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“Thank you Connor McDavid,” the message began, “for saving us from more Dallas tyranny.”

A D.C.-based friend of mine sent that in the group chat for a fantasy football league we’re in after the Edmonton Oilers tied their series with the Stars at two games apiece. This was more or less around the time a hoops-inclined pal out in Phoenix delivered a vaguely threatening, mostly bummed out, “If your city’s basketball team wins right after your city’s baseball team wins …” And when two Angelenos I know were flummoxed at the prospect of the Stars and Mavericks simultaneously hosting their respective sport’s finals in the same building.

It’s a safe bet that all of those people, like plenty of you, noticed that viral stat making the rounds about the minuscule number of days since three of the four major men’s professional teams reached a conference finals, which underscored the Cowboys’ futility by emphasizing how dominant the Rangers, Mavericks, and Stars have been over the last nine months. Google could have told you that, of course, just as it could have told you that the trio raised its total number of conference finals appearances by nearly a quarter during the most recent seasons. When you expand the scope to include the Wings and FC Dallas, the last calendar year marks the first time all six local teams made the playoffs. If the Mavericks upset the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals, North Texas will hold multiple championships simultaneously for the first time ever.

But it is one thing to understand those factoids and quite another to embrace the implication: we are living through the greatest sports moment in Dallas history.

Fire Chief Gets Promotion. Dallas Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert said Tuesday she appointed  Dallas Fire-Rescue Chief Dominique Artis as the city’s new Chief of Public Safety, which makes him City Hall’s overseer of the police and fire departments, municipal courts, the marshals, the Office of Emergency Management, and the Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions. Those departments were previously under then-Deputy City Manager Jon Fortune, who is leaving to work under former City Manager T.C. Broadnax in Austin.

Dallas Firefighters Pull Man From White Rock Creek. Dallas Fire-Rescue says they responded after someone called 911 about a man in the creek yelling for help. He allegedly told DART police that he got into a fight near a station in Lake Highlands, and someone threw him into the creek. DART is investigating and says surveillance cameras don’t corroborate the story.

Oh. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that if Texas’ power grid had been connected to the rest of the country during the 2021 winter storm, 80 percent of the blackouts ordered by ERCOT could have been avoided. 

Enjoy This Dumb, Hot, Dry Weather. We got a lot of rain last month. (Almost 8 inches at DFW International Airport and almost 10 at Dallas Love Field.) We got even more last week and over the weekend. More storms are predicted for the weekend, so enjoy today and Friday, which will be dry but stupidly hot. Also, enjoy the big dumb mosquitos that are coming.

Four Day Weekend, one of Sundance Square’s most popular legacy tenants, is losing its lease.

The comedy company has hosted its signature improv and sketch comedy shows from its Houston Street home in downtown Fort Worth for the last 26 years. However, David Wilk, one of its founding members, confirmed on social media that the space’s lease with Sundance Square will not be renewed and they must vacate the premises by the end of July. 

“I heard a rumor in the back halls of the theater,” Wilk says. “I ran into a manager at the Reata [Restaurant] and I hear, ‘Hey man, sorry to hear you’re going too.’” 

Reata had served Texas cuisine from its impressive dining room just down the street since 1996. Last year, its owners said it couldn’t come to an agreement with the landlord and would allow its lease to expire. Wilk made a quick phone call to Sundance Square Management, which confirmed the bad news. He says he received no reason for the decision to not renew the comedy troupe’s lease. The landlord did not respond to multiple requests for comment from D Magazine.

“We are at an 86 percent sellout rate for 2024 and we’ve paid our rent on time every month for 26 years with the exception of the pandemic, but we were caught up in the full first week we were open,” Wilk says. “I have no idea what they’re doing. I just know we’re not part of the plan.” 

Did you decamp to a hotel for the week while the power was out? Are you facing large repairs because of storm damage? Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said Wednesday that the Biden administration has added Dallas County to the presidential disaster declaration, which means residents now have access to FEMA dollars to offset some storm-related spending.

Gov. Greg Abbott last week announced that he expanded an active state disaster declaration to include Dallas and four other counties after the devastating winds and rain following Memorial Day.

