Coppell Chronicle Vol. 1, No. 9

Let’s Dive Back Into Campaign Finance • Ain’t That a Kick in the Head? • Scouts Need New Homes • Restaurant Roundup – Who’s Hungry?

Let’s Dive Back Into Campaign Finance

Our municipal elections are six days away, which means the candidates’ final campaign finance reports were due Friday. Here’s a quick comparison of the contributions they reported:

The Texas Ethics Commission’s 2021 Filing Schedule says these reports were supposed to cover March 23 through April 21. Contributions and expenditures prior to March 23 were to be included on the reports that were due April 1.

If you want to peruse the latest data yourself, you can find the City Council candidates’ reports labeled “COH-8 Day” on this page. For the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees candidates, visit this page; each candidate’s hyperlinked name will have all of his or her various filings in a single document. (Memo to the school district: I prefer the city’s method.)

In case you missed it, the April 11 edition of the Coppell Chronicle included my analysis of the 30-days-out reports that were due on April 1. Here’s what I found interesting about the latest reports:

Coppell Mayor

Rob Anderson reported spending $10,984 of his personal funds, 99 percent of which went to a company called Mission Control for postcards. He reported an additional $4,064 sent to Mission Control as “unpaid incurred obligations.” I believe it; I’ve received three different postcards from Anderson so far, two of which appeared in my mailbox on the same day.

I was amused by the contribution of $125.47 that Anderson received from an Ohio resident named David White. Nice round number there.

Wes Mays received $3,000 from the MetroTex Association of Realtors, plus $100 from Coppell Realty owner Jeff Varnell, who is a member of the MetroTex Board of Directors. Place 6 incumbent Biju Mathew also got $100 from Varnell but just $1,000 from MetroTex. Meanwhile, Place 3 contender Davin Bernstein reported $300 from Varnell but nothing from MetroTex.

I’ve been poring over campaign finance reports for years, and Mays is the first candidate I’ve ever seen who included “hand sanitizer” as a campaign expense – $386 worth of it, for the record. Sign of the times.

Coppell City Council Place 2

Incumbent Brianna Hinojosa-Smith and challenger Raghib Majed both reported no contributions. She spent $225 of her personal funds on T-shirts, and he spent $573 of his personal funds on yard signs and door hangers. Easy enough.

Coppell City Council Place 3

As he did with his 30-days-out report, Don Carroll listed himself as a contributor. The $250 he gave his campaign on April 17 makes it a total of $2,250 for which he’ll have to send himself a thank-you card.

Meghan Shoemaker’s 30-days-out report included a single contribution of $325 from Amelia Anderson, the wife of the mayoral candidate. This time around, one of her 30 contributions was $500 from Susan Moster, the wife of state Rep. Julie Johnson.

As I said earlier, Davin Bernstein reported $300 from Coppell’s favorite kayak enthusiast, Jeff Varnell.

Coppell City Council Place 4

I stopped by Town Center on Sunday afternoon so I could bust Kevin Nevels’ chops about how his reports made my head hurt. (Disclaimer: I would never really bust his chops or any other part of his body. The dude knows karate.) Nevels filed a corrected 30-days-out report that required a subsequent correction, and his 8-days-out report includes all of the contributions that were in both his original 30-days-out report and the corrected version. Bottom line: He received one newly reported contribution of $50, bringing his grand total to $3,540.

Amit Dharia reported no contributions. He spent $1,218 of his personal funds and loaned his campaign $750.

Coppell City Council Place 6

To match his 30-days-out report, Mark Smits’ 8-days-out report lists no contributions and says he put all of his expenditures on a credit card.

As I said earlier, Biju Mathew received $1,000 from the MetroTex Association of Realtors and $100 from one of its directors, shutters magnate Jeff Varnell.

Coppell ISD Board of Trustees Place 7

Incumbent Tracy Fisher was the only one of the three contenders whose file on the Coppell ISD website had been updated by the close of business on Friday.

I didn’t expect an update to Sam Wellington’s file, because he gave me a heads-up that he’d be sticking with his plan to neither raise nor spend more than $930, which is the threshold set by the Texas Ethics Commission for skipping the 30-days-out and 8-days-out reports.

When I stopped by Town Center this afternoon, I asked Sonal Tandale why her paperwork hadn’t been updated. She chalked that up to a misunderstanding regarding her signature and said she expects the update to appear on the CISD website tomorrow. Tandale showed me a picture of the cover sheet for her 8-days-out report, which says she reported no new contributions and reported $590 worth of expenses.

Early voting continues from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday, and the polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday. Feel free to stop by Town Center and chat with the candidates, as I did today. Believe me: They’d all love to talk to you.

