Federal Judge Unseals Suit That Asks: Did Dallas Screw HUD Out of Hundreds of Millions?
By Jim Schutze Wed., Nov. 16 2011
On June 10, 2010, I wrote a column for the newspaper about an official complaint brought to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by two Dallas developers alleging a decades-old pattern of racial discrimination and fraud by the city of Dallas, the county and other local entities against the federal government. Just now that complaint has re-emerged publicly in the form of a federal “false claims” lawsuit seeking what could be billions of dollars in damages.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor unsealed the file on this suit — which follows — in an order he signed two days ago, even though his own administrator and the U.S. District Clerk were still insisting yesterday the suit was under seal.
Weird. But take a look at this deal, and you can see why even the judge might treat it as a rogue nuclear device.
The lawsuit, developed by the nation’s top false claims law firm in D.C., goes straight at the issue of race in the city’s history, claiming that officials here have taken hundreds of millions in federal dollars designed to reduce segregation while using the money to achieve the opposite end.
I sent a copy of it to the city, in case they still thought it was sealed too, and asked them to comment. Haven’t heard back yet. It has immediate national implications. If Dallas takes a bullet on this, cities and counties all over the country will probably come into the same cross-hairs.
The complaint is 61 pages of dense reading but not entirely without some chuckles. For example, in filing legally required documentation of local housing patterns by race in local cities and communities over the years, local officials repeatedly forgot to include two communities.
