Hiatus

"Ed Cognoski" is on hiatus.

Streaming Video of Council Meetings

Come August, Richardson will be online

Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, reports that Richardson's city council is likely to begin making streaming video of council meetings available on the city's Web site beginning in August. Reader Sherri adds that council member John Murphy, in conversation after the council meeting, suggested that podcasts of the audio of council meetings might be available as early as next week.

This is all good news. If there was an issue that resonated with the electorate in the recent council election, it was transparency in government, with streaming video of council meetings the most requested symbol of improving transparency (that and an online checkbook). All of the candidates supported putting video of council meetings online, so it's good to see the new council quickly live up to what many considered an implicit promise.

Even though neither video nor audio of this week's council meeting was available online, Ian McCann did the next best thing by live-blogging the meeting via Twitter. Having a journalist tweeting highlights is great and will continue to be even after we get live broadcasts. Let's face it, there's a lot of dead time in a city council meeting. Having someone summarize is a great service and doing it in real time is even better, as it affords Twitter followers the opportunity to tune in when the debate gets interesting. Like when McCann reported the discussion about the costs of providing streaming video: "7-10K too much to set up cameras? Amir Omar says...'I've got a friend who could do it for a couple hundred bucks.'"

If others join the conversation, too, there's the potential of having the electorate play a significant role in council deliberations, not just play spectator. Maybe we need a Richardson hashtag like #cortx to collect all the chatter my feverish imagination predicts we'll have.

By the way, is streaming video the biggest issue facing Richardson? Of course not. But it's the right thing to do. And it's easy to do. It doesn't keep us from tackling other issues at the same time. Let's do it.

May I Have a Word? Veloweb

DART and trails in Richardson

Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News, reports the good news that "Richardson plans new trails to link to DART stations."

A new trail will provide access to the Bush Turnpike DART station, up to now isolated from all commuters except those who can get there by car or bus.

A new trail will connect Renner Rd with the Galatyn Park DART station. There's already a trail that does that, the trail meandering through Richardson's gem, the Spring Creek Nature Preserve, but some people have complained that they don't want to walk through the woods, especially at night. Now, they'll be able to walk a new hike/bike trail alongside the new Routh Creek Parkway. Sure, the new road scars a beautiful nature preserve, but if it caters to cyclists and walkers, too, maybe it is an acceptable balance of competing careabouts.

And there's hope for a new trail along the Cotton Belt rail line, which will eventually be home to an east-west DART line across Richardson.

All of this trail activity in Richardson is just a small piece of a much bigger network of interconnected trails across North Texas. The bigger network even has a catchy name, a veloweb. What's a veloweb? Dictionary.com has never heard of the word. Google can't define it. But the North Central Texas Council of Governments is promoting the term to describe the "644 mile, designated off-street trail network that has been planned to provide bicycle and pedestrian connections in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex."

Some people flinch when they hear the word metroplex. Veloweb sounds like the kind of word with the potential to irritate people, too. Here's hoping the word veloweb becomes as common as metroplex, for it will mean that the vision of that 644 mile network of hiking/biking trails will have become a reality.

Police Chase

If it bleeds, it leads

There's a reason I don't watch local television news. It's the same reason I don't own a police scanner. I'm just not into murders, rapes, drug deals, kidnappings, traffic accidents, drownings, and "body bag" journalism in general. Then, there are the public interest stories that promise to keep me alive and healthy if I stay away from peanut butter, hotel bedding, tap water and breathing.

I know I'm in the minority on this, as every local television station found out years ago. Now, I fear that my new favorite local news source, The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, might be tempted to follow Channels 4, 5 and 8 in a race to the mucky bottom.

Ian McCann posted a blog item about today's car chase from Mesquite to downtown Dallas to north Dallas, ending in crash at the Richardson/Garland border. By 5:40 PM, the post had attracted 77 comments, by far the largest haul of commentary in memory on this fairly new blog. I fear McCann and Jeffrey Weiss, the main bloggers, will notice (or someone higher up will notice) and decide that blood and violence play as well in the blogosphere as they do in the vast televised wasteland. Given every newspaper's increasingly desperate search for relevancy, who could blame them for finding it in "a nasty looking T-bone crash" in Richardson? Just tell me you guys aren't going out to buy police scanners, will you?

Where Is ... the Slash Pine?

Staycations in Richardson

From Where is ...

This is the third in an occasional series of photos for which readers are challenged to identify the location where the photo was taken.

