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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Stop, In the Name of Zamba
A cool little café opened up on the city’s North Side — finally. Café Zamba’s grand opening was delayed three times after vehicles ran through the façade. The café is located on a curve where North Main meets 20th Street. Late-night Stockyards patrons sometimes miss the curve but not the building. Owner Alex Floreschapa said concrete barriers once prevented such mishaps, but the city at some point removed them.
City traffic engineers say it’s a tough problem to fix. “Traffic laws say that, in a place like that, there are not supposed to be traffic obstructions that can cause further injury to people who have traffic accidents,” a city spokesman said. Huh? The city would rather have drunken motorists plow through a café storefront? Hell, why not remove all guardrails from the highway? (Static lovingly refers to them as guiderails, since they’ve kept the Static-mobile from plunging to a fiery grave more than once.)
Floreschapa wants the barriers replaced or says he’ll erect some himself, regardless of city logic. “I’m in a position now where I don’t care,” he said. “My dreams are here.”
In Idiocy We Trust
Haltom City might never have lived down its association with David Williams, who was the city’s DARE coordinator before becoming Tarrant County’s wackiest sheriff. But the little blue-collar city is erasing that memory by hiring even weirder people.
Texas Rangers busted a city jailer for sexually abusing female prisoners and said the problem was more widespread. The city faces a dozen civil lawsuits by women who say they were sexually abused or assaulted by the jail keyholders.
Municipal Judge “Maximum” Jack Byno did something right, though — he resigned, amid allegations that he was also a harasser. (But only after the city council “cleared” him of all charges.) Byno denied the accusations, but he’s still an arrogant tyrant who sent low-income single mothers to jail for a couple of unpaid traffic tickets or for truant kids, thus boosting the city’s revenues and giving him a platform for spewing moralistic rhetoric.
Add to these troubles an off-duty cop charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy, the sudden resignation of the police chief, and the arrest of a former police clerk for distributing confidential police files. Maybe the city should change its motto from “Proud and Progressive” to “Hell and Hole.”
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