Back Talk Oak Cliff

DART's $60,000 fiasco: No employees fired in accounting mess

Here's an update on the DART jewelry scandal discussed here on Back Talk awhile back, as the Morning News reports that DART's internal review has concluded and no DART employees will lose their jobs even though the mismanagement in this fiasco is breathtaking.

According to the DMN story, the problems — which involve a DART employee group that allowed employees to purchase jewelry from a vendor through payroll withholding — go well beyond simple mistakes. Instead, the review found that money wasn't withheld from paychecks, and it appears that hundreds of tickets sold by the committee to pay for a party were never paid for/invoiced.

DART budget woes: Schutze has more questions

You have to read Jim Schutze's latest story in the Observer about DART and its budgeting woes all the way through to grasp two things: Schutze can really tell a complicated story well, and DART is such a mess it's a wonder any rail lines at all have been built. Schutze's point in this piece seems to be that it's no wonder DART underestimated the cost of future construction by a couple of billion — the way the agency hands out money is a little curious, to say the least. Not illegal, mind you, but curious for an agency that should be counting pennies rather than pitching them to contractors. For example, Schutze points out that DART says it competitively bids projects, but then indicates that two companies won bids for a few million dollars only to each be awarded — without bid — several hundred million dollars in additional contracts, without bidding. DART calls the companies "teammates" on the rail team, which I guess would be OK if we all knew what they had been signed for at the beginning of the season. Which is precisely Schutze's point.

Car-free downtown? It happened in NYC, what about here?

Back Talk reader Dallasmay passed along this link to a program New York City is trying over three consecutive weeks: 7 miles of car-free streets in Manhattan. The first car-free day occurred Saturday, and the link includes a video of what the experience was like for New Yorkers (fyi, the video loads awfully slowly). But what you'll see are people walking and biking and dancing and running throughout the city — it's a pretty impressive way to introduce the city to its residents all over again.

Dallasmay forwarded this, I assume, because of our Back Talk discussion of a week ago about ways to make downtown Dallas vibrant again. One of the suggestions was to temporarily and/or permanently close down a street or two in the center city to create a place where people don't have to worry about being flattened by vehicles. A number of comments pooh-poohed the idea, but after viewing the NYC video, I think it has a lot of merit.

In fact, two thing closing downtown streets might actually accomplish: One, a lot of people not previously acquainted with DART would find out how to use the rail to get downtown, since that would be the smart way to arrive there sans vehicle. And two, I'll bet there are literally hundreds of thousands of Dallas residents who have never been out of their vehicle downtown, except to visit a courthouse or attend a game at the AAC — how supportive of improving downtown do you think they'll be if they have no idea what's down there?

And there's a final reason to do this, too: There's nothing to lose. On the weekends already, there's almost no vehicular traffic downtown. Institutionalizing a no-vehicle day, even if it's just a one-time trial, isn't going to hurt anyone or anything downtown. In fact, it can only help.