184: Bobby Abtahi unpacks the raw deal on Fair Park

D Magazine's EarBurner

If you listened to the previous episode of EarBurner (and you should), you know that Bobby Abtahi was sitting at the table at the Old Monk as Matt and Tim interviewed Mike Rawlings. When they finished the episode with the former mayor, Abtahi, a former president of the Dallas Park Board, having consumed a statistically significant number of beers, started talking about how the city got into the current mess over the management of Fair Park—at which point Tim and Matt plugged the mics back in and recorded this episode. Abtahi was on the Park Board back in 2018, when it was decided that a nonprofit (Fair Park First) would oversee a new for-profit operator of Fair Park (Spectra, which eventually became the Oak View Group), which operator is now nearly $6 million in the red and asking for a handout.

You know what? It's all very byzantine and boring, and we did a poor job of setting up on the podcast what's at stake and what happened. You should probably just skip this episode.

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