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Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?

File this under “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Lloyd Mauch is Coppell’s park operations manager, and he takes a lot of pride in his staff’s work. During the April meeting of the Parks and Recreation Board, he used the phrase “major-league quality” to describe the parks’ athletic facilities.

Coppell’s baseball and softball fields stay relatively pristine because they are surrounded by fences with locked gates. The soccer fields, on the other hand, are as accessible as the city’s streets. People are on them 365 days a year, often without permission.

“It’s just something that we’ve always dealt with,” Mauch said. “When you have nice facilities, people want to come use them.”

Mauch spoke to the Parks Board after Angela Lancaster, president of the Coppell Youth Soccer Association. Lancaster told the board there are groups of men who play pickup soccer games on Coppell’s fields year-round, even during inclement weather, which damages the turf. Mauch’s staff puts up signs that indicate when the fields are closed, but the signs are ignored.

“If it rains hard, we’re off the fields for a week,” Lancaster said. “But while we’re off the fields for a week, the pickup games are going on.”

There are soccer game fields and soccer practice fields at Andrew Brown Park West and Wagon Wheel Park. Lancaster said the pickup games are more prevalent at Wagon Wheel because of its more secluded location.

“Nobody hangs out back there by those warehouses, so they feel like they can use those fields and not be seen, and they just beat it to a pulp,” she said. “When they stomp those fields down — especially at Wagon Wheel, where there’s not a lot of turf left — when that dries, you have a mess. It’s just a mess. We’re playing on bumpy dirt for the next few weeks until it can even out again.”

Parks Board member Chaitu Jayanti said he’s noticed that the soccer goals have been moved when it rains, to discourage the fields’ use. He wondered whether further steps could be taken, such as putting tarps over the fields. But Mauch said that would be a monumental and expensive task, considering the Parks Department manages 17 game fields and 37 acres of practice fields.

“We’ve had several instances where we’ve had to run people off and say, ‘Hey, they’re closed. We have [signs] posted. They’re too wet,’” Mauch said. “But they don’t seem to care.”

Lancaster said Coppell once employed a “marshal” whose job was to shoo unauthorized users away from the fields, but the position was eliminated from the city’s budget. She said she’d love to see that job restored and to see fences installed around the Wagon Wheel fields.

Parks Board member Maureen Corcoran suggested inviting the men from the pickup games to join the CYSA’s co-ed league for adults, but Lancaster said she doubts they’d be interested.

“They get to do this for free without any regulation,” she said. “They don’t have to pay any ref fees; they don’t have to follow any rules.”

Speaking of rule-breakers, Lancaster said another issue are the private teams — from Coppell and elsewhere — that are always lurking around the practice fields, hunting for an empty spot. Between the CYSA, the Coppell Youth Football Association, and the Coppell Lacrosse Association, all of the practice fields are almost always spoken for, even if they’re not always occupied.

Lancaster is not only the president of the CYSA, she’s also a coach. During one of her team’s recent practices, she said, they were flanked by a soccer team from Irving and a women’s football team, decked out in pads and helmets, who were practicing their tackling techniques.

Meanwhile, Lancaster shared these stats to show that the CYSA is slowly recovering from the pandemic. The “Spring 2020” column represents the level of participation before COVID forced that season to be canceled after just two games.

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Scouts Need New Homes

When the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy last year, I submitted this award-winning letter to The Dallas Morning News:

“I am a fifth­-year den leader and second­-year Cubmaster. I have sympathy for all the victims and share their anger at their abusers, but the Boy Scouts of America’s Chapter 11 filing is a result of lawsuits stemming from incidents that happened decades ago. It should not reflect poorly on the current Scouting program. Thanks to the youth­-protection policies that were in place long before I got involved in 2015, I’m confident that a child who becomes a Scout is at no more risk of abuse than any other child.

“I’m a firm believer in the positive effects of Scouting, and visiting Coppell’s Boy Scout troops over the past few weeks with my son and his fellow Webelos has only made me more passionate about the program. It’s all about raising children with varied interests and skills, including leadership, morality, communication, and community service.”

My feelings about Scouting haven’t changed since that letter was published, but something has changed for the unit I used to lead. Cub Scout Pack 857 needs a chartered organization. The new leadership of the Denton Creek Elementary PTO, the pack’s previous chartered organization, was uncomfortable with some aspects of the agreement.

Whether you’re talking about a Cub Scout pack, a Boy Scout troop, or a Venturing crew, a chartered organization’s primary responsibilities are selecting the Scouting unit’s volunteer leaders and providing a place for the unit to meet. One member of the organization is given the title of Chartered Organization Representative, and that person works with the unit’s Cubmaster or Scoutmaster and its Committee Chair as a leadership trio called the “Key 3.”

