Here are some highlights from my reporting career, when it comes to government and organization coverage. I take pride in the fact that few of my best stories came from sitting in a meeting somewhere. They came from digging, working sources, crunching data and wearing out my wingtips (which have been resoled three times now).

On my beat as the sports/government reporter at the Dallas Business Journal, I suspected that the city of Arlington might have bought bond insurance to reduce its payments on the Dallas Cowboys' stadium. After I got into reporting the story, I realized the erratic credit markets had hit both the Cowboys and the city of Arlington.

Here's the online article about the Dallas Press Club Katie Awards scandal. It won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award.

I found this story while poking around at the Dallas municipal courts building. Basically, the article describes the impacts of decriminalizing city code violations.

I used city records to analyze enforcement trends for lawn-watering violations here. A related map of alleged violations that I built with mapping software doesn't appear with the online version of the story, but it appeared in newsprint.

Here's a story I broke at the Dallas Business Journal about the city of Dallas' increase in tax-increment financing of development projects.

While at the Denton Record-Chronicle, I used computer-assisted reporting and county records to show that a family-court judge was overbilling the county for court-appointed attorneys. The judge who billed the county for the cases stopped doing so after the story was printed and didn’t seek re-election.

My most intensive experience in city government coverage came when I worked for two years as the Columbia Daily Tribune's city hall reporter. Here are some related clips:

I used Microsoft Access to determine a sharp spike in the arrests of minority children in Columbia. This story took second place in Missouri's APME reporting competition for community-service journalism, losing out to a submission by a reporting team at the Kansas City Star. I researched and wrote this story while covering Columbia's city hall nonstop.

I broke this story after talking to sources about the state of Missouri's reluctance to issue construction permits. Development was frozen across half of the city as a result of the state's decision.

This is a profile of the city of Columbia's (now-retired) longest-serving city manager, Ray Beck. Much of it is based on my observation of him.

In my feature "Raking It In," I used Microsoft Access and Excel to analyze the payroll records of 1,117 city employees and reported that:
-- a third of the city's workers get paid for not being sick.
-- Some employees make more money than their supervisors because of overtime and other benefits.
-- At least 10 workers earned more than 36 percent over their base pay, thanks mostly to overtime.
-- many of the top city employees' salaries included car allowances.