About 100 people came out for the first public meeting of the city’s task force on gas drilling Tuesday night. Most neighbors who spoke at the meeting urged the panel to recommend a ban on gas drilling in the city.

City Council member Angela Hunt appointed the panel, composed of several lawyers, an environmentalist and experts in the oil and gas industry. Their task is to research urban gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which is known as fracking, and decide whether and under what circumstances the city should allow drilling. The city signed a $34 million mineral lease with XTO Energy in an effort to balance the budget two years ago. But so far, the city has not given XTO a permit to drill on its lease in the Mountain Creek area. If the city doesn’t allow the company to drill, we must repay the $34 million.

Overwhelmingly, neighbors urged the panel to ban gas drilling because of evidence suggesting that chemicals used in fracking can contaminate ground water and pollute the air. Th Environmental Protection Agency does not regulate fracking, which utilizes cancer-causing compounds including benzene. So the job is left to the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality, which employs 12 inspectors for some 15,000 gas wells throughout the state.

Joanne Roan of Bryan Place told the panel she is “getting tired of being embarrassed by the decisions the city of Dallas makes.”

“They’re not going to have fracking where I live, or in Lakewood or in most of our neighborhoods,” she said. “But I feel for people who do.”

Fracking also requires hundreds of gallons of water, a precious resource itself.

Molly Rooke, who lives near Mockingbird, suggested the panel wait until there is more research and better technology for extracting the gas from the Barnett Shale.

“That gas is not going anywhere,” she said. “It’s going to be there. Someday there could be a better technology, and we don’t want to make our air quality worse.”

Two people spoke in favor of gas drilling in the city. Robert Unger of University Park, who said he worked in the oil and gas industry for 35 years, said he thinks fracking is safe, even near “established and mature developments.”

We all need energy, was the gist of his argument. Wouldn’t it be nice to pay less for it?

The panel’s chair, Lois Finkelman, told the room: “I promise you we will address this the best we can, and when we finish, we will have a strong consensus about what to do.”

The next public meeting is in October, a few days before the panel submits its recommendations.

It was a major issue in the District 12 city council election, and it’s back under the microscope. The 26-mile long Cotton Belt Rail Line will run right through Far North Dallas with a station at Knoll Trail near Arapaho and one at Preston and Keller Springs. The overall route will also pass through surrounding suburbs of Carrollton, Addison, Richardson, Plano, Coppell and Grapevine.

DART and the Federal Transit Administration are moving forward with an environmental impact study for implementing the Cotton Belt, which is could run on a depressed track to alleviate the negative impact to nearby homes along Davenport and other residential roads. You can hear all the latest details at a public meeting set for 6:30 p.m. Monday, Aug. 8 at the Addison Conference Center. Read up on the project here.

The Cotton Belt has been on the books for years. Through a public-private partnership, DART aims to have it up and running by 2030.

Check out this video provided by DART:

Four longtime residents and community leaders gathered for a roundtable discussion to define our neighborhood once and for all.

Those of you who think city government is a useless waste of time should know that the city’s budget cuts may have played a role in the deaths of two Dallas residents last week.

The city has savaged the traffic light repair budget to help make up for three years of budget mismanagement (which, oddly, hardly anyone but me has written about until now). The result? Rafael Valdovinos and Yolanda Guzman were killed when a driver blew through a broken stop light near Ferguson and Centerville.

There was a nice bit of reporting in Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper (behind the paywall) describing how the budget cuts have reduced the number of employees available to fix broken stop lights. It even went so far to say that the accident was “at least partially caused by an inoperative traffic light.” Which, given the way reporters are taught to write stories, speaks volumes about the city’s culpability.

Hopefully, this will get through to the bureaucrats and council members downtown who continue to treat the budget crisis as something that will go away if they close their eyes long enough.

For those of you “whatever happened to” story fans, here’s a flash from the past: Former Dallas mayor Steve Bartlett just was profiled in a lengthy New York Times story talking about his impact on banking legislation as head of the Financial Services Roundtable.

Yeah, I had never heard of the group, either, but they must be doing OK: Bartlett is paid $2 million a year, according to the NYT story. That would have to put Bartlett among our most successful former mayors, at least in terms of annual pay days.

