Is Dallas at a tipping point, a turning point, or is the Dallas Morning News just out to sell papers with the finest pomp and pompousness its money could buy?

A number of you did read the entire manifesto published by the paper. I know because your questions and comments tell me you did. Many of the problems it professed to be deadly for the city have been a problem in our past. However, I believe the last two councils have recognized many of these problems and have been hard at work fixing pipes and watching for more leaks in the system.

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If you read that opinion of lament and woe closely, you realize the bulk of the statistics used were from 1990-2000. We are some three and a half years removed at this point and moving at a very fast pace compared to the lazy hazy days of the ’90s. Can Dallas do better? You bet we can!

Let’s look at some of the positives:

  • Would a man of Ray Nasher’s intellect and means put his Sculpture Garden in a dying city when he had his choice of anywhere in the world?
  • Dallas now has five new industrial parks operating in our southern sector.
  • The University of North Texas opened a new campus at Hampton and I-20 and expects 16,000 students by 2010.
  • For the first time in the history of this city, more building permits were issued south of the Trinity than north of it in the last fiscal year.
  • Two Santiago Calatrava bridge designs have been funded, and the third is almost complete. They are magnificent structures comparable to the St. Louis Arch, and we would be the only city in the world with such bridge work tying our city together.
  • The Dallas Arts District is second to none today with the Meyerson, and the balance of the performing venues are but five years from opening.
  • The American Airlines Center will be paying off its bond holders years early according to its press agents, which means that the investments the city made were on course after all.
  • The city passed a $555 million bond package in a down economy. That was on top of a $1.34 billion school bond package.

Someone out there believes the glass is half full, wouldn’t you say?

My point is that Dallas may have been at a crossroads in diversity for a while, but not a tipping point. The strength is still in the will of the people who live in this city, not in the ink of the Dallas Morning News.