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Dallas Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert will have one more change to make on her new organizational chart. Assistant City Manager Robert Perez is leaving for Topeka, Kansas.

Perez has been chosen as the lone finalist for Topeka’s open city manager’s job, according to a well-placed source at Topeka City Hall with knowledge of the hiring process who did not have permission to speak on the record. Perez will replace former City Manager Stephen Wade, who was fired over the summer after only 10 months on the job. The city later alleged that he had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.

Topeka confirmed Perez’s hire around noon Friday in a press release. The City Council is expected to formally approve Perez’s contract in its May 14 meeting. Perez will be offered a one-year contract with a base salary of $255,000. His start date is being finalized, the city said, but it’s anticipated to be between late June and early July.

Blame calzones for ending the tenure of this magazine’s first-ever dining editor. To hit a deadline, David Bauer consumed eight of the Italian turnovers within a few days, and the ricotta cheese did him in. In truth, Bauer never set out to cover food. In 1974, he was a long-haired and bearded Dartmouth grad looking for a job in journalism because, he says, “I couldn’t think of anything else to be.” 

“The first person you’re going to hire is not going to be that hippie, right?” said D Magazine’s founding publisher, Wick Allison, after editor Jim Atkinson brought Bauer on board. Some months later, when Allison announced that someone would need to build a dining directory modeled after the one at Philadelphia Magazine, Bauer volunteered. 

“Except for the fact that I liked to eat, I had no credentials, no expertise,” Bauer says today. 

His mini-reviews gave Dallas its first taste of dining criticism: “An old Market St. warehouse brought back to life and loaded with antiques. … It’s possible the spaghetti is also antique,” he wrote in the magazine’s first issue. Word got around among the city’s restaurateurs to watch out for “a guy who looks just like Jesus.”

Inexperience aside, Bauer did have an ace up his sleeve. His girlfriend at the time was Nancy Nichols. Longtime readers will recognize the name, as Nichols was D Magazine’s dining critic from 1996 to 2015. But back in the 1970s, she was not a writer at all. Nichols had worked the line at a buzzy Austin restaurant called MarCo’s and then served as a chef and waitress at La Cave in Dallas, which she claims was Dallas’ first authentic wine bar. “But The Grape fights me on that every time,” she says. So while Bauer could write, Nichols knew food and often joined him on dining expeditions. 

Mavs, Stars Even Their Series. Critical games in Oklahoma City and Dallas, with the Mavs sailing past the Thunder behind a Luka Doncic bounce-back game and the Stars putting up five goals. StrongSide will have more shortly. The Oklahoman spent its lead arguing that maybe Paycom Center shouldn’t chant “Lu-ka Sucks” next time.

Sergeant Fired for Faking Overtime. Sgt. Katherine Silva lost her job after Police Chief Eddie Garcia ruled that she had falsified her time cards and forged documents. She also engaged in “adverse conduct” when she was arrested for theft between $2,500 to $30,000 as well as tampering with a government record. Silva had been with the department since 2004. She can appeal the decision.

Mother’s Day Rain? There’s a 40 percent chance on Sunday, but the weekend should be in the mid-70s. That might be the last time we say that until fall. Rain and storm chances begin Saturday night and continue into Sunday morning, but the forecast doesn’t expect it to be severe. Bring an umbrella for your walk into brunch and you’ll be just fine.

Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia is suddenly a wanted man in two of the state’s other large cities, and our City Hall was caught looking. Houston and Austin are both without police chiefs; Houston’s resigned amid a rather alarming department scandal and Austin’s reportedly got fed up that the city couldn’t agree to a contract with the police department and retired after 25 years.

Complicating matters is that T.C. Broadnax has taken the city manager job in the state’s capitol, and, if you’ll recall, Garcia told reporters that he would “go through a wall for that man” once his boss’ messy Dallas exit became public knowledge.

And so it wasn’t totally a surprise that interim City Manager Kim Tolbert sent out a statement on Wednesday night to reporters. Her phrasing, however, warrants a raised eyebrow. Without naming them, she told our neighbors to “turn around and go back home.” (She also misspelled his name as “Gracia” once. Maybe she just had thankfulness on her mind.)

So what’s going on here? The crux of the issue, as the Dallas Morning News reported this morning, is that the Dallas city charter precludes the City Council from signing a contract with the police chief. He is an at-will employee, meaning the city manager could part ways with him at any time just as he could part ways with the city. I got on the phone this morning with sources around City Hall and tried to get a sense of what’s happening behind the scenes. Here’s what I can tell you, although I promised not to name names so folks could speak freely.

