Coppell Chronicle Vol. 1, No. 27

Coppell ISD Approves Tax Rate • Mask Debate Continues in CISD • 3 Neighborhoods Form Alliance • Dairy Queen Under New Management

I’ve gotten in the habit of sending the final Coppell Chronicle of each month to everybody on my email list, as opposed to just my paid subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed, here are some of the articles you’ve missed this month:

• After the Coppell City Council unanimously approved a budget, two council members voted against the proposed tax rate.

• Coppell subsidizes Lyft rides for people commuting to the city via mass transit.

• DART is acquiring properties in the future path of the Silver Line trains.

• Plans are being made to double the number of live-work units along South Coppell Road from five to 10.

• The Coppell YMCA has launched a youth cricket league.

• Doggie’s Wonderland is going to become the Coppell Chess Club.

If any of those topics sound interesting, you can read them in my online archives by becoming a subscriber.

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Coppell ISD Approves Tax Rate

On Monday, the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees unanimously approved a tax rate of $1.292 per $100 of valuation, which is 1.8 cents lower than the current rate. In her final presentation regarding the budget and tax rate, Chief Financial Officer Diana Sircar showed that the district’s tax rate has been dropping for years:

(Of course, thanks to rising property values, most people’s tax bills will go up.)

“Of all the difficult decisions we will be making, this one is easy,” Trustee Manish Sethi said during Monday’s public hearing. “Reducing tax for the third year in a row? We can all get behind that.”

What was harder to understand was why a motion had to be made that said the rate “would raise taxes for maintenance and operations on a $100,000 home by approximately negative $4.20.” Just before the board voted, Sethi asked why the motion was worded in such a convoluted way.

“That’s the legal language, that’s written in the statute, that must be used,” Sircar said.

That wasn’t the only confusing aspect of Monday’s proceedings that can be credited to the Texas Legislature. Only one person signed up to speak during the public hearing on the budget and tax rate (and that woman’s comments were really about COVID-19 protocols more than they were about finances). Consequently, Board President Nichole Bentley tried to adjourn the public hearing after less than nine minutes, but Superintendent Brad Hunt told her (inaudibly) that she couldn’t.

About seven minutes later, Bentley said, “We are sitting here in silence. We are currently in the legally required tax hearing that has to last for 30 minutes. … So, hopefully, that will connect the dots for anybody that this seems strange to.”

As reported in Coppell Chronicle No. 25, the Coppell City Council approved an unchanged tax rate of 58 cents per $100 of valuation on Aug. 10. The council held three public hearings that night regarding city finances, and nobody signed up to speak at any of them.

The next time I hear a Coppell resident complain about their property taxes being too high, I’m going to ask why they didn’t complain to the powers that be when given the opportunity.

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Mask Debate Continues in CISD

Masks were not on the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees’ agendas last Monday, but masks were discussed at length nonetheless. Between the board’s regular meeting and their public hearing on the budget and tax rate, they heard from 51 individuals during Monday’s “open forum” sessions. Thirty-three were in favor of a mask mandate, 14 were against the idea, and four either didn’t clearly articulate their position or addressed another topic.

Seven of the 33 people who supported a mask mandate identified themselves as various types of physicians. They were joined by a social worker employed by a hospital and a Dallas County contact tracer.

One of the 14 people against a mask mandate identified herself as a scientist, specifically a retired DEA forensic chemist. She is currently employed by a “private company who actually makes COVID vaccine chemicals.”

Seven of the 14 people against a mask mandate spoke in person (as opposed to sending a letter that was read into the record). Board President Nichole Bentley had to remind three of those seven people to address the trustees, not the audience.

The 25 letters were all read into the record by Director of Communications Amanda Simpson, and the poor woman was out of breath by the time she finished. I would hope that reading-aloud duties can be divided up among multiple staffers the next time the school board meets.

That next time is tomorrow afternoon. The board has called a special meeting that is scheduled to begin at 4:30 p.m., and this is the major item on the agenda: “Discussion and possible action regarding provisions of Executive Order GA-38, Dallas County requirements, and general litigation related to a mask mandate in Coppell Independent School District.”

In other pandemic-related news from last Monday’s meeting:

▪ Angela Brown, Coppell ISD’s Executive Director of Communications and Community Engagement, told the school board that the district’s COVID-19 Dashboard will be updated every weekday. Previous plans for this semester were to update it on Tuesdays and Fridays only.