FEMA’s Individual Assistance program could reimburse the costs of home repairs, temporary housing, uninsured or underinsured property loss, legal services, disaster-related unemployment assistance, and other expenses. To apply, go to disasterassistance.gov, download the FEMA app, or call 800-621-3362.

I own two shotguns. Even if I do it infrequently and poorly, I enjoy sporting clays. Elm Fork is a great facility. And I have a friend who owns multiple handguns. I’ve shot with him on a range. Dig it. What I’m saying is: I like guns.

But I have no use for the NRA. It’s an evil organization. I’m for gun control. No assault weapons. I know I’m glossing over the issue. It’s complicated. But now you know roughly where I stand, which is important context for what I’m going to say:

The city of Dallas has failed its citizens. It doesn’t matter where you stand on the gun issue. If an organization comes to Dallas and uses our city-owned convention center, and if a news organization asks about the financial details of that convention center rental, then the city should turn over its records. Plain and simple.

KERA asked for the numbers, and the city stonewalled. Now we know that the NRA got a $482,000 discount on its rental of the convention center and a $445,000 subsidy paid by Visit Dallas. In the grand scheme, the money isn’t that important. The bigger issue is that the city tried to hide the details of the contract, fighting KERA’s open records request.

Props to KERA for bringing this to light. Shame on the city of Dallas for operating like a podunk.

Dallas-based Stock Exchange Gains Momentum. “Dozens of individual investors” have ponied up a total of $120 million to start the Texas Stock Exchange, an economic priority of Gov. Greg Abbott. It could begin trading in late 2025. The new venue for going public would target companies in the southeast portion of the country, but would not have a trading floor. Plans are for executive offices and a data center, as well as a downtown location “which will serve as the physical front of the electronic exchange.”

Emerald Ash Borer Spreads Across North Texas. The invasive beetle was found last month in the Great Trinity Forest and has now been identified in Collin, Franklin, Johnson, and Red River counties. The Texas A&M Forest Service confirmed the samples and expressed concern about the ash tree populations in the northern part of the state. The beetle lays its eggs in the tree bark, then its larvae eat up the tree’s tissue for water, gradually killing it. If allowed to proliferate, A&M forestry experts say the beetle could wipe out the ash tree population.

The Rain Just Won’t Stop. That’s a little misleading. The storms picked up again overnight and continue into the morning, but this afternoon will finally dry out. Thursday and Friday don’t have rain the forecast, and coverage won’t be widespread over the weekend. There are about 4,000 people without power in North Texas, with about half in Dallas County. Most of Oncor’s outages look east of us, particularly in Tyler.

A week after an early-morning storm wiped out electricity for more than 650,000 North Texas customers, Oncor is still working on restoring power across North Texas. Additional storms have followed, complicating an already complicated situation. While at its height Dallas County had more than 356,000 households without power, that number has dwindled to a little more than 1,000, according to the energy provider’s outage map.

For most of Dallas, power was restored by Friday night. At the Erickson house, our first inkling we had power was the email the fancy thermostat sent us to let us know our house was hot and humid. (We didn’t know because we were at a hotel.) By Sunday, I was responding to readers and neighbors who were having problems reporting their outages to Oncor. They were being told by its automated system that their power had been restored. They weren’t getting answers, so I reached out to my contact at Oncor, who was able to reassure most of them that they were scheduled for a crew that afternoon.

BNSF Railway Sues City of Gunter. The Fort Worth-based train company wants to build a 900-acre logistics center in the small town north of Celina. Gunter denied BNSF’s plat application for the project, so now it goes to court.

Scarborough Renaissance Festival Is Not on HBO. There’s a new series on HBO about a renaissance festival. Apparently it’s a little spicy. So the Scarborough folks want everyone to know that the TV show centers on the Texas Renaissance Festival, in Houston, which is totally different from the Scarborough Renaissance Festival, which wrapped up May 27 in Waxahachie. All clear?

Eaglet Returns Home. That baby bird that got blown out of its nest near White Rock Lake? It was returned to its parents, and Laura Johnson, with the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center, said things are “looking positive.”

