02/09/2012

Putting a muzzle on political speech
We weren’t there, so we can’t know to what degree Denton County residents were distracted, inconvenienced, annoyed or even frightened last month by the followers of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche in front of the Horn Government Center on East McKinney Street.

02/08/2012

One last song for Ema Ruth Russell
Ema Ruth Russell moved to Denton as a young girl and spent most of the rest of her life bringing music and beauty to this good town.

02/07/2012

A great project; a bad process
Building a city-owned cogeneration power plant to serve industries near the Denton Airport is a forward-thinking idea that we have already endorsed in this space. Slipping around the voters to get it done was a misguided tactic that could further erode the already deteriorating confidence that Denton residents have in their leaders. We wish the city had found another way to get this project done.

02/06/2012

A hell of a way to run a stage line
Almost everyone we know has a gripe — justifiable or not — about being jerked around by a bank at one time or another. About 8,500 employees of the University of North Texas just got another story to tell.

02/04/2012

The council takes decisive action
The latest news to come out of City Hall is also extremely good news: The City Council has plans to fight the problem of deteriorating city streets in both the short and long term.

02/03/2012

It’s time for a conference center
Not quite three years ago, a representative from a development company told Denton officials that the economy had scuttled an ambitious plan to build a hotel and convention center on the University of North Texas campus. Now that same man is back with a similar plan, but the economy has improved enough to change the picture.

Hard times pile up in Wellington Trace
When it rains, it pours, the saying goes, and the water in the Wellington Trace subdivision is 5 feet high and rising.

02/02/2012

A new college; a new concept
The University of North Texas has chosen a leader for its new College of Pharmacy at the UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth, and he already knows where the cafeteria is.

02/01/2012

Four for the future at TWU
The plans by four students receiving scholarships from the 2012 Virginia Chandler Dykes Leadership Award program at Texas Woman’s University are heartening and indicative of the import of education and health to our society.

01/31/2012

Giving the A-train a sporting chance
The Denton County Transportation Authority board did the right thing last week in letting the trial period for Friday night A-train service run its course. Prospects for the Friday evening schedule aren’t good, but the DCTA signed on for a year’s trial period, and it’s only fair to stick to the schedule before pulling the plug.

01/30/2012

Other Voices: School lunch: Eat this, not that
To paraphrase The Simpsons, cheeseburgers are really more of a weekend thing. Which is why we’re glad that some Houston-area school districts are already starting to follow new federal requirements for school lunches, replacing often tasty but generally unhealthy foods with more nutritious alternatives.

01/28/2012

A loss, an opportunity
A sense of dread filled the hearts of many onlookers Thursday morning as they stared at the billowing black smoke rising into the sky above Selwyn College Preparatory School.

Other voices: Dublin Dr Pepper myths
However you might feel about cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in your soft drinks, the end of Dublin Dr Pepper recently yields two important truths. First, the free-market system isn’t always so pretty or so neat. Secondly, details have an inconvenient way of scattering to the four winds the tenuous mystique surrounding any beloved product.

01/27/2012

Let us now praise loyal schoolmen
The Denton school board has offered a new three-year contract to longtime Superintendent Ray Braswell, and Braswell says he’ll accept it. That’s good news for Denton and its schoolchildren, not to mention the teachers and other district employees.

01/26/2012

Public decisions should be justified
It is our understanding that John Siegmund, a member of Denton’s official gas drilling task force, has enjoyed a distinguished career as a petroleum engineer working in the private sector. That may be why his comment at a meeting of the task force this week sounded so inappropriate coming from a member of a body mandated to serve public, rather than private, interests.

01/25/2012

Denton’s new lines of communication online
In this particular corner of the page, we have oft felt compelled to point out the errors of city officials’ ways. Today, we’re more inclined to suggest an “atta town” for their new virtual town hall.

01/24/2012

Safety tips for the Facebook generation
Many of us may remember a communication problem once referred to as the “generation gap.” Coined during a time of rapid social change nearly half a century ago, the term was used to describe the lack of understanding that often existed between young people and their parents.

01/23/2012

The manipulators strike again
We didn’t really need another reason to be leery of special taxing districts and the developers who manipulate them to their advantage, but we got one Sunday when we read about the plight of Wellington Trace and the residents who live there.

01/21/2012

Another name on the honor roll
We have had occasion in recent weeks to depose on a couple of area school districts and the way they have responded to the unenviable task of budgeting in hard economic times.

01/20/2012

Higher education in a service economy
Creating quality leisure time takes a lot of skill and training, and the University of North Texas has been providing it for years in its School of Merchandising and Hospitality Management. So diligent has the school been in upgrading its programs and attracting superior students that it has morphed into a full college at the university — the College of Merchandising, Hospitality and Tourism.

Perry: Hoist with his own petard
Gov. Rick Perry has looked over the wall at the Alamo, counted all those enemy soldiers and jumped back behind that line in the sand. At a press conference Thursday morning in North Charleston, S.C., Our Boy announced that he leaving the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

01/19/2012

Our flying Pioneers rekindle an old crush
Our favorite area sports team began a new season with a victory last Saturday, and they did it without donning a helmet, swinging a bat or dribbling a basketball.

01/18/2012

The Krum board has the right idea
The members of the Krum school board obviously like their superintendent, Mike Davis. At a meeting earlier this month they voted to extend his contract by a full year, to June 2015.

01/17/2012

Snake bit and a little tone deaf
We have never lived with a start-up commuter rail system before, so we have no way of knowing what the norm is for accidents involving a brand-new railroad. Six in a little more than six months sounds high to us, though.

A tumultuous life becomes history
It is only now, 44 years after he was shot to death as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel, that we are beginning to view the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from a historical rather than an emotional perspective.

01/14/2012

Some old wine in a new bottle
A new swain has come calling on the University of North Texas and the city of Denton, and is plying them with Champagne. The bottle is different, but its contents seem pretty much the same as that offered up by a previous gentleman caller. Interestingly enough, the same matchmaker is at work trying to stir up a little romance.

Setting priorities in education
We are hesitant to add to the burdens of those who run our public school districts. They have enough to endure from the Texas Legislature; they don’t need half-baked criticism from the likes of us. But we were taken aback on Thursday, when we read that the Sanger school board had unanimously agreed to raise the annual salary of the district’s superintendent, Kent Crutsinger, by more than 13 percent.

01/13/2012

It’s time for a drilling moratorium
A majority of the Denton City Council seems poised to pass a moratorium on new gas well drilling and production permits, and we hope the council does it — soon.

01/12/2012

Recession? What recession?
Happy days are indeed here again for three of Denton’s most highly paid officials, thanks to the largesse of the City Council. City Manager George Campbell, City Attorney Anita Burgess and Municipal Court Judge Robin Ramsay all had their annual salaries bumped by 2 percent Tuesday night by a unanimous consent-agenda vote of the council.

01/11/2012

Other Voices: Carefully prune defense budget
The federal government has a big problem with spending more than it takes in, and closing the gap is going to get harder in the coming years. So it’s reasonable for President Barack Obama to conclude that, along with other parts of the government, the Pentagon is going to have to trim down. Done carefully and gradually, the downsizing can be done without jeopardizing national security.

11/29/2011

Help in obeying a bothersome law
We are not a big fan of Senate Bill 14, the state’s new voter photo ID law. There’s nothing inherently wrong with its premise, but it seeks to solve a nonexistent problem, and it will make voting more difficult for hundreds of thousands of otherwise qualified Texans.

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