#tarrant — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #tarrant, aggregated by home.social.
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DART celebrates Silver Line opening with concert, free rides, more 🚋 🛬
New light rail line will connect seven cities with DFW International Airport, “marking a new era of transit” in the region, officials say
🆓🔗: https://archive.ph/NbolV
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/transportation/2025/09/13/grand-opening-of-dart-silver-line-in-north-texas-set-for-late-october/#ZachariaReports #DFW #Dallas #Rail #Transit #DART #SilverLine #Texas #Plano #Richardson #Carrollton #Addison #Grapevine #Coppell #Collin #Tarrant #MassTransit #DFWAirport
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Baseball-sized hail incoming. That's fun. Actually managed to get both cars in the garage at least.
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Yay! In theory, we get decision "letters" (emails) on Friday indicating whether or not we've gotten in to the #nursing program. Fingers crossed that I have.
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A solid 24-hour sprint later -- I had to wrangle data from tables in PDFs to get a solid baseline to work with (#csv here: https://pastebin.com/JGLxQMbT) -- and I've got all of the polling stations for tomorrow's #election in Tarrant county mapped out in #osm #OpenStreetMap :D
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/23ok
I experimented a bit within the polling_station:* namespace. Thinking I might be settling into a pattern, at least for #Texas. I dunno if I want to build up explicit relations between polling places and their (typical) associated buildings/areas or not. So for now, I chucked the relation data in a tag instead.
Ideally, future elections won't be such a pain to get bootstrapped; most polling stations tend to stay the same across elections.
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Huh. That's a pretty hyperlocal story for me, seeing as I live in Tarrant county.
>After accusing the sheriff’s office of violating the law last fall in light of Bolts’ reporting, Texas jail regulators now say there’s nothing they can do about the failure to commission independent investigations into deaths in jail custody, which have spiked on Waybourn’s watch. At least 70 people have died in jail custody since the sheriff took office in 2017, compared to 25 deaths in the eight years prior.
A near-tripling in the death rate is awful. Tarrant county certainly hasn't tripled its population since 2017.
>After the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office listed the Fort Worth Police Department as the agency looking into jail deaths, Bolts filed a public records request last year seeking Fort Worth police investigations into county jail deaths. Last October, the department said it had no records of those investigations, with a Fort Worth police spokesperson saying, “I’m told that the Tarrant County Sheriff Department investigates those.”
The notion that FWPD could serve as an impartial investigator of its county-level co-party is itself tenuous. The Thin Blue Line protects itself, and even getting information out of them through Texas' Public Information Act is a pain.
>In one case involving a death ruled to be from “natural” causes that occurred in the fall of 2022, the police department apparently didn’t send its review letter to the sheriff’s office until this month, with the letter from a Fort Worth detective dated April 14, 2025 concluding that the sheriff’s office investigation was “consistent, thorough, and complete.”
I.e., once FWPD knew that Bolt was sniffing around, they scrambled to cover their asses.
>Brandon Wood, director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, said that he hadn’t been aware of Tarrant County’s failure to seek outside investigations into jail deaths until Bolts’ reporting last October—despite his agency being copied on emails from the sheriff’s office stating the Fort Worth Police Department would conduct an “independent review,” according to records Bolts obtained this month.
So even the regulators consider themselves members of the Thin Blue Line.
>One measure filed by state Representative David Lowe, a former corrections officer and Republican who represents Tarrant County, would create an advisory committee to review in-custody deaths and make recommendations to reduce preventable deaths, while also mandating a detailed and publicly available annual report on deaths that occurred in county jails. Another bill filed by Salman Bojani, a Democratic House member who also represents Tarrant County, would mandate that death investigation records be maintained as vital state records. Nicole Collier, another Democratic House member from Tarrant County, also filed a bill to clarify that the Texas jail commission must appoint a third party law enforcement agency to investigate jail deaths, and require information about those investigations be published on the commission’s website. Collier has said that the legislation was prompted by the failure to conduct independent investigations into Tarrant County jail deaths.
