Coppell Chronicle Vol. 1, No. 50

Rest in Peace, Pete Wilson • City Plans for Future Housing • Which Home is Coppell’s Oldest? • Fire Department Buying New Ambulances

Rest in Peace, Pete Wilson

Courtesy of Theatre Coppell via Facebook

Our community is mourning a lifelong Coppell resident who was called a “master teacher,” a “great historian, and a “local icon.” Wheelice “Pete” Wilson Jr. died on Tuesday.

Those adjectives in quotation marks were copied and pasted from Facebook, where I also found these words of praise:

• “He was a great person in our community,” said Doug Stover, who served two terms as mayor.

• “He was the champion and the engine behind getting the Coppell Arts Center built! His vision carried us forward,” said Nancy Yingling, a former City Council member.

• “He truly was Mr. Coppell,” said Betsy Wilcox, a former coworker of Wilson’s at Coppell High School.

Wilson taught theater at his alma mater for more than 35 years. At the conclusion of Saturday’s performance of the SpongeBob SquarePants musical at CHS, his face and name appeared on screens in the auditorium, along with a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Good night, sweet prince.”

“It’s hard to put into words just how much he means to our community and me personally,” Coppell ISD Superintendent Brad Hunt wrote in Friday’s edition of the district’s Informed newsletter. “He and his family’s handprints are all over this community.”

Wilson’s father, W.H. Wilson, is the namesake of Wilson Elementary School. The elder Wilson was a member of both the Coppell City Council and the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees.

Pete Wilson was a member of Coppell High School’s first graduating class in 1965 and was the school’s original valedictorian. While directing the theater program at the high school, he also led the community organization now known as Theatre Coppell. Because of his years of advocacy for the arts, one of the performance venues in the Coppell Arts Center is known as the Wheelice Wilson Jr. Theatre.

Courtesy of Nancy LeMay

Wilson was also the president of the Coppell Historical Society. Although I never had the pleasure of meeting him in person, he was kind enough to occasionally answer my emailed questions about the town’s past. (The final one of those answers will come up later in this edition.)

No information about a memorial service was immediately available, but I’m sure Wilson will be discussed at length when the Coppell Historical Society gets together for a regularly scheduled meeting at 1 p.m. this Saturday at 700 S. Coppell Road.

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City Plans for Future Housing

Coppell’s Vision 2040 initiative led to the creation of two panels of volunteers. The Smart City Board was the subject of an article in Coppell Chronicle No. 42; today’s edition will spotlight the other panel, the Future Oriented Approach to Residential Development Task Force.

The task force, which is also known as the FOARD Board, has a few goals to achieve by 2040, including:

• Establish programs to protect the unique character of Coppell’s “community oasis” nodes of single-family homes.

• Explore ways to refit and refurbish Coppell’s older housing stock.

• Explore new housing options for Coppell’s older residents that maintain a high standard of living while reducing their footprint.

The task force, which is led by Chair Peggy Quinn and Vice Chair Kamesh Subbarao, met with the City Council last month to brief our elected officials on their research and offer some recommendations. The three recommendations all address the needs of residents ages 55 and older, a demographic that my wife and I will join in less than a decade. (Yikes!)

Recommendation No. 1: The city should organize and support a village for older residents. This is a concept already employed in other Texas suburbs (The Woodlands), cities (Austin), and counties (Fort Bend). The village wouldn’t be a geographic location within Coppell. Instead, it would be a suite of services related to tech support, transportation, and small household tasks, such as changing light bulbs or batteries in smoke detectors.

Recommendation No. 2: The city should offer financial incentives to older residents to improve their homes. Coppell already offers discounts on property taxes and utility bills to all residents ages 65 and older. What if the city offered further abatements and rebates to the owner of a home that made it more senior-friendly by, say, adding an elevator? The task force proposed basing the amount of the incentive on how much the improvement changed the home’s value.

Recommendation No. 3: Hire a consultant to study small-footprint options for senior housing. The task force threw out a couple of broad ideas on this front, and one of them was fairly simple: rezoning and renovating existing apartment complexes. The other was more ambitious: rezoning the shopping centers at a couple of major intersections (Sandy Lake and Denton Tap, and MacArthur and Belt Line) so they could become mixed-used developments complete with pedestrian bridges and tunnels. That’s a really big idea, hence the recommendation to hire an expert, as opposed to the volunteers on the task force.

