Across the Calatrava, David Jensen Learns Just How Dirty a Fight with Dallas City Hall Can Get
“The city calls its plan for street improvements in West Dallas “The Three-Hole Punch.” But for David Jensen, who owns a warehouse on those streets, it’s a sucker punch.
Three years ago Jensen, a 62-year-old Harley-riding semi-retired fine-art handler, started seeing plans for a major rebuilding of the streets all around his small warehouse at Herbert and Bedford streets, four blocks west of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. He lives in the 52-year-old structure and had planned on spending his golden years there. The new street maps caught his eye.
“Ever since I started seeing these plans,” he says, “I have been asking people to keep me in the loop.”
Nobody kept him in the loop. There was no loop. Even though the public process prescribed by law for the closing and realignment of streets has never been launched, Jensen already has a bureaucratic knife in his back — a shiv with no prints.
That’s how City Hall rolls.
This is a deal that only looks complicated because somebody wants it to look complicated. It’s not. It’s a simple squeeze-play.
The city says it wants to widen Herbert Street, which runs along the side of Jensen’s building. They also want to move it about 20 feet west, closer to Jensen. Wider plus closer means Jensen is toast. That guts his building from stem to stern.
Even though none of the necessary legal authorization for the street widening has been granted by the City Council, construction will begin soon on a project that will seal Jensen’s doom. It’s already a done deal. Jensen just wasn’t in on it. In fact he was kept out of it. Now he’s taking punches with his hands tied behind his back.
The major developer across the street from him is West Dallas Investments (Phil Romano, Butch McGregor, Stuart Fitts), a favorite of City Hall because they are bringing a hundred million dollars in high-style, mixed-use investment to a disused industrial desert at the foot of the new Calatrava show-bridge. Why wouldn’t City Hall like them?”
Schutze, Jim. Dallas Observer 16 February 2015.
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