Turkey's done!

The FW Weekly's annual Turkey awards are out.  What are we thankful for this year?  The FW Weekly and most of their Turkey awards.  WHO wasn't on the list that you wanted to see?

Here are a few highlights, don't miss them all at the FW Weekly!

That’s right, folks. From mostly the same crew that’s been laying eggs in this town and around Texas for awhile now has come another year of greed, wrongheadedness, corporate butt-smooching, and just plain refusal to listen to the people. And next year, it seems, is going to be way too much like the last one, only more so. Maybe they ought to call this edition of the Weekly the Groundhog Awards instead of the Turkeys.

This year’s sweepstakes award, to Fort Worth schools superintendent Melody Johnson and her minions, should be cast in brass. What else do you call it when they send a guy out to accept complaints from the troops and then, when he discovers a laundry list of illegal and tawdry activities, fire him –– even though almost all of the charges that he brought forward proved to be true? The recent firing of that whistleblower, former Arlington Heights assistant principal Joe Palazzolo, is just part of the district’s campaign to cover up one of the most dishonorable and salacious scandals in the district’s history. What should be as embarrassing to district voters is the fact that Johnson got six board members to go along with the firing.

Take a good look at Fort Worth City Council members, city budgeters, City Manager Dale Fisseler, Mayor Mike Moncrief, and all of the other mostly middle-aged, middle-class, white bureaucrats who determine how the city spends its money. Now think back in time a few decades. Imagine them as children, ecstatic about enjoying a day at the local pool, paddling around with smiles on their little faces. It’s true — children’s favorite memories often involve swimming at a public pool on a hot summer day. (OK, Little Lord Moncrief probably had a heated pool in his bedroom.) And yet those same bureaucrats whose innocent pleasures were provided, way back when, by city taxes, are now ready, willing, and able to close down every swimming pool in town to save money. In honor of Thanksgiving, let’s fill one of those abandoned pools with boiling water, throw Moncrief, Fisseler, and all the other heartless budgeteers in it, add sliced carrots and celery, a dash of salt, and serve up some curmudgeon soup. Just be sure to wait 30 minutes after eating to go swimming –– if you can find a pool.

A floating turkey carcass goes out to Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners for laying a natural gas pipeline along one side of Mary Kelleher’s 12-acre property line on Randol Mill Road that raised the ground level several inches and turned Kelleher’s property into a lake when the remnants of Hurricane Hermine flooded the Trinity River in September. Kelleher, who has a petting zoo on the property, lost an alpaca, two rams, a lamb, and several other animals in the flooding.

The problem is that the 30-inch pipeline is not buried deeply enough, so that it blocks the path by which water formerly drained from Kelleher’s property, in the Trinity flood plain. Worse, Enterprise denies there is a problem, even though the ground elevation difference is visible to even a casual passerby.