Coppell Chronicle Vol. 1, No. 12

City Dumps Municipal Mask Mandate • A Neighbor Has Entered the Chat • Just a Few More Apartments in Valley Ranch • Trustee Concerned About Qualifications

City Dumps Municipal Mask Mandate

Coppell announced on Thursday that the mask mandate in city facilities will be suspended effective tomorrow. Some residents may have assumed that this announcement was a result of the one made earlier Thursday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which declared that fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks in most settings.

In fact, the decision to change the city’s policy was made Tuesday evening, when the City Council discussed it for the fourth time since reinstating the mandate in March.

During each of these discussions, City Manager Mike Land has reported how many residents of ZIP code 75019 have been vaccinated, using statistics supplied by the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department. (Tuesday’s report was 61 percent.) Multiple council members have said the actual percentage of vaccinated Coppell residents must be higher than that, because they believe that people who get their shots in other counties — including several council members — are not accounted for in the statistics supplied by Dallas County.

I don’t buy that argument. When my wife and I were vaccinated in Tarrant County, we filled out paperwork that clearly stated we reside in Dallas County. So we shouldn’t be accounted for when Tarrant County calculates its vaccination rate, but under the council members’ logic, we wouldn’t be accounted for in Dallas County’s vaccination rate either. So what then? Did our four combined Pfizer shots just evaporate into the statistical ether?

On Thursday, I emailed Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins’ chief of staff, the county’s designated contact for questions from nosy journalists, to ask who’s right in this theoretical argument — me or the council? She hasn’t responded yet, but it’s a moot point anyway; Coppell’s mask mandate ends tonight.

The only council members who argued for keeping it in place during Tuesday’s discussion were Mark Hill and Brianna Hinojosa-Smith, who pointed out that masks were still required in most Coppell businesses. Of course, some of those stores and restaurants have relaxed their rules in the wake of Thursday’s announcement from the CDC.

Meanwhile, here are some other things I learned from watching Tuesday’s council meetings. (There were two meetings that day.)

▪ I learned that the owners of J. Macklin’s Grill also own an event venue in Addison as well as a catering business. These facts came up when the council approved a three-year deal for Mackbeth Corporation to be the Coppell Arts Center’s food and beverage vendor. The deal calls for Mackbeth to pay the city 20 percent of its gross profit for concession services and 10 percent of its gross revenue for catering services.

▪ I learned that Varidesk, the company also known as Vari, plans to build a new headquarters at the corner of Freeport Parkway and State Highway 121. That came up when the council amended Varidesk’s “Economic Development Incentive Agreement,” which had been approved last December, so that it covers some affiliate companies that have since been created.

▪ I learned that the unofficial election results I reported two weeks ago were off by just a single vote in each race; I assume that means a single provisional ballot was deemed valid after the unofficial results were posted. Here are the official totals that were canvassed at Tuesday morning’s meeting. At Tuesday evening’s meeting, the winners of the May 1 election took their oaths of office.

Presiding over his first meeting as mayor, Wes Mays wrapped up Tuesday’s proceedings with this: “Let every member here remember that every short-term decision has long-term effects, and that long-term change can only happen with collaboration and consensus. Let’s keep the best interests of Coppell in our hearts, so that the best days of Coppell are still in our futures.”

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A Neighbor Has Entered the Chat

When I worked at People Newspapers, I would break in new reporters by sending them to cover a Dallas Landmark Commission meeting. Most of them would scan the agenda, contort their face into a confused expression, and ask, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

I would tell them, “You’re looking for a conflict. All of these people who are going before the Landmark Commission own homes in historic districts, and they need the commission’s permission to alter their homes. So you may have a conflict between a homeowner and the commission, or between the commission and the city staff, or between a homeowner and one of their neighbors. Whenever you have a conflict, you have a story.”

I wasn’t expecting to find a story when I tuned into the latest meeting of the Coppell Board of Adjustment. I watched it just because the first homeowner on the agenda, Dibya Mohapatra, is my friend. (His son and mine were in Cub Scouts together.) But as I used to assure my young reporters, conflict can show up when you least expect it.

Mohapatra owns a corner lot in the Vistas of Coppell, a neighborhood due east of Denton Creek Elementary School. He wants to move the fence on the side of his house closer to the sidewalk, even though the plat for his neighborhood says side fences have to be 15 feet from the property line. Because of his fence’s current location, he has a narrow little pizza slice of a side yard, which is not connected to his backyard.

