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Dallas Spending – Article from Melshire Member on Dallas News

The residents of the Melshire Estates neighborhood in northwest Dallas long ago abandoned all hope that the city’s ever going to plant that long-promised library along Forest Lane near the Dallas North Tollway. Intended to replace the cramped, aging Preston Royal Branch Library less than two miles away, it was sold to voters as part of the 2006 bond package. But that branch was snapped off long ago, then tossed into the wood chipper.

“It’s never going to happen,” Linda Vallala, president of the neighborhood’s HOA, told me Wednesday. “And we’ve all accepted that.”

But what they can’t accept is the giant patch of land set aside for the library that’s never going to happen — that block-long stretch of cracked concrete and dead grass between Quincy Lane and Nuestra Drive that, at 35 mph, looks like the world’s most depressing park. It’s been barren for almost eight years, ever since a bulldozer sent the Korean Young Nak Presbyterian Church to heaven.

I drive past it all the time, always forgetting it’s a lot the city hustled to buy for too many millions because it was allegedly such a steal. Never noticed until I pulled over Thursday morning that its two driveways are marked with no-trespassing signs affixed to thin sagging chains that couldn’t stop a Hot Wheel much less my Jeep.

City Hall can’t tell me exactly what it plans to do with the land, now that it’s dropped any pretense of ever building a library there or another one farther west on Forest, along Marsh Lane, where it was supposed to construct a Park Forest replacement branch until that, too, was quietly erased off the to-do list.

Read the rest of the article at Dallas News.

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