Power Not Fully Back. As of yesterday afternoon, 2,300 Dallas County customers were still without power.

Author Julia Heaberlin is no longer “a writer hiding in plain sight,” as we described her in 2018. She’d published her fourth book back then, and last month she published her sixth. Night Will Find You is a West Texas-set mystery that, she says, “explores that space between fact-based science and unexplained phenomena through a single character.” It features an Alex Jones-esque figure and its narrative was informed by all the questions her astrophysicist cousin graciously answered for her, including, “Do you believe in God?”

Fox has optioned it, seeing a possible multi-season series that follows the protagonist, the 28-year-old astrophysicist Vivvy Bouchet. The Dallas Morning News loved it, writing that her prose “walks the line between plain speech and poetry.” She’s on a roll, and she told us all about it on a rare return visit to EarBurner.

So, after all this momentum, why won’t the New York Times review the thing? Listen below, or on any of the streaming apps you have on your phone. Just for fun, here’s the last time Heaberlin was in our pages, in 2020, profiling an ocularist—“The Man Who Paints Souls.”

Stars Eliminated. They got one goal in the third period, but couldn’t get a second to even it up. So Edmonton advances to the Stanley Cup Final and the dream of Dallas holding three championships at one time dies. Now we just will (hopefully) have to settle for two. At least all the last-time-each-team-played-in-a-conference-final memes remain true and extremely embarrassing for Jerry Jones and the Cowboys. Anyway, more from the StrongSide gang soon.

More Harsh Weather. There was flooding and hail Sunday and we should see at least a little more rain today. Looking better later this week, but I think I speak for everyone in saying I am over it. Not “bring on 100-degree days for the foreseeable future” over it. Just give me a few days of not having to worry one way or another. Give the people who had to endure almost a full week without power (some still dealing with that) and those still dealing with damage from trees and debris a break.

At Least We Were Treated to Mammatus Clouds. Hopefully you got a good chance to see the cotton-ball sky yesterday after the storms.

After the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge was built, it took about five years for the property tax hikes to make it over the Trinity and into West Dallas.

In 2017, the Dallas Central Appraisal District began notifying homeowners in the 75212 ZIP code that their homes were immediately worth a lot more. Suddenly 1940s-era, two-bed, one-bathroom homes no larger than 1,200 square feet had doubled in value. By 2022, many had doubled again.

James Armstrong is the CEO of Builders of Hope, a nonprofit home builder and housing policy advocate that focuses on West Dallas, Pleasant Grove, South Dallas, and southern Dallas. He grew up in this neighborhood, and he has watched longtime residents face difficult decisions to sell or risk being priced out because of these tax increases.

The organization has launched a fund for homeowners to offset the cost of rising property taxes. It will begin as a pilot with $150,000, money provided by an assortment of partners that includes the Dallas Foundation; the Trinity Park Conservancy, which is building the Harold Simmons Park just west of the Trinity River levees; JPMorgan Chase; and the Lukirain Partners Fund, which is managed by the Dallas Foundation.

The Builders of Hope fund will be administered by the Wesley-Rankin Community Center, a nonprofit that has been active in the community for well over a century. The goal is to raise $1 million in the coming years, ideally with funding from the deep-pocketed investors and developers who are building in West Dallas.

“When the middle to upper class feel the pressure, they have options,” Armstrong says. “But the single mother in West Dallas, she has to move away and out. And then she doesn’t come back.”

Perhaps no other neighborhood in the city has seen the wild swing of development like West Dallas has over the last decade. The bridge opened in 2012. But three North Dallas investors and entrepreneurs had spent the prior eight years assembling 80 acres of land that abutted the working-class neighborhoods just over the river from downtown. Their group, called West Dallas Investments, built the Trinity Groves “restaurant incubator” adjacent to the La Bajada neighborhood. Next came a long row of luxury apartment buildings along Singleton Boulevard. The average price of a home went from $75,325 in 2016 to $239,722 in 2023, which was the fifth-highest jump in the state, according to a recent analysis of Zillow data.