Suzanne Arnold, Coppell’s chief building official, told the Board of Adjustment that three other corner houses behind Mohapatra’s have been granted similar variances to the 15-feet rule. Approving his request would put his side fence in alignment — literally — with those house’s side fences, as this photo from Arnold’s memo to the board illustrates:

Seems like an open-and-shut case, right? Board of Adjustment Chair Mark LeGros asked his fellow board members for a motion on Mohapatra’s request, but then Arnold informed him that Eric Lee — who, like Mohapatra, was attending the hearing via Zoom — wished to speak. Lee, who owns a house four doors down the street, identified himself as the original owner of Mohapatra’s house. He told the Board that there was once a side fence closer to the sidewalk, but the city made him tear it down.

“How come the city changing this again to disprove your own action a few years back?” Lee asked.

Please read this in a falsetto sing-song voice: Awk-ward!

LeGros told Lee that Board of Adjustment hearings don’t set precedent. So Lee being told to tear down a fence on the same property years ago would not have any bearing on Mohapatra’s request.

After some back and forth between Lee and the board, it became clear that Lee’s other concern was that moving the fence back to the property line would make it hard for drivers emerging from the alley behind his and Mohapatra’s houses to see traffic on the side street.

“From our concern is safety. From their concern is their child have more room to play,” Lee said of Mohapatra and his wife. “I do have sympathy for them to maybe extend the yard a few feet away from the current configuration, but not what they propose here.”

LeGros pointed out that the Mohaptras’ across-the-alley neighbors have a 45-degree “visibility cut” to their fence, as you can see in the photo above. If there were a similar cut on the corner of the Mohapatras’ property, LeGros said, then anyone emerging from the alley should be able to see just fine, provided they were driving slowly.

“An alley is not a street,” LeGros said. “There’s no 25-to-30-mile-an-hour speed limit going down there. So coming out of any alley, cars should not be going any more than 10 miles an hour.”

The board unanimously approved Mohapatra’s request, with one condition: He must include a visibility cut on the corner. So the conflict was resolved with what sounds like a win-win to me.

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Just a Few New Apartments in Valley Ranch

Here’s another rule I had for my young reporters back in the day: Don’t write about a piece of property without looking at it in person. To adhere to that rule, I took a drive through the Reflections at Valley Ranch apartment complex, which Irving Planning and Zoning Commissioner Jack Spurlock recently described as “a war zone.”

I wouldn’t go that far. Many of the apartment buildings are a little rough around the edges, and their tiny detached garages are distinctly rougher, but I’ve seen worse. Heck, I’ve lived in worse.

The Planning and Zoning Commission held a hearing on May 3 to consider whether Sahara Equity, the company that bought the 212-unit complex in December 2019, could replace a one-story storage unit with a two-story building that would add 12 apartments to the property — which, by the way, is within the boundaries of Coppell ISD. The storage unit is right up against a fence that separates the apartment complex from single-family homes on Marble Canyon Circle.

The hearing was delayed twice while Sahara Equity and its representatives negotiated with some Marble Canyon homeowners. The original proposal was to replace the storage unit with a three-story building featuring 15 new apartments, so the homeowners won a compromise there. Another compromise was a proposal to put a 12-foot fence between the new apartments and the single-family homes.

The city staff recommended approving Sahara Equity’s request, on the condition that the fence height be limited to Irving’s maximum of 8 feet and that new trees be planted between the properties. But the commission had to consider testimony from multiple Marble Canyon homeowners — both written and in-person — who worried that anybody occupying an upstairs apartment along the property line would have unobstructed views into their yards while the aforementioned trees matured.

Jas Kaur, one of the co-founders of Sahara Equity, told the commission that she and her partners want to maximize the return on their investment. They need the additional units because they don’t want to raise the rent for their existing tenants. She got the opposite of a sympathetic ear from Spurlock. Besides describing the complex as “a war zone,” he also said this: “I’m so tired of out-of-town developers coming in here and raping our city.”

Whoa! I did not expect to hear a reference to sexual assault while watching this hearing.