This pamphlet about chartered organizations says the BSA provides “primary general liability insurance to cover the chartered organization, its board, officers, chartered organization representative, employees, and volunteers currently registered with the Boy Scouts of America.” Meanwhile, this copy of an Annual Unit Charter Agreement says, “There is no coverage for those who commit intentional or criminal acts. Liability insurance is purchased to provide financial protection in the event of accidents or injury that is neither expected nor intended.”

I’m no lawyer, but I think someone could interpret the latter language to mean that the insurance wouldn’t cover a lawsuit related to sexual abuse. As I said in my letter to the Morning News, I believe such abuse is a thing of the past. That said, a chartered organization does assume a small degree of risk. Statistically speaking, though, we all assume much more risk every time we get behind the wheel, don’t we?

My old pack isn’t the only unit in the Western Horizon District — the BSA’s collective term for Coppell, Irving, and Grand Prairie — that needs a new chartered organization. Several packs and troops that were affiliated with Catholic churches are looking for replacements.

I was told that the Dallas Diocese ordered all of its churches to sever their ties with the BSA, which surprised me. If any organization could identify with the BSA’s legal and financial troubles, you’d think it would be the Catholic church. I emailed the diocese’s spokesperson for clarification, but her reply provided confusion: “The Diocese of Dallas did not sever ties with Boy Scouts of America. Our parishes still host BSA events but are simply not the chartering organizations.” Um, OK.

In any case, if your organization is willing to adopt my old pack, reach out to my successor as Cubmaster, Martin Lopez, via pack857dce@gmail.com. If your organization can take on any of the units formerly affiliated with Catholic parishes, please contact Julio Salas, who oversees recruiting for the Western Horizon District: julio.salas@scouting.org or 214-902-6740. Salas would also like to hear from any organizations willing to charter a new unit.

In an attempt to broaden my horizons beyond schools and churches, I asked the members of a national Facebook group called “Cub Scout Volunteers” to tell me who their chartered organizations are. The answers included:

• Service organizations (Rotary, Lions Club, Kiwanis, etc.)

• Veterans groups (VFW, American Legion, etc.)

• Municipal police departments and fire departments

• Homeowners associations

• Youth sports leagues

Some of the respondents even said their chartered organizations were private businesses, including a chiropractor, a hardware store, and a gun range.

So, are any such organizations willing to help keep Scouting strong in our community?

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Restaurant Roundup – Who’s Hungry?

● Tomorrow is the official opening day for the Biscuit Bar on the southeast corner of Denton Tap and Sandy Lake. However, I drove by on Saturday and saw people were already chowing down under neon signs that said “BABY GOT BATCH” and “TATERS GONNA TATE.”

● Tomorrow is also the official opening day for Ms. Mary’s Southern Kitchen, which is taking over the former home of the Deliman’s Grill.

● George Coffee + Provisions in Old Town has reopened for the first time since the pandemic began. Owner Christian Hemberger said so Wednesday in a private Facebook group for Coppell residents. “We’ll tell the rest of DFW next week, or the week after,” he wrote.

● This morning was the first time I noticed the existence of Scrumbscious Burgers & Pieshakes on the westbound service road of I-635. Please forgive my tardiness, as the Irving eatery apparently opened two months ago. The original Scrumbscious (great name, by the way) is in Forney.

● Did anybody else notice how Quiznos just quietly disappeared a few years ago? I was bummed about that, because I always preferred it over competing sandwich chains like Subway, Jersey Mike’s, Jimmy John’s, etc. Well, I’m happy to report that Dallas County still has at least one Quiznos, and it’s just down the road in Carrollton, specifically on the northeast corner of Josey and Keller Springs (which is another name for Sandy Lake).

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Community Calendar

Rotary Club Flag Leases: May 1 is the deadline to lease a United States flag from the Coppell Rotary Club. If you give the club $50, volunteers will place a flag in front of your home on these five holidays: Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, and Veterans Day.

Run to Fund: The Coppell ISD Education Foundation has turned its fundraising 5K race into a virtual event over the course of May 1-8. There will be daily themes, including Star Wars on “May the Fourth Be With You” and Tex-Mex on Cinco de Mayo.

Humvee Challenge: Claymore Operations, a Coppell-based nonprofit that helps veterans adjust to civilian life, will raise funds via a unique competition on May 8 at First United Methodist Church. If you think you and seven friends have the combined strength necessary to pull a Humvee across the church’s parking lot, sign up ASAP. The registration fee is $10 per person.