Kidd Springs Park pool opens June 2 for the final season in its current form. A $4.5-million renovation is expected to begin in late fall or early next year. When it’s finished, by summer 2020, Kidd Springs will have a six-lane lap pool and a separate pool with flume slides and a jungle gym, plus a 3,000-square-foot bathhouse with showers and dressing rooms. Shoreline and dam improvements at the Kidd Springs lake are nearing completion. 

The luxury of Dallas’ bulk and trash collection practices could come to an end soon. Currently the city’s sanitation department will pick up almost anything residents put on the curb during monthly combined bulk and brush days. Dallas City Council on June 6 will consider a new system that would cut bulky trash pick up to four times a year but also result in citywide brush and yard waste recycling. Leaves and yard clippings, picked up monthly, would have to be bagged in paper or other compostable yard bags, no plastic. The city also plans to improve its on-demand bulky trash pickup service, where residents can get estimates by phone or online and be charged on their water bills. Besides that, more bulky trash drop-off centers could be added. Changing the system could eventually save the city as much as $1 million a year, but more important, it will keep tons of trash out of the city-owned McCommas Bluff Landfill. As much as 90,000 tons of brush and yard waste could be diverted from the landfill every year. Those materials could be turned into mulch that’s given away to Dallas residents.

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It’s no longer free to ride the Oak Cliff streetcar. City Council in April approved creating a $1 fee to ride each way. Dallas Area Rapid Transit thinks the fare will bring in about $133,000 a year in revenue; the streetcar costs about $2.1 million a year to operate. But the decision to create a fare was about fairness to all transit riders in Dallas, not profit.

The Coombs Creek Trail will reach from Beckley Avenue to Bahama Drive in the next couple of years. The Dallas City Council recently approved spending $7.2 million to bring the Kessler Park trail to Beckley Avenue and the Interstate 30 pedestrian bridge. Another $2.2 million will go to extending the trail from Hampton at Plymouth up to Fort Worth Avenue at Bahama Drive. That project, connecting the trail from Hampton Road to Fort Worth Avenue, will create bike lanes on Bahama between Plymouth and Fort Worth Avenue and along Fort Worth Avenue from Bahama to Interstate 30. Sidewalks will be widened along Bahama and the trail will be extended along Plymouth from Hampton to Bahama. It is funded 80 percent from regional toll revenue funds and 20 percent from the Fort Worth Avenue TIF fund. Construction on that part could begin in March 2019 and be completed in September 2019. The project to bring the trail about 1.5 miles from Kessler Parkway to the Interstate 30 pedestrian bridge will include building a 12-foot-wide trail. This Kessler Park part of the project could begin in July 2020, with construction taking about a 10 months