I’m sure once former mayor Ron Kirk steps down from his role in President Obama’s administration, he’ll be beating back lots of big-dollar job offers, too. And maybe that’s why former mayor Tom Leppert is so eager to get into politics while Bartlett and, likely, Kirk have done their time and decided to cash in with the private sector — Leppert’s career has been the opposite of theirs, since he already cashed in before venturing into politics.

Most of the Advocate editorial staff has worked social media into the fabric of our day, as there is no denying that it is a revolutionary and invaluable source of information and communication. Sometimes we veer off into personal-interaction territory, but in fairness, our personal time is consistently interrupted by work stuff, and Facebook and Twitter help us stay informed, inform our readers, and do our jobs, so we don’t feel bad.

At city hall, things are a little different. Taxpayers, and all. It’s too easy to make Facebooking on the job sound bad in the headlines, which is happening now, following a probe into city staffers’ Facebook use during work hours.

The Morning News (read it here if you aren’t a subscriber) story highlighted the city’s assistant water director as a “Facebook abuser”. He was found to have logged about 68 hours on the site over a three-month period. Really, that’s like an hour a day. He admitted it was a “bad habit” and that the findings and subsequent reprimand were “not one of (his) finest hours.” A few other city employees logged in the 100-200 hour range during that 3-month investigation.

City Manager Mary Suhm says Dallas will soon release an updated social media policy for employees, though one is already in place. Because the city and its various departments use Facebook to communicate with Dallas residents, I imagine it will be tough to set and enforce stringent restrictions.

I love how the Morning News article includes a graph about HardlyWork.in, where you can make your Facebook page look like a spreadsheet.

Aldi market's simple quarter-deposit system keeps lots and nearby neighborhoods cart free.

This week, plans to round up abandoned shopping carts, part of a citywide quality-of-life improvement program, are underway.

According to a June 9 memorandum to the city’s Quality of Life Committee, the test program began yesterday to corral the errant carts that plague Dallas neighborhoods, which proponents of the abandoned-shopping-cart cleanup plan say attract more litter (they become “garbage magnets”, Angelina Avalos of the Vickery Meadow Improvement District has told the city council). City crews — along with some volunteers — will continue the cleanup throughout the week.

The cart conundrum is prolific in poorer neighborhoods, where people do not have cars and therefore frequently steal carts (yes, merchants confirm this constitutes theft) as a means to get the groceries home.

The pilot cleanup program this week will focus on five Dallas neighborhoods (click on map at the left for a larger view) including the 500 block of Maple, Polk/Camp Wisdom Road, Spring Valley/Coit, the Vickery Meadow area, and Lancaster/Keist.

The plan, pushed by leaders of the Vickery Meadow Improvement District and the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas, places due responsibility on merchants for keeping track of carts, asking them to “demonstrate strategies that will keep carts on their property and not abandoned in neighborhoods”.

Aldi, a grocery store often set in such pedestrian neighborhoods, is exemplary when it comes to controlling its cart inventory. The system is simple — put a quarter in to get a cart. Get your quarter back when you return the cart. (I also learned the hard way, one day when I parked on the south end of the lot at the Forest-Audelia store, that the carts seize up if you take it past a certain point in the parking lot).

The worst: Wal Mart. The few times I’ve been forced to visit the Wal Mart at Forest-Abrams, I have passed on several available parking spaces due to carts in the spot, and the Wal Mart carts can be seen in the lots of nearby apartments, extended-living hotels and beauty supply stores. Fiesta (though I adore its produce section) is also awful with the carts.

While I admire the effort here, I think the majority of the onus should be placed on the businesses — if a barebones outfit like Aldi can figure out how to cure the shopping cart chaos, surely Wal Mart and Super Target can do the same.

Despite a close election May 14, Sandy Greyson kept a commanding lead over Donna Starnes in the runoff Saturday, defeating the Tea Party newcomer to claim Greyson’s old city council seat.

Starnes had endorsements from third-place finisher William Tsao and Ron Natinsky, the current District 12 representative who lost his race for mayor.

At first, it seemed as though Greyson had failed to recapture her long-time support in Far North Dallas, but she told me that she believes many voters were too confident, assuming she would win. So, they didn’t go to the polls. She hit the campaign trail even harder leading up to the runoff.

Greyson previously served on the council from 1997 to 2005 when term limits forced her out. She has still remained active in civic leagues and neighborhood groups, working as the president of the League of Women Voters of Dallas and serving on the board of Save Open Space to help advocate for green space.