Now that we know the Cotton Bowl will be home to a new USL Super League team, here are some names we’d like to float:

Cottontails
Bruhs
Carnies
North Texans
Republican Mayors
Diamonds
Pegasi
Tammy Palominos
Very Fast Rocketships
Woofuses
Highways
Sue Ellens
Super Junior Leaguers
Stories

Update (10:53): At an event held at Klyde Warren Park, it was just announced that our team will be called Dallas Trinity FC, which I think is pretty solid. The logo is a stylized Pegasus. I’m onboard. And it turns out the club has been tweeting for months.

Local USL Super League Team Will Call Cotton Bowl Home. As we suspected, the new professional women’s soccer team will play in Fair Park. That much was confirmed yesterday when the Dallas City Council approved the deal. This morning around 10:30, Mayor Eric Johnson, league leadership, and USL Super League Dallas president Charlie Neil will announce more details, including the name of the Dallas team.

‘Turn Around and Go Back Home.’ After reports surfaced that Austin and Houston have expressed interest in hiring Dallas police Chief Eddie Garcia for their open positions, interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert issued a statement praising Garcia’s work. She said that she and the City Council would be“working tirelessly” to find a way to keep Garcia in Dallas. “To the cities shopping in Dallas for a new chief, I have one message for you: ‘turn around and go back home,’” she concluded.

Dallas ISD High School Responds to Allegations. Last month, a Jewish student at Hillcrest High School filed a federal complaint alleging antisemitic bullying. This week, Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said that the district had partnered with the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, and Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum to provide training for staff in January, and will hold a student session as well. Elizalde said that the district has not yet received the federal complaint, but will cooperate when it does.

Hawk Terrorizes Neighborhood. People in one Keller neighborhood are dodging a “pretty aggressive” red-shouldered hawk with new chicks. One resident said the attack left her bleeding, and “felt like I got hit by a baseball bat.”

Weather Is Going To Be Weathery Today. The National Weather Service’s Fort Worth office says that another round of potentially severe scattered storms will fire up around North Texas this afternoon. The primary threats will be “very large hail” and wind gusts. No word on how big “very large” is, so just go ahead and expect something between a CD and a Dodge Challenger.

Yet more proof that Dallas is a banging literary city. First the New York Times gives some of our guys some shine, and now Ben Fountain wins the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He’ll pocket $50,000 and head out for a residency at UC Berkley. Plus, on May 23, he’ll do an online chat with JCO herself. Details are here. (And if you don’t know who Ben is, please get yourself up to speed by reading Zac Crain’s profile of him from the May 2012 issue of D Magazine.)

Ben, a hearty congratulations from your favorite city magazine. Your lamp is on the way. Be careful. It is fra-geel-ay.

Here’s one of the things I love about our dining critic, Brian Reinhart: when he notices something curious, he doesn’t just throw up a post on Twitter about it and then go back to watching baseball. Nope, Brian starts digging.

That’s what he did last year when he noticed that jalapeños in grocery stores seemed to have less fire than he remembered. Is that actually the case? And, if so, why have they grown more mild? The result of his curiosity was an article that has, for a year, continued to draw an astounding amount of traffic to our little outpost. The headline and sub: “Here’s Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever: Throw out those bogus shopping tips about pepper size. Decades of deliberate planning created a less-hot jalapeño.”

Well, the folks at Slate read that article, and they decided to do even more digging. They found the actual inventor of the less-spicy pepper. The result of their efforts is an episode of the podcast Decoder Ring that just dropped. I’ve listened to just a few minutes so far, but this is good stuff. Worth your time:

Kimberly Bizor Tolbert hasn’t waited to make changes at City Hall since becoming Dallas’ interim city manager on May 2. The new boss has shaken up the organizational chart and outlined her goals for the first 100 days.

In an email to the Dallas City Council yesterday, Tolbert announced that interim Dallas Water Utilities director Sarah Standifer would change her title to permanent director. The move may be seen by many City Hall watchers as controversial, particularly those who count themselves among our city’s environmental hawks. Standifer notably was atop the department that oversaw managing the Trinity River and the watershed when environmental snafus seemed common, like a borrow pit and a drained wetland pond that attracted the attention of the state in the forest near where the Trinity Forest Golf Club was being built.

