News of a Starbucks moving to the corner of Ferndale and Northwest Highway has many in the neighborhood defensive on behalf of their beloved, locally owned White Rock Coffee, located just a couple doors down from where the java giant’s dirt and building materials are flying. The recently razed Backus Shell  station that occupied the spot for more than 50 years seems all but forgotten.
But Starbucks isn’t alone in new construction here along the 10100 block of E. Northwest Highway. White Rock Coffee owners Nancy and Robert Baker are erecting a training center for WRC baristas, in a building that sits between their 12-year-old “mothership” and the incoming Starbucks.
“Our baristas undergo thorough training, some are certified at [the highest levels],” Nancy says. “We have outgrown the original building — it’s so busy, they are hopping from training to customers, too much.”
The training facility, which will inhabit an extensively renovated former cash-lending store, is slated to open sometime this spring. It will include office space and a conference room and will be equipped with the latest gadgets and state-of-the-art espresso machines, “so the baristas can stay on the cutting edge of espresso/coffee technology,” Nancy says. Who knows, she adds, she and Bob might even launch classes for the public.
Parking conditions at this Northwest Highway locale, about the only regular complaint, should improve.
“We are aware it’s a little treacherous, parking, which is one reason we didn’t put another retail location there. We plan to maximize the lots for parking.”

​To read the full Advocate article CLICK HERE

It was a labor of pure lake love, and about $200,000 in donations, that built the White Rock Lake Museum in 2004. But this month, without any discussion with the people who built it, the City of Dallas handed the museum an eviction notice giving the group 60 days to vacate the Bath House Cultural Center.
“It took a community to build this museum; it’s going to take a community to save it,” says Kurt Kretsinger, president of the museum board.
Why exactly the museum was given an eviction notice remains murky. Marty Van Kleeck, who manages the center, referred questions to David Fisher at the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs, which oversees the building. After agreeing to an interview, Fisher didn’t answer his phone when the Advocate called. But in an email to Kretsinger, which included the eviction notice, Fisher wrote:
“Text-based, static, interpretive exhibits are just not efficient uses of space anymore. After more than a decade, we feel the museum has lived its useful life. In addition, the number one resource we hear that is needed by the cultural community is more gallery space for emerging artists. Hence, we are requesting that you remove the museum panels so that we can replace them with an emerging artist space. This helps the Bath House and Office of Cultural Affairs further their missions of supporting the arts and artists in Dallas.”

To read the full Advocate article CLICK HERE.

Beginning March 1, it will be illegal to smoke in Dallas' public parks. But not all of them. And not all of the time.
The City Council voted Wednesday morning to approve a smoking ban with exceptions made for municipal golf courses, the city-owned gun-and-archery range and parks controlled by private partners. Those include the Dallas Zoo, the Dallas Arboretum, Lee Park and Fair Park during the State Fair of Texas. 
And a last-minute amendment also made it possible to light up in the future park beneath the Trinity River levees, to be funded with $50 million donated by the family of Harold Simmons.
The vote was close, with six council members supporting a full-on ban. Mayor Mike Rawlings, a former Park and Recreation Board president who said in June that he supported a partial ban, is out of the country on a trade mission.
The ban will be added to the 2008 ordinance outlawing smoking in, among other places, Dallas' bars, restaurants and city-owned facilities. Anyone caught violating the ordinance could be fined up to $200 — though, as northwest Dallas council representative Jennifer Staubach Gates pointed out Wednesday morning, enforcement could be difficult.
The council was set to vote on a ban without exceptions. But Pleasant Grove's Rickey Callahan proposed an amendment leaving room for muni golf courses, the Elm Fork Shooting Sports facility and other parks with contracted operators.
Callahan said he was proposing the amendment because he's "concerned about hyper-regulation" and "creating more rules." He found a supporter in North Dallas' Lee Kleinman, who said, "Over-regulation is a concern of mine," adding that he wasn't interested in trying to serve "a health agenda or social agenda."
Kleinman also added another amendment, which said the ban was limited only to land defined as a city park. 

To read the full Dallas Morning News article CLICK HERE.

On paper, it looks like a simple reassignment of duties. Item number 18 on this week’s Dallas City Council agenda calls for a “consideration of appointments to boards and commissions and the evaluation of duties of board and commission members.” But between the lines of the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, the agenda item represents nothing less than a hatchet job.
First, let’s translate it into plain English. Tomorrow the City Council will decide whether Dallas Park and Recreation Board Vice Chair Jesse Moreno should remain vice chair, or if Sean Johnson, another board member with professional connections to the State Fair of Texas, should assume the position.
The timing is significant.
Two weeks ago, Moreno and Johnson locked horns in a park board meeting over the State Fair of Texas. Officials from the State Fair were invited to City Hall on January 26 to give a presentation of “highlights” from last year’s event. Some park board members wanted to use the visit as an opportunity to ask fair officials some tough questions, particularly relating to findings of a city audit that questioned whether the State Fair was adequately fulfilling its contractual obligations as a tenant of Fair Park.
When city staff told the board that the agenda item only allowed for the State Fair to present “highlights,” and not to be questioned by the board, Moreno slipped a second item onto the agenda that would allow for an open discussion of the State Fair. However, after the State Fair made their presentation and the open conversation began, the fair officials split. They just left. No conversation.
Jim Schutze covers the whole thing here. Schutze was in the park board meeting room at the time, which is good because I was watching the meeting online and just when the juicy part of the back-and-forth kicked in, the sound on the live feed mysteriously dropped out. Schutze reports that Johnson went to bat for the State Fair, calling his colleagues’ attempts to grill the State Fair officials during the briefing “embarrassing.”


To read the full D Magazine article CLICK HERE.