Or just all of it. Every beautiful, rotten, wonderful, contaminated stretch of the land called Kleberg, where Carranza is president of the neighborhood association and crime watch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was my getaway, the country close enough to the city,\u201d the 62-year-old former Oak Cliff resident said as we sat Wednesday morning at his dining room table. \u201cPeaceful. Quiet. The slow-paced life. I thought.\u201d He laughed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Then he told me about the fire over the weekend that he feared would burn the seven head of cattle grazing the eight-acre pasture behind his home off Kleberg Road, where there\u2019s a monitoring well, a left over from when this was downstream from lead-contaminated Dal-Tile land<\/a>. Carranza at first thought it was just the usual random gunfire \u2014 which, out here, he said, sounds like a war zone, the unceasing pop-pop-pop of assault rifles. Then he saw the flames.<\/p>\n David Carranza lives two properties over from the salvage yard that was investigated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and sued by the city of Dallas. There are no open cases, but Dallas City Council member Lorie Blair said an investigation is taking place following Saturday night’s fire.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n A Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesperson told me later firefighters didn\u2019t think the cows were imperiled. But it did take them three hours \u2014 and an additional Dallas County tanker \u2014 to douse the blaze.\u00a0<\/p>\n This part of the city \u2014 and it is part of the city \u2014 has been the southeasternmost slice of Dallas since voters in both cities approved annexation in early 1978. Kleberg, where working farms sit alongside single-family homes, is but 15 miles southeast of Dallas City Hall, a 30-minute drive down C.F. Hawn Freeway from downtown in afternoon traffic. Some of this is city land; some, Dallas County property. Residents say they might as well be on the moon.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s perfect out here,\u201d Marla Hogarth said Wednesday morning as we stood in her driveway, peering over the pastureland that stretches toward a treeline hiding the creek that floods her land whenever it rains because it\u2019s filled with trash and animal remains.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cI just wish it weren\u2019t so \u2026\u201d She paused, looking up at the sky filling with rarely seen rain clouds. \u201cStressful. Why does it have to be so difficult?\u201d<\/p>\n Hogarth is Dallas City Council member Lorie Blair\u2019s appointee to the Citizen Homelessness Commission. She and her family moved here 11 years ago from New Hampshire, after time spent living in California and New Zealand. She said if she knew then what she knows now about\u00a0Kleberg, she never would have moved here.<\/p>\n It was the fire that brought me out to Kleberg for the first time in a long time \u2014 probably since the early 2000s, back when city staffers were prepping one of a number of Kleberg plans killing time on the city\u2019s website<\/a>. Over the weekend I\u2019d received a vexed text from Kathryn Guerra, chair of the city\u2019s Environmental Commission, who got her own tour of Kleberg just last Friday. That was the day before the GD Star Auto Salvage caught fire.<\/p>\n The Trust for Public Land plans to install a green space near this\u00a0stretch of Hickory Creek, where David Carranza explained Wednesday that these sewage pipes occasionally leak.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n \u201cResidents told me that they’re tired of the city\u2019s laws going unenforced and that they want the level of city services that other folks in the more central areas of the city enjoy,\u201d Guerra said later. \u201cDespite living in a rural part of the city, they still live in and pay taxes to the city of Dallas.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n City Hall is well aware of that salvage lot: In June 2024, the City Attorney\u2019s Office sued its numerous owners, claiming, among dozens of other alleged violations, that it was crushing cars \u2014 some stolen, according to Dallas police \u2014 without a certificate of occupancy on land zoned for residential and agricultural use.\u00a0<\/p>\n Worse still, said the city: \u201cThe Property has a waterway running through it, into which Defendants are depositing vehicle parts, tires, debris, and chemicals from vehicles.\u201d That waterway is called Hickory Creek, which flows into the Trinity River.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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