I’m barely scratching the surface here, but so is the city. A few days after meeting with the task force, the council convened for a two-day retreat that was the beginning of their budgeting process for fiscal 2023. Without taking a formal vote, the council directed their staff to further explore the FOARD Board’s recommendations, as well as the recommendations made by the Smart City Board back in November, because nobody’s affixed a price tag to any of these ideas yet.

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Which Home is Coppell’s Oldest?

All this talk of a future-oriented approach to residential development prompted me to contemplate Coppell’s past approach to residential development. More specifically, I wondered which house is the city’s oldest.

I put that question to Pete Wilson in December, and his answer was the Kirkland House on Bethel Road, which was built in 1904. But that building is more like a museum than a home these days. What I meant was, if I wanted to raise my family in an older Coppell home, what would be my oldest option?

Right around the corner from the Kirkland House is the home at 700 S. Coppell Road, which was once owned by Wilson’s family. Dallas Central Appraisal District records indicate it was built in 1949, but they also indicate it is zoned for retail uses, not residential. For that reason, I’m disqualifying it from this discussion.

There are half a dozen older houses along Southwestern Boulevard, due west of Pinkerton Elementary, and they all look like a stiff wind would blow them over. Only two of the six are zoned for residential use; the others are zoned as commercial or light industrial. The two that are still zoned as residential were built in 1950 and 1955, according to DCAD.

My other leading candidates are a trio of houses in the 500 block of South Coppell Road. DCAD says the one in the middle was built in 1905 while the two on either side of it were built in 1949 and 1950, so I’m betting that whoever typed “1905” accidentally transposed the final two digits. DCAD also says those three homes are zoned for commercial uses, but some of that zoning was recently updated.

Previous owners of 528 S. Coppell Road, which was built in 1949, had the zoning changed from residential to commercial because they planned to replace it with a two-story office building. Those plans never came to fruition. The current owner, who bought the house in 2019, was unable to refinance the property because the zoning called for an office. So she and the owner of the house next door asked the city to reverse the zoning change, and the City Council approved that request in December.

So, I believe that the house at 528 S. Coppell Road is the city’s oldest home in which someone could live. Who disagrees?

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Fire Department Buying New Ambulances

God forbid you ever need to take a ride in an ambulance, but if you do, you want it to be a top-of-the-line model. Last month, the Coppell City Council approved a $1.17 million contract to purchase four new ambulances for the Fire Department.

Fire Chief Kevin Richardson assured the council that not only were these funds in the approved budget, the amount was less than what was budgeted. Richardson said buying a set of automated stretcher loading systems directly from the manufacturer at a cost of $177,000 — rather than getting those systems as added features on the ambulances — will save the city about $40,000.

The existing “emergency rooms on wheels,” as Richardson called them, went into service in October of 2016. This will be the fourth time the Coppell Fire Department has replaced its ambulance fleet since the turn of the century. Richardson said turning over the entire fleet at once is more cost-effective, and more efficient in terms of training and maintenance, than buying new ambulances one vehicle at a time.

Council Member John Jun clarified that the unit price for each of the new ambulances is nearly $340,000, while the trade-in value for each of the units being replaced is only $46,000. “I think you could have done better than that,” Jun said with a smile.

“Man, I tell you, I wish we could,” Richardson said. His staff looked into selling the existing fleet via auction, but their research showed that neighboring cities were getting only $26,000 for similar units. “There’s not a huge market for used ambulances, so I think that helps drive the price.”

Mayor Wes Mays pointed out the specs for the new ambulances totaled 18 pages, and he asked Richardson how much time he put into that. Richardson said all the credit for the research should go to his staff, and one particular aspect of his answer was a revelation to me.

“We have firefighters that range from 6-foot-7 to 4-foot-11,” he said, “so the design committee had to make sure they looked at every detail as far as ergonomics and driving compartments and the way that they’re laid out.”

I’m 5-foot-8. I had no idea there’s at least one Coppell firefighter who’s a head shorter than me.

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Chronicle Crumbs

• I’m not a big Facebook Marketplace user; I leave the online shopping to my wife/proofreader/interior decorator. Nonetheless, Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithm served me a listing this morning for a lease on a drive-thru restaurant in Coppell, which seems like an odd thing to market on Facebook.

• Speaking of odd decisions, I was taken aback by this announcement made during the intermission of Saturday’s performance of the SpongeBob SquarePants musical at Coppell High School: “If you’re the owner of a Toyota Tacoma with a dog inside it, you may want to go visit him. He seems upset.”

• Get your popcorn ready for Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Here’s the final action item on the agenda: “Discuss and consider removal of Venky Venkatraman as a member of the Conduct Review Board.”