Jeffrey Weiss, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, solicits ideas for "interesting and inexpensive" staycations in Richardson this summer. His first suggestion is to visit the China Town mall on Greenville Avenue, which "includes a bunch of Asian restaurants (including one Vietnamese and one Korean), a bakery, a couple of music and book stores, a couple of beauty salons, and a restaurant supply store where you can find Asian specialties like woks." If you're Chinese-American and already frequent this mall, this may not be much of a staycation, but if you're a white-bread European-American who can't tell the Chinese character for "woman" from a Picasso sketch of a woman, then get adventurous and make a trip to China Town over the summer.

In the same spirit, I offered a couple suggestions of my own. First, take in a Bollywood movie at Richardson's FunAsiA, "an interesting eco system of theaters showing Bollywood and other Indian language movies, banquet halls, radio stations and a magazine called as DesiPages." (Jeffrey Weiss ran with my suggestion, highlighting it in his own blog post "Hooray for Bollywood.")

But if Slumdog Millionaire is as close to Bollywood as you care to get, then how about seeking out and patronizing one of Richardson's non-traditional bookstores before Amazon.com drives them all out of business? Here's what a quick Internet search turned up, but be warned: businesses come and go and some of these bookstores might already be gone.

• World Bookstore
• Richland Bookstore
• Herald Book Store
• China Books & Arts
• Keith's Comics
• Half Price Books
• Medbooks
• Off Campus Books

Finally, if you want to get outdoors this summer, then how about going on a scavenger hunt for an Elderica Pine or a Lace Bark Elm or any of a couple dozen other species of trees found in Richardson? The City of Richardson conveniently provides maps. In today's photo challenge, readers are asked to identify the location of the Slash Pine in the photo above. As before, the first reader to supply the right answer wins a year's free subscription to "Ed Cognoski."

May I Have a Word? Hearsay

Withdrawn, your honor

I was met with some objection when, in a comment to a recent blog post, I described readers' reports of what was said at a Richardson City Council meeting as hearsay. I said, "I now have hearsay from two people and still no video, audio, or transcript of any of this talk."

You would think I called the reader a liar. Which, I guess, when it comes right down to it, maybe I carelessly did, although that was not my intent. Most hearers can be forgiven if they understood the word to mean idle gossip or, worse, malicious rumor or even deliberate untruth. It's often used that way. Instead, all I intended was the neutral connotation as defined by Dictionary.com:

hearsay [heer-sey] noun
1. unverified, unofficial information gained or acquired from another and not part of one's direct knowledge

My knowledge of what was said at the city council meeting consists solely of unofficial information acquired from this reader and not part of my own direct knowledge. In other words, according to this definition, my knowledge is hearsay. That implies nothing about the truth or falsehood of what I heard, only that I heard it from another and didn't experience it myself.

Then there's the legal definition of hearsay. Wikipedia defines hearsay as "information gathered by Person A from Person B concerning some event, condition, or thing of which Person A had no direct experience." In the legal sense, the report from that reader (Person B) of what was said at the city council meeting is not hearsay. It's evidence of what the reader heard. In contrast, if I were, in turn, to report what was said by the city council members, using only the first person's report as my source, my report (as Person A) would be hearsay, because I didn't hear the city council's discussions myself.

All clear? The lesson, for me, is that hearsay is the kind of word that's OK to use by professionals in a controlled setting like a courtroom. It's also the kind of word to use to insult someone, if that's your intent. But it's not the kind of word to use in any kind of neutral sense, at least not without running the real risk of insulting someone. So, your honor, you are right to sustain the objection. I withdraw my statement.

Apartment Dwellers vs Homeowners

Further thoughts on a complex issue

Yesterday, I feel I didn't do justice to the issue of property values in the RISD. Certainly, the issue is more complex than the critics of the RISD made it out to be. The issue is more complex than some might have inferred from my own sarcastic response.

To recap, here's my understanding of the argument against the RISD. The demographics of Richardson are changing. More racial and ethnic diversity. More poor people. More run-down apartments. The RISD, by offering better education than the Dallas ISD does, in general, and targeting services to apartment dwellers in particular, makes Richardson a magnet for poor people. More poor people move to Richardson making the situation even worse.

If that's the argument, and if there's truth to it, what should the RISD do about it? Degrade the quality of its education? That can't possibly be what people want, can it? Separate the poor children from the affluent, the apartment dwellers from the homeowners' children? That's illegal. Create economic incentives for developers to tear down those run-down apartments? Is that it? Although no one quite made that argument, it's the only one that makes sense to me.