▪ Brown said the district will host vaccination clinics – featuring COVID-19 and flu shots – during varsity football games at Buddy Echols Field. Her staff was also working on at least two opportunities for CISD staff to receive both types of vaccine at the district’s headquarters.

▪ The board unanimously approved a motion to purchase portable air purifiers for classrooms throughout the district. These 900 devices will be paid for by Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds.

▪ The board also unanimously approved using $1.248 million worth of ESSER funds to give a $1,000 “retention incentive payment” to most teachers and staff. If you were a full-time employee before the last nine weeks of 2020-2021 and remain a full-time employee on Nov. 30, you’ll get the money.

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3 Neighborhoods Form Alliance

The Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten, and the Pac-12 made nationwide news last Tuesday when the three conferences announced the formation of what they termed “an historic alliance.” I’ve read a few articles about this new alliance; if it has a name, I’m not seeing it.

Also on Tuesday, the formation of another alliance was announced here in Coppell, and its name is unmistakable:

“We have dubbed ourselves the West Denton Creek Neighborhood Alliance,” Yvette Hightower, vice president of the Magnolia Park Homeowners Association, told the City Council. “This is a collective of 473 homes. That’s over 1,800 residents of Coppell.”

The alliance gave a 40-minute presentation to the City Council on where to place a trail through the park that’s directly south of their homes. Coppell Chronicle No. 7 included a lengthy article about this topic, which has been debated for years. Here’s the basic dilemma: The city staff says putting the trail on the north side of a pond would be cheaper and less prone to flooding. But the Magnolia Park HOA really wants the trail on the south side of the pond, i.e. the opposite side of the pond from their homes. 

To begin Tuesday’s presentation, Hightower said she and her allies would explain why the south-side route is “by far the best in terms of cost, strength and durability, and beauty.” They touted many advantages of the south-side route, including these:

• It would not bisect the green space in the park. (The north-side route would.)

• It would be shorter than the north-side route.

• It would be shaded. (The north-side route would not.)

• It would be more scenic than the north-side route.

In city documents, the south-side route is known as Option A and the north-side route is called Option B. The alliance’s presentation gave the south-side a new name: Option A+.

“There’s a reason Option B is Option B. That’s proverbial; it’s the second choice,” said Mark Henry, another member of the Magnolia Park HOA. “Nobody wants Option B. If you can’t have Option A, you say, ‘OK, I’ll settle.’”

Other speakers from the alliance included Sunil Avadhanam, president of the East Lake HOA, and Westhaven HOA board members Deepak Jayavant and Vijay Mandiram. But the keynote speaker was Mark Crannell, the civil engineer hired by the Magnolia Park HOA to present alternatives to the estimates from Halff Associates, the city’s consulting engineers.

Crannell said he initially favored Option B based on his online research. But he said the HOA invited him to walk the site, and that led him to change his mind.

“The first, initial meeting, I was not a very friendly engineer,” Crannell told the council. “I just said, ‘I don’t think I like it; I like this other plan better.’ From an aerial map that I was looking at online, in my desk, you see things in 2-D. And when you get out to the site, you see things in 3-D. So you’re seeing the slope, the topography – you’re seeing the challenges.”

Council Member Kevin Nevels asked which specific challenges changed Crannell’s mind. The engineer cited Option B being longer than Option A, Option B being too “curvilinear,” and the lack of significant trees along Option A.

Council Member John Jun asked for confirmation that no trees would need to be removed to execute Option A. Crannell clarified that no trees with diameters of 6 or more inches would need to be removed.

“It is a very heavily treed area, but there’s no feature trees, no significant trees,” he said. “It would just be cleaning up the brush and undergrowth.”

Council Member Mark Hill reminded everyone that there used to be a path on the south side of the pond, but it washed away in a flood. He asked Crannell what the lifespan of a new path between the pond and Denton Creek would be. Crannell didn’t directly answer that question.

“Can it wash out again? Possibly,” Crannell said. “From what I saw, the ground seems to be fairly well-established in there.” There are two low spots that look worrisome, he said, but a stem wall would mitigate the risk.

After the Q&A concluded, Mayor Wes Mays said the city staff was seeing the alliance’s presentation for the first time. So he would ask them to review it, and then conduct a work session with the council in about two months. The announcement of that time frame seemed to suck the air out of the room.