Guys. Guys! You're just piling reporting requirements on, not actually tackling the behaviour itself -__- You *already have* a committee dedicated to this effort, and it *is not working*. You *cannot* expect law enforcement, of any stripe, to investigate itself.
>In the years after the Sandra Bland Act required independent investigations for jail deaths, the Rangers conducted the bulk of them, including in Tarrant County. But that changed in 2021, after the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office hired the Ranger who investigated the deaths of many people in the county jail, including Myers. That same year, the sheriff’s office tapped the Fort Worth Police Department.
Case. In. Point.
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We were mostly showing our signs to passing cars and chanting. Many of the drivers were supportive. Just a few haters. Maybe 5 people in a pro-Trump counter-protest for about an hour. Considering that this county voted for Trump in 2024, 2020, and 2016, this was remarkably positive!
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Alrighty. Several hours later, and I have Tarrant County's updated early voting locations :D
Overpass-turbo query: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/21qx
Actual location info from county (can match up the numbers on the map to addresses): https://www.tarrantcountytx.gov/content/dam/main/elections/2025/0525/locations/0525_EV_Sched.pdf
And a reddit post in the FortWorth subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/FortWorth/comments/1jorg38/early_voting_locations_for_april_2025/
#reddit #pdf #OverpassTurbo #OSM #OpenStreetMap #OpenData #FortWorth #Tarrant #dfw #txpol #uspol
So far, I only have locations that serve (at least) as early voting centers. There are several more pages of day-of voting centers that I could conceivably add. I'm debating building a small, static, mobile website with #Leaflet to perhaps make a "show me my closest voting station" feature, and maybe a "schedule my voting time" feature that spits out an ical file or something. The opening hours are all there in the OSM data.
(Annoying sidenote: most college/university locations are either early vote only, election day only, or not open at all :()
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https://ballotverifier.tarrantcountytx.gov/
>The Ballot Verifier allows members of the general public to enjoy access to every single cast ballot in every Tarrant County election as far back as November 7, 2023.
Holy Fucking Shit that's fucking awesome! That's exactly the way it oughta be done! You can literally get PDF scans of the actual paper ballots, yo:
https://ballotverifier.tarrantcountytx.gov/ballot/9E2C70DF-7706-47AA-88ED-C871BB6F96F2
All you need in order to validate your own ballot is, presumably, that GUID in the URL. Sadly, it isn't in the QR code, at least not plainly/obviously. Having an easy way to confirm your ballot after-the-fact would be a big win for voter confidence.
I mean, *technically*, if you recorded your QR code prior to depositing the paper ballot (spoiler, I did :D), then you could, conceivably, download every ballot, scan every qr code, and then find *your* qr code in the pile to validate that your ballot was properly marked. But that would be a bunch more work.
With this data, conceivably, *anyone* can validate, from the *ballot level*, that the election was fairly counted.
You know what? I'mma do it for the upcoming May 2025 election.
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@Incognitim Don't wanna wait for Tarrant County to upload a map? Have no fear! I added the data to #OpenStreetMap #OSM and used #OverpassTurbo to plot it.
Query: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1R7e
#uspol #DFW #FortWorth #Tarrant #TarrantCounty #TarrantCo #GIS
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@Incognitim Want to know which location is closest? Too bad! The map is "coming soon":
https://www.tarrantcountytx.gov/en/elections/current-election-information.html
Incidentally, every TCC campus -- except its downtown location -- is on the early voting list:
https://www.tarrantcountytx.gov/content/dam/main/elections/2024/1124/locations/1124_EV_Sched.pdf
I'm sure that's an oversight though. Guess I gotta show up to Yet Another Meeting and give my rEprESenTAtiVeS a stern talkin' to.
#DFW #FortWorth #tx #Texas #Tarrant #TarrantCounty #TarrantCo