I'm for creating economic incentives for redevelopment, if it can be done without harming the schools. But can it? After all, "create economic incentives" translates into giving money to someone, money that has to come from somewhere else, in this case, schools. The RISD risks degrading the quality of education by diverting money. (I know some argue that throwing money at education doesn't assure success, but diverting money doesn't assure it, either). The argument for diverting money now rests on the theory that the sacrifices are only temporary. Eventually, the redeveloped areas will be paying even more in property taxes than the RISD gives back today. It's an enticing argument ... for nearby homeowners. For the poor families who live in apartments and send their kids to RISD schools, it's not as enticing. For they lose on both ends of this deal. First, money is taken from their children's schools and given to developers. Then, when developers get the money and tear down the apartments, the families lose their homes, too.

So, the issue is complex. I admit it. The RISD school board recognizes it. The RISD has shown its willingness to cooperate in redevelopment programs. It entered a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) agreement with the city of Dallas for the Skillman corridor. It did so only after ensuring that it was in the best interest of *all* residents of the RISD, not just the developers, not just the homeowners, but the apartment families and schoolchildren as well. Issues that pit homeowners against apartment dwellers put the RISD in a difficult situation. I am convinced that the RISD is attempting to balance all interests. My eyes were opened yesterday to the fact that some reasonable people insist on believing otherwise. Reasonable people on both sides need to resist the urge to suspect the motives of each other. They need to keep talking and working together to develop win-win situations for all.

Red Light Cameras Work

Latest evidence is from the city of Dallas

Kimberly Thorpe, in Unfair Park, reports on a meeting of Dallas' Automated Red Light Enforcement Commission, at which members were told that since the installation of 66 cameras in 2007, there has been a 62% reduction in red-light related accidents at intersections with cameras. The program cost is $6 million per year and ticket revenues last year were $7.4 million. After sending half of the net revenue to Austin, as required by the Texas legislature, the city's net revenue was $676,753, or about 10% of the cost of the program.

In short, red light cameras work! Our intersections are safer. The red light cameras are not "a bald faced cash grab," as one reader still believes even in the face of contradictory evidence. Or at least the cash grab isn't by cities; Austin's demand for half of the revenues is another matter. In fact, if the incidence of red light running continues to drop as drivers adjust their driving habits (which would be a good thing, remember), revenues will drop as well and the program might no longer pay for itself. In ticket revenues, anyway. In accidents avoided and lives saved, the program's positive return will be longer lasting.

Mark Davis on Mark Sanford

My nominee for today's award for unintended irony

Mark Davis: "I suppose I should be thankful that a guy who I might have favored for the GOP nomination has done us all the favor of revealing that he is a complete idiot."

You'd think Mark Davis would be used to it by now.

RISD and Property Values

Readers say quality education lowers property values

Jeffrey Weiss Ian McCann, in The Dallas Morning News Richardson blog, posted Monday night's action agenda for Richardson's city council meeting (God, it's good to see the DMN cover local government!). Reader reaction surprised me and had me saying "Really!?!" like an episode of SNL's "Really with Seth and Amy" (only not about Rod Blagojevich). Reader "schoolboardblues" tells us that last week's city council goal session was a real "yawner" and Richardson residents ought to go over to the Richardson ISD school board meetings. Now, if you ask me, both the city council and the school board are very well run, especially compared to their equivalents in Richardson's big brother city to the south.

But, OK, I'll bite. What is the issue with the RISD that has readers so concerned that they hijack a blog item about the city council to whine about the RISD instead? It's apartments. Rundown apartments are the result of the RISD offering quality education. Really. Reader "fedup" explains: "The single family homes in and around the old apartment areas are still in the tank (e.g. Richland Park as one of many examples). When RISD continues to offer programs which appeal to apartment dwellers, they will seek out RISD - plain and simple."

It's time for a sanity check. Really. Richardson ISD is the state's largest school district to earn a rating of "Recognized" in the TEA's accountability assessments. That's a point of pride, folks, with a beneficial side effect for homeowners. Good schools support higher property values for single family homes. If you don't like what your own home's resale value is, don't blame the good schools. And don't blame the RISD's quality education for decaying apartments. If the RISD were to lower its education standards, those decaying apartments aren't going to be filled with more affluent tenants. Take your concerns about rundown apartments to the city council, which does have responsibility for code enforcement. Ironically, readers side-tracked a blog item about the city council, which has the power to address the readers' complaints, to complain about the RISD, which doesn't. Really.