There was an I Like Mike sign in front of a KFC-Long John Silver’s fast food restaurant this morning, and that pretty much sums up what happened in the mayoral election. Dallas’ business community got the man they wanted — Mike Rawlings, who used to run Pizza Hut (and whose corporate parent owns KFC and Long John Silver’s, which explains the sign).

The irony, of course, is that David Kunkel, the man Rawlings beat, would not have been any less friendly to business. Or that Dallas has ever been anything less than incredibly friendly to business. Or, in what may be the biggest irony, that it won’t make any difference how business friendly the city is these days. The elite downtown and the business community, who paid for Rawlings’ election, are assuming that it’s 2005, and the next big deal is just around the corner.

Unfortunately for them, and for us, it’s not 2005. It’s 2011, and the U.S. economy, the Texas economy, and Dallas’ economy are not going to incubate any big deals any time soon. The city can barely balance the budget, we’re closing rec centers, and we’re not replacing cops — and that’s not going to change for several years. Even Dallas’ Only Daily Newspaper, which speaks for the business community and the downtown elite, hinted at this in Sunday’s paper (behind the pay wall, of course).

So, if those two groups thought getting Rawlings elected meant that they could push through vest pocket deals like the convention center hotel, or use tax dollars to finance their profits in redeveloping Industrial Boulevard, they’re going to be disappointed. The economy is going to stymie them, just like it has the rest of us. They’re not going to be happy to hear that, are they?

There’s still an election going on – two of them, actually. And while early voting turnout has been low, according to this paywall-hidden DMN story, there’s still one more chance to make a difference for your candidate.

If you’re still on the fence, be sure to check out our video debate coverage of the mayoral runoff between Mike Rawlings and David Kunkle.

The District 12 runoff between veteran council member Sandy Greyson and Tea Party newcomer Donna Starnes is sure to be a close one. There are clear differences between the two as evidenced by their first public debate. Check out our coverage here where you can listen to full audio of the forum.

Neighborhood polling places include Haggar Elementary School and the Renner Frankford Library.

The Urban Living Laboratory will test the effectiveness of green-building materials.

A mixed-used development at Coit and Frankford will include about a million square feet of retail, office and apartment buildings, plus two hotels with 250 rooms. But the Urban Living Laboratory is not just a real estate development.

It will be a research facility to test the practicality of sustainable and green building materials.

Arlington-based developer Realty Appreciation Ltd. is teaming up with the Texas A&M University System to create a “green and sustainable built environment” on 73 acres.

Texas A&M owns the land, which once was an agricultural extension facility where the university tested cotton and other agricultural products.

“The whole purpose is to do research on green environments and how people live, work and play in those environments,” says Kevin Rogers of Realty Appreciation.

Site plan for the Urban Living Laboratory, a unique mixed-use development near Coit and Frankford

The development will be equipped with sensors in every room that will monitor the efficiency of everything from light bulbs to toilets. To subsidize the cost of that technology, Realty Appreciation has recruited corporate partners to donate or discount goods and services for the project. In return, they get research data on those products and services. So far, 19 companies are on board with the project, including Milliken, Oncor, TXU Energy, LG Electronics, AT&T, Owens Corning and American Standard.

Rogers says his favorite example is Kohler, which makes a dual-flush toilet. Users, as Rogers puts it, press one button for number one, and a second button for number two. Kohler’s own research shows that when used properly, the dual-flush toilet saves water.

“But they don’t actually know how people use their product,” Rogers says. “Because how can you know? This is the first time they’ll have data on how people use their products, and then they can design better toilets in the future.”

Researchers from 17 other universities also will take part in the data-gathering.

City Council is expected to approve a zoning change for the project next week. Construction could begin as early as November, and the project will take 3-5 years to complete.

As the mayoral race enters its final few days, there’s no doubt who the biggest winner is in fund-raising: Mike Rawlings has raised (and spent) about $2.2 million in the election and runoff, while David Kunkle has raised $242,000 and spent $202,000, according to the latest election filings reported in the DMN.

Early voting for the Saturday election ends today. Early reports indicated an overall turnout of about 12 percent is projected.

And if you’re still undecided, don’t forget about our video discussion with both candidates:

Part 1 – Calatrava bridge, World-Class City & the AAC

Part 2 – Neighborhood development

Part 3 – Budget specifics, police and Farmers Market

Part 4 – Public libraries, art and economic development

Part 5 – Favorite restaurants, robo-calls and “what if you lose?”