By Amanda Casanova

A new Four Points by Sheraton will add more meeting space for conventions to come to the City, Council Members said at an April 9 meeting.

The six-story hotel site plan was unanimously approved by the Coppell City Council at the meeting. The hotel on Point West Boulevard will feature 157 rooms, a restaurant and more than 9,000 square feet of conference space.

“We have a lot of hotel properties come and go, and we’ve always wanted a conference center,” Council Member Bob Mahalik said. “This will be wonderful for the community … thanks to y’all and to planning. We welcome y’all to the community.”

In 2007, the Council approved a site plan for a six-story hotel on the five acres of land, but the proposed Double Tree hotel was never built. Then, in 2012, architects proposed two hotels and a conference center, but the plans changed to a single hotel when City Staff pointed out parking, landscaping and amenity concerns with the original plan.

“We applaud the developer for noting our concerns, making changes that reflect use for this property as envisioned by the Comprehensive Plan, and endeavoring to alter the hotel plan to provide adequate parking, landscaping, aesthetic elements, architectural design, among others,” the staff report said. “This revised proposal can be supported by staff.”

Four Points hotels are largely targeted toward conventions and business travelers. The Coppell hotel is set to open in the summer of 2015.

Representatives from the City of Irving were presented with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award during a ceremony this morning at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel in Baltimore, MD on April 8. The event, which is part of the 25th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference, was presided over by U.S. Commerce Deputy Secretary Rebecca Blank and Dr. Patrick Gallagher, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and Director of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Irving is only the second city, and the larger of the two, to receive the nation’s highest honor for performance excellence in the program’s 25-year history.

Following a videotaped congratulatory message from President Barack Obama, and before nearly 800 attendees, Irving City Manager Tommy Gonzalez and Human Resources Director and Chief Performance Officer Lynda Johnson accepted the Baldrige Award, the nation’s highest honor for performance excellence, on behalf of the city. They were joined by Mayor Beth Van Duyne, Councilwoman Rose Cannaday and Councilman Dennis Webb.

“Looking at your organization through the lens of the Baldrige criteria is a transformative process,” said Gonzalez. “All of the City’s employees worked toward a common goal, embracing a common vision, and I could not be more proud of them. Irving is a cleaner, safer and better city thanks to their hard work and commitment to excellence.”

In addition to accepting the award, Gonzalez and Johnson joined other representatives of Baldrige Award recipients – past and present – to deliver presentations at the Quest for Excellence Conference. 

Each year, the Quest for Excellence Conference allows Baldrige Award winners to share their stories, insights and strategies with hundreds of participants who are interested in starting their own Baldrige journey or who simply want to improve their companies by implementing performance excellence programs. Keynote sessions highlight elements of leadership and excellence, while breakout sessions are focused on the categories used by the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program to assess award applicants, such as strategic planning, customer and market focus, measurement, analysis and knowledge management, workforce focus and process management.

Also receiving awards and presenting at this year’s Quest for Excellence conference were Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, an advanced combat, missile, rocket and sensor system developer for the U.S. and foreign military; MESA Products Inc., a designer, manufacturer and installer of cathodic protection systems to control corrosion of metal surfaces in underground and submerged structures; and North Mississippi Health Services, a nonprofit, community-owned and integrated health care delivery system serving 24 rural counties in northeast Mississippi and northwest Alabama. 

Source: City of Irving

Amanda Casanova

Bicycle enthusiasts and elected officials are meeting this weekend in hopes of spurring Irving to becoming a more bicycle friendly city.

“Biking and walking is important for so many reasons, including public health, quality of life, and mobility for our growing population, including the aging tsunami we are facing,” said Leslie Luciano, Bike Texas community relations and membership coordinator. “The economic benefits of walkable/livable complete streets are attractive to corporations, and attract corporations whose workforce wants to live in this type of community with these amenities. Leaders need to get behind it so they don't get behind and lose these opportunities.”

Irving already boasts a handful of bicycle lanes and a trail system for recreational biking, but community leaders, including the Bike Irving initiative, have long pushed for safe cycling in the City.

“Irving needs to support policies that will help grow their communities into healthy and prosperous living communities,” Luciano said. “Bonds for these types of projects have been passing with over 60 percent overwhelming public support. The public wants this and they have demonstrated it with their votes”

Click here for the whole story.

By Phil Cerroni

As humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International hailed the United Nations’ March 27 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) as a major step towards eradicating violent conflicts and humanitarian crimes around the world, gun advocacy groups in the United States, including the National Rifle Association (NRA) voiced strong opposition to the Treaty, claiming it will infringe on the Constitutional right to bear arms. The NRA announced on their website that the ATT is “incompatible with our Second Amendment rights.”

The ATT regulates the international trade of conventional weapons, a category ranging from battle tanks and warships to light weapons and small arms. This latter category includes a large number of handguns, shotguns and assault-style rifles that many Americans own for recreational purposes – Berettas, Glocks and Sigs are all popular imports.

Although the preamble to the ATT has a broad focus “underlining the need to prevent and eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms and to prevent their diversion to the illicit market, or for unauthorized end use and end users, including the commission of terrorist acts,” the NRA looked at the specific effects the Treaty could have on individual gun owners in the United States.

“Such provisions could lead to a system of firearm registration and significant additional burdens being placed on the firearms industry as well as the millions of American gun owners who occasionally trade and sell firearms out of their own personal collections, the “"Undead" U.N. Arms Trade Treaty” article stated.

Ladd Everitt, the Director of Communications for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence was more sanguine about what he thinks is the negligible negative effect the ATT will have if it is passed by Congress.

“The treaty is replete with protections for domestically-enacted laws. It explicitly recognizes the sovereign status of each country and the laws they have enacted to protect domestically-owned firearms,” he wrote. “Furthermore, obviously, our Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of the U.S. Senate to ratify treaties and any actual changes in our gun laws would have to pass both chambers of Congress and be signed into law by our President.

“Given all these protections, it's difficult to understand how anyone outside of a conspiracy theorist--or NRA fundraiser--could argue that the treaty is a threat to the Second Amendment.”

Ernest Leonard, an attorney with the Dallas-based law firm Friedman and Feiger thinks the effects the Treaty will have on average, gun owning Americans is an open question.

“How the courts would view the creation of a national control system in light of the Second Amendment also is an open question; it would probably depend upon how burdensome the mechanics of a national control system are upon individual gun ownership rights. That is, if the national control system is narrowly tailored to address international arms dealers (the intent of the treaty), the law would probably pass constitutional muster. However, if it is overly broad to affect an average citizen who happens to own a gun manufactured outside the U.S., the law would probably find itself subject to judicial scrutiny.”

Read the whole story in the April 13 edition of The Rambler.