(For the record, Sahara Equity has an Irving mailing address, specifically on MacArthur Boulevard, listed on its website. And if you look up the Reflections at Valley Ranch property on the Dallas Central Appraisal District’s website, the mailing address for the owner is on Beranger Drive, also in Irving.)

Whether she’s an out-of-town developer or not, Kaur will have to make do with fewer new apartments. Commissioner Bruce Burns put forth a motion that the storage unit could be replaced only by a one-story building limited to six apartments. His motion passed on a 5-4 vote, and that, as they say, is that. Unlike most Planning and Zoning Commission votes, this one is not subject to a subsequent ruling by the Irving City Council.

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Trustee Concerned About Qualifications

The Coppell ISD Board of Trustees held a special meeting last month to discuss changes to their operating procedures. One particular portion of this April 19 meeting got my attention, when the newest trustee, Neena Biswas, had questions about how trustees should address concerns with the superintendent.

The board’s president, Nichole Bentley, read the portion of the procedures that says “board members should not violate the chain of command.” For example, if a trustee has a concern about how his or her own child is being taught or coached, the trustee should take up that concern with the teacher or coach before going to the principal. But if the trustee no longer has kids in the district, Bentley said, it would be appropriate to take a concern directly to Superintendent Brad Hunt.

Biswas’ response: “My issue is, let’s say I communicate directly with Brad, and let’s say the concern is not dealt with, what is the next step?”

Biswas went on to say that she didn’t want a raised concern to become a grievance, “because that pushes it over the edge.” That would waste a lot of time, she said, “and most of the times, in a grievance, you don’t get justice.” So, she asked, how can a trustee address something that is not being addressed?

Bentley said, “‘Addressed’ gets a little nebulous, right? Like, ‘addressed’ doesn’t mean that we get to go complain to the superintendent, and he’s going to do whatever we tell him to do. He gets to decide, as the person running the district, how it’s going to be addressed. It may not be an outcome that any of us personally would choose, or it might be.”

Trustee David Caviness asked Biswas to clarify what type of concerns needed to be addressed. “I’m talking about, specifically, qualifications of a specific person who’s, you know, touching a student,” she said, and I assume she didn’t mean “touching” literally. “We want the best for our students, so if the person is not qualified, or does not have experience, they should not be in that field. There should be a way to remedy the situation fast enough so we don’t waste another year of the students’ time.”

Trustee Tracy Fisher reiterated that the chain of command needs to be respected, whether the concerned parent is an elected trustee or not. Biswas responded, “The problem with the chain of command is you are complaining to the person who is causing the harm, so that breaks down the system.”

As Fisher tried to determine what was driving the discussion, Biswas insisted “there is no personal issue; it’s qualifications of teachers.” Caviness pointed out that trustees should bring personnel concerns to the superintendent, so he can address them. That led to this exchange:

Biswas: “So what happens if he does not?”

Caviness: “If he doesn’t, or if you don’t agree?”

Biswas: “No, if he does not. Let’s say it is not. It is not acceptable …”

Fisher: “Well, then that’s a personnel matter that should be talked about in closed session.”

For those who aren’t aware, a school district’s board of trustees has authority over only one employee: the district’s superintendent. This particular board’s only employee was in the room for this debate.

“If you are unhappy with how I have responded to [a raised concern],” Hunt told Biswas, “then that’s a reflection on my job performance, and you all evaluate me, and that would be reflected in my evaluation.”

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Community Calendar

▪ After sweeping Jesuit, the Coppell High School baseball team will face Prosper in the third round of the Class 6A playoffs. A three-game series has been scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, 7:30 p.m. on Friday, and 1 p.m. on Saturday, if necessary, with all games to be played at Lake Dallas High School in Corinth. Given all the rain in this week’s forecast, that schedule is very much subject to change.

▪ If you don’t want to drive all the way to Corinth to watch competitive baseball, consider root, root, rooting for any team in the Coppell Baseball Association’s city championships. The U9/U10 final is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Thursday at Wagon Wheel Park’s Field 5, and the U7/U8 title game is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on Saturday at MacArthur Park’s Field 5. Again, this is all weather permitting.

▪ BSA Troop 840 is organizing a donation drive for Genesis Women’s Shelter. Household goods, canned food, and new toys will be collected between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday outside the Dollar Tree at 820 S. MacArthur Blvd.