What a Newspaper Should Be

A letter to the Fort Worth Weekly about Betty Brink’s passing, ends up telling you what a newspaper should be.

Kudos to the Weekly for being a real “news” paper.  The residents of Tarrant County salute you.  You too, Mrs.Brink.....

To the editor: I’ve read Betty Brink’s obituary a half-dozen times, and it’s hard to believe she’s gone. I can’t say enough about what a woman I never actually met meant to me.

My only regret is that I discovered Betty very late. She was on the cover of the Weekly, carrying on about the mayor’s desire to put the whole town of Handley at risk by mowing down an old roadside motel using a new method, unproven and untested, for asbestos abatement. Brink outed him, and the resulting furor ended his little effort to test the “Fort Worth method” on the people of Handley.

To say that Betty was the face of the Weekly is not incorrect. After that story, if there was a cover piece with Betty at the keys, I’d pick it up and read it, no matter what it was about. She loved outing corrupt government, public waste, and outrageous behavior by elected folks, usually subjects that had been largely left untouched. Mike Moncrief hated her and at one time told the city council that any employee found to be communicating with the Weekly would be fired. It didn’t have any effect.

Amazingly, the stuff she wrote about never seemed to be of interest to the local daily. She brought me to the newspaper at age 40, when I’d never been interested in it before. As I began to read other alternative papers and other dailies, I began to have a distinct opinion about Fort Worth Weekly: It’s like no other paper out there. They’ll tell you the rest of the story, about things nobody else seems to want to give space to. And it’s not yellow journalism at all. It’s added-value journalism, from writers like Betty who know where to find the bad apples.

I will miss Betty forever. We can’t replace someone like that, born and raised here with a voice that resounds through the community like an air raid siren. You have to build people like that, and they must have a natural desire to do that kind of work. I never expected to find the Weekly’s kind of quality in an “arts and entertainment” paper full of sex ads in the back. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Chris M. Waring, Hurst

A moment of silence...

For Miss Betty.  Our hearts go out to her family and her Fort Worth Weekly family.  We'll be looking forward to their cover story and we'll be missing those done by Brink.

Rest in Peace.

In due time...

Betty Brink may be writing another story about buildings on the Trinity River in Fort Worth that will sound hauntingly familiar to the one in the Fort Worth Weekly this week.

This one is about the Tarrant County College Trinity River campus and its cost overruns and backroom dealings.  Change the names, though the game remains the same.

We can't wait to read all about it.

Officially known as the Trinity River East Campus, it cost taxpayers a staggering $1,476 per square foot to build — more than three times what experienced real estate executives say such a facility should have cost. 

However, troubling questions remain about the hiring and performance of the members of that team. Some TCC critics — including some of the same citizen watchdogs who ferreted out problems with the downtown project in the past — are worried by what they see as more layers of expensive oversight being added without clear delineation of duties. One consultant, who has been paid more than $800,000, was hired without the college board signing off on his contract and despite the fact that his firm had been created only a month earlier with Tarrant County College District his only client.

Those ranged from disregard of historical preservation concerns to huge cost overruns, delays, lack of key permits, opposition from downtown leaders, and questions about the design of the northern section of the project that would have been built in part on the river levees.

In a March memo to Petty, Sewell concluded that the cost overruns and long delays were caused by a “culture of complacency … established years ago” coupled with an “attitude of just ‘rubber-stamping’ cost-related items.”

”The campus is very impressive,” Poulson said. “But I guess that’s easy to do when you have unlimited funds, no budget, and no one asking questions.”