. Which makes yesterday’s 947 new coronavirus cases and record 17 deaths, one a new mother in her thirties, even more troubling. Tarrant County became the first county in North Texas to report more than 2,000 new cases in a single day. And Dallas County health officials are investigating the Union Gospel Mission Dallas homeless shelter after five employees and 10 residents tested positive for the virus as of last night.

Gov. Greg Abbott Announces Plan to Send State Troopers to Dallas After One of Deadliest Weekends, With Seven Homicides in 24 Hours. It’s not clear how many will be dispatched, but it sounds like the intent is to have them help with investigations and not serve on patrol, in contrast to what happened last summer.

Six Former Dallas Jesuit Prep Students Are Added to Lawsuit Alleging Sexual Abuse by Priests in the 1970s and 1980s. The lawsuit was originally filed by two former students in Dallas County civil court in August 2019. Along with three deceased priests, the other named defendants include the Rev. Peter Callery, a teacher and wrestling coach; Vincent Malatesta, a former teacher and counselor; and Robert Crisp, a former priest.

People Forget How to Drive and Crash Into Two Dallas Restaurants. In what appear to be entirely unrelated incidents, drivers drove into S&D Oyster Company and Haute Sweets Patisserie on Tuesday. The driver at Haute Sweets accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake, and injured three employees when the vehicle drove into the kitchen, including chef-owner Tida Pichakron. The shop will be closed for at least a month for repairs, but it will be open today to sell off all surviving pastries.

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The city of Dallas didn’t let the pandemic get in the way of its spending. For the last fiscal year, of which COVID-19 infected the community for six months, sales tax receipts reported to the city of Dallas were only down less than a percentage point from the prior year. In all, Dallas brought in just $2.7 million less than it did in 2018-2019, an encouraging sign for the economy, if not for public health. That loss amounted to .9 percent.

“The governor began reopening in May and that really changed the course of the trajectory of sales tax forecast,” says Elizabeth Reich, the chief financial officer for the city of Dallas. “Clearly people had emerged from shelter in place and were back shopping and sustaining the economy. So aside from the safety issues—we still want people to be very, very safe and there is concern now with community spread that we all need to do more on that front—from a fiscal standpoint, the additional spending has been very helpful.”

The fiscal year runs from October through September. A major drop in sales tax revenue would require a reduction in city services, Reich says. Property taxes basically pay for public safety; sales tax revenue covers most everything else, including homeless services and libraries and parks. In 2019, the city brought in a little over $313 million. That number for 2020 was just shy of $311 million.

In May, the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center reported that states had lost $6 billion in sales tax receipts compared to May 2019. Texas was down 15 percent year-over-year. That month, Dallas dropped 12 percent, but then began improving. Reich says there is evidence that the suburbs have benefited from workers staying home, which Dallas loses out on. She expects that trend to continue as the pandemic forces companies to keep their offices closed.

The back half of the year was buoyed by the first four months. Dallas brought in about $11 million more year-over-year from October through January. That was about a 10 percent increase. February barely topped its prior year, adding just $376,799 in receipts when the previous three months each saw year-over-year increases of between $2 million and $3 million. March suddenly plunged 9.4 percent, down about $2.8 million compared to March in 2019. The bottom fell out in April; the city of Dallas lost about $6.3 million, a drop of 24 percent.

COVID Hope. New trial results show Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine shot is 95 percent effective. The FDA is expected to approve the first rapid at-home COVID-19 test. And new cases of COVID-19 in Dallas County dropped from the record rates we’ve been seeing in recent days, but Dallas County health officials expect the numbers to rise again, particularly with the coming Thanksgiving holiday.

FBI Investigating Attorney General Ken Paxton. Sources told the Associated Press that the FBI is looking into accusations from former members of the AG’s staff that Paxton committed bribery and abused his office. Paxton has shown no signs that he is willing to resign amidst the ongoing scandal.

Three More Shootings in Dallas. Thankfully, no one was killed in Tuesday night’s shootings, but the three separate incidents came after a weekend that saw at least 13 shootings in Dallas that left seven people dead. Police arrested a teenager accused of shooting and killing another teen in Oak Cliff Monday. The two were fighting over a gun.

Braniff Airways is Back — As a Hotel. The former Braniff flight attendant dormitory near Love Field will be transformed into a boutique hotel by the same company that redeveloped the Statler Hotel. As with the Statler, the new hotel will attempt to capture the nostalgic feel of a bygone age, and it follows similar retro air travel-themed hotels that have opened near JFK Airport in New York and SeaTac in Seattle.

Would you rather bring the family to a restaurant that offers you a few pages of menu items or a restaurant that only makes two or three dishes? Probably the former, right? Now what if the first restaurant had a terrible health department record, was panned by every dining critic in the city, and takes an hour to get the food on the table—but the second restaurant has a Michelin star?

Different story.

This is, essentially, the game Dallas Area Rapid Transit played this summer when it surveyed Dallas residents about its planned bus system overhaul. DART has long insisted that Dallas residents favored a bus system that covered as much of the city as possible. After all, whenever the agency threatened to change a bus line, riders pushed back. And when DART asked riders, non-riders, and other stakeholders in its survey whether they preferred a system with broad coverage over one that focused on increasing ridership, 55 percent said they wanted coverage.

But then DART asked the question again in a different way. Would Dallas residents prefer a short walk to a bus stop followed by a long wait for the bus, or a long walk to the bus stop followed by a short wait for the bus? The results flipped. Forty-seven percent of respondents said they preferred the long walk and the short wait, while another 29 percent said just make the whole damn hassle with the bus go as quickly as possible.

In other words, 76 percent of the respondents preferred the ridership-oriented, high-frequency bus network model. The question just had to be asked in a way that made it clear that they were choosing between quality over quantity.