The top local stories this evening from KERA News:
The second highest-ranking elected official in Dallas has pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and tax evasion charges.
Dwaine Caraway has been the Dallas mayor pro tem and long-time City Hall fixture. He resigned from the city council this morning, effective immediately.
Documents filed in federal court show Caraway accepted about $450,000 in kickbacks and bribes in exchange for votes.
Those votes benefitted Force Multiplier Solutions, a school bus camera company at the center of a scandal at Dallas County Schools, the now-defunct bus agency.
"Today is a day of both reckoning and reconciliation for the city of Dallas and its citizens,” U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox said. “I am pleased to announce a major victory in the battle against public corruption."
Caraway is scheduled to be sentenced in December. He could serve up to seven years in federal prison.
“Other than my family and God, there is nothing I love more than the City of Dallas,” said Caraway in his resignation letter. “It is time to remove the dark cloud that my actions have brought upon our city.”
Mayor Mike Rawlings said in a statement that he’s saddened by the news.
“I appreciate that [Caraway] is admitting his crimes and sparing the city what could have been a drawn out legal battle,” he wrote.
Other stories this evening:
- It might seem like the conversation about climate change is fairly new. But scientists have been warning the U.S. government about the consequences of a warming Earth since the 1960s. Nathaniel Rich is writer-at-large for The New York Times magazine and author of article "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” Today on Think, he talked with Krys Boyd about why we've been thinking about the issue all wrong.
- The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth has two new shows that are flip sides of the same coin. That coin is the American West. One exhibition features the Wild West as showbiz, and the other looks at how the West is lived now by Native Americans. For this week's Art & Seek Spotlight, Jerome Weeks talked with Amon Carter curator Maggie Adler about connecting history to the present.
You can listen to North Texas stories weekdays at 8:22 a.m. and 6:20 p.m. on KERA 90.1 FM.