Standifer joined the city in 2002 and was appointed interim director of the city’s water utility in June 2023, when her predecessor, Terry Lowery, retired. In her email, Tolbert cited Standifer’s expertise in water and wastewater management, as well as her affiliations with the Trinity Regional Flood Board, National Waterways Conference, and Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies. 

In the same email, Tolbert also announced that Emily Liu has been hired as Director of Planning and Urban Design. Liu comes from Louisville, Kentucky, where she held a similar role. Tolbert said that Liu had been with Louisville for more than a decade, with much of that time spent leading the planning department. She has also worked in Illinois and Ohio and, in 2022, became the first woman in Kentucky to be inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She’ll report to work in Dallas on May 20.

“Emily has broad expertise across various aspects of urban planning and design, such as long-range planning, zoning, housing, transportation, urban design, and historic preservation,” Tolbert wrote. “She was pivotal in leading Louisville’s acclaimed Zoning Reform initiative, which has been recognized as a model for other cities.”

Two days ago—is it really only Wednesday?—I mentioned in my Leading Off post that former Cowboys wide receiver and mink coat enthusiast Michael Irvin was out at the NFL Network, his longtime post-playing career home. I added that we could probably find a desk for Irvin at D HQ.

I wasn’t joking then, and I’m not joking now. Since I can’t prove that the Playmaker is not a regular FrontBurner reader, I am going to address him directly from here on out. So, here goes.

Michael, this is a formal offer: come work with us.

What would you do? Short answer: whatever you want. (Within reason! We have lawyers on retainer but not enough to fully defend a “White House”-level scandal.) Long answer: whaaaaaateverrrrr yoooooouuuu waaaaaant.

Sorry. Off the top of my head, I think you would be a natural at heading up our weekly Monday Morning Huddles. No offense at all to Cory, who works upstairs and is a real champ at being the emcee of that particular shindig at the moment, a post he has held for some time. But, I mean, even if you have Harrison Barnes playing small forward, you don’t say no if Kevin Durant wants the spot. You know? Cory is a natural with dad jokes. But he cannot compete when it comes to wearing a tie with a knot the size of the Incredible Hulk’s fist.

If you want to write, we have essentially an infinite amount of room at our sports site, StrongSide, and you obviously have the requisite ability to fire off A Take, not to mention the kind of on-field (or court) experience that currently is lacking from our roster of writers. Or maybe you’d prefer to take on a new challenge. I’m sure your sartorial expertise could find a fairly natural fit at D Weddings, since we tend to see things from a bride-heavy POV. Or SideDish. Everyone likes to eat.

OK, now, as far as salary goes, I’m not saying we won’t pay you, but we certainly won’t pay you at the level you are used to, not as a pro athlete or even a broadcaster. But you can expect Tiff’s Treats cookies on the reg (they just show up, and I’m almost never clear why), and some restaurant or bar brings us lunch or afternoon snacks and/or drinks generally a few times a month, or else there are sandwiches or whatever left over from meetings. Speaking of leftovers, occasionally we have an event in the office and for a week or two afterward, there are spare beers in the fridge. So: desk beers.

Also, we are about to set up a cornhole game in the hall.

Stars, Mavs Both Lose Game 1. Different sports, different story, same result. The Stars blew a 3-0 lead and lost by a goal in overtime while the Dallas Mavericks looked tired and wounded while getting run off the court in the fourth quarter by the young Oklahoma City Thunder. Stay tuned to StrongSide; analysis is coming.

Rashee Rice Can’t Just Stay Home. The Kansas City Chiefs receiver, who is already charged with eight felonies related to a hit-and-run racing incident, is now under investigation for an assault at a downtown nightclub. Rice, an SMU graduate, is accused of hitting a photographer at 609 N. Harwood Street, which houses Lit Kitchen and Lounge and the speakeasy venue Feu. Police are interviewing witnesses about the incident.

Dallas Considers Rebates for Switching to Electric Lawn Equipment. The city may stand up a $750,000 program that reimburses single-family homeowners for switching from gas to electric lawn equipment. The city’s environmental higher ups expect about 3,500 families to benefit, which could include $50 for blowers and $100 for push mowers. The effort is a push to reduce emissions, and about half of the city’s 200,000 single-family homeowners still have gas equipment. (As a longtime member of the Ryobi Gang, I’d like some free money for being an early adopter.)

Cold Front! Today will be Houston, all muggy and warm, but a springtime cold front is on the way. Severe weather is a possibility, but the highest chances for problems are southeast of the metro area. Highs will be in the low 90s today before falling to the high 70s and low 80s through Mother’s Day weekend.