“You’ve been most patient with us, and city business takes a little time, so we apologize for that,” Mays said. “We try to remember that short-term decisions that we make here today have long-term impacts and long-term consequences, so we want to make sure that we make the right decision.”

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Dairy Queen Under New Management

Not long after my family moved to Coppell, I posted pictures on Facebook of my sons eating ice cream at Dairy Queen and captioned them “Coppell is DQ country.” A friend of mine who grew up here replied thusly: “You bet yer ass it is. It used to be only DQ country.”

I thought she must have been exaggerating, but Mark Wolfe – who was Coppell’s mayor from 1989 to 1993 – recently confirmed for me that Dairy Queen was the city’s only restaurant for several years. So, despite what you may think of Hungr-Busters and Dilly Bars, our little Dairy Queen is significant to Coppell’s history.

Unfortunately, like a lot of restaurants, our little Dairy Queen seems to have fallen on hard times. It’s one of the few eateries in town – perhaps the only one – that is still limited to drive-thru service. Members of the “Coppell, Texas” group on Facebook have decried its irregular operating hours, supposedly due to a lack of staff. Others have expressed frustration about pulling up to the menu board and being informed that the kitchen was either out of burgers or out of ice cream.

One member of that Facebook group recently asked who owns the place these days; he wanted to know where the buck stops. Wanting to be a helpful neighbor, I fired up the search engine and merged onto the information superhighway. I found a blurb published last August by Restaurant Finance Monitor that said Square 1 Restaurants sold our Dairy Queen (and 40 others) to Los Angeles-based Elite Restaurant Group. However, Dallas Central Appraisal District records indicate that the “business personal property” at our DQ’s address is still associated with Vasari LLC, a former name for Square 1 Restaurants.

I got an email address for Elite Restaurant Group from a Restaurant Finance Monitor staffer; an email I sent to Elite on Tuesday, asking whether the firm still owns our Dairy Queen, has not been answered. The aforementioned blurb said the sale was brokered by Morgan Kingston Advisors, so I contacted someone at that firm; he told me on Tuesday that he had forwarded my inquiry to Elite, but as I said, I’m still waiting to hear from the company.

So on Thursday morning, I decided to go the more-direct route: I called our Dairy Queen and asked to speak to the general manager. The woman who holds that title was starting her second day on the job when I bothered her. She asked me to call her back later that day; in the interim, she’d ask her area manager who owns the franchise.

Anybody who’s worked at a restaurant knows there are times when you’re so busy and shorthanded that you feel like you’re treading water in a whirlpool. This is commonly referred to as being “in the weeds.” The new GM was undoubtedly in the weeds when I called her back. She hadn’t had time to call her area manager, whom she identified as “Tito,” but she agreed to give me his phone number so I could pester him directly. I left him a voicemail – the first one I’ve ever left for someone named Tito – but he hasn’t returned my call.

Meanwhile, we’re approaching the 20th anniversary of the day that our little Dairy Queen was managed by Mark Cuban. Wouldn’t it be something if the Dallas Mavericks’ owner decided to commemorate that crazy day by purchasing the place?

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Chronicle Crumbs

▪ Coppell is Texas’ best suburb to live in, according to a website called Niche. The city got A-pluses in the “Good for Families” and “Public Schools” categories, A’s in “Diversity,” “Health & Fitness,” and “Jobs,” and A-minuses in “Housing” and … [looks twice] ... “Nightlife”?

▪ The Coppell Farmers Market was named the “Best Suburban Farmers Market” in the August edition of D Magazine: “Focused on local farmers and makers, it is stocked on Saturday mornings with seasonal organic produce, free-range meats, dairy, breads and pastries, pickles and jams, and fresh flowers.”

▪ While driving down Bethel Road recently, I noticed some work being done to the exterior of the Minyard’s building. Pete Wilson, president of the Coppell Historical Society, said it was part of routine repairs to the structures in Heritage Park.

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Community Calendar

Yard of the Month: Tuesday is the deadline to nominate your neighbors with a green thumb for an award. Before you do, make sure those neighbors are comfortable with having pictures of their yard posted online.

Coppell Lariettes Spaghetti Dinner: The drill team’s annual fundraiser is scheduled from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday in the Coppell High School Commons.

Art, Sip & Stroll: On Sept. 9, you can take in some culture while you simultaneously take in some wine, all in support of the Coppell Arts Council.