Coppell Chronicle Vol. 2, No. 34
Lots of Free Cash Remains Unclaimed • Leftover Funds to Pay for Right-Turn Lane • Vintage Store Expands Product Lineup • How Much Would Bond Raise Taxes?
Lots of Free Cash Remains Unclaimed
If you own a business in Coppell and you haven’t received a $10,000 grant from the city this year, what are you waiting for?
The city government received $10.2 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, and the City Council has allocated 2.75 million of those federal dollars to a pair of programs benefiting local businesses. As of Tuesday, more than half of that money was unclaimed, which was surprising to the council.
“We thought we were going to be overwhelmed with applicants,” Mayor Wes Mays said during Tuesday’s work session.
Under the Coppell Business Rent/Mortgage Assistance Grant Program, which was designed to offset the effects of the pandemic, all small businesses in the city are eligible to receive a $10,000 grant. During the initial application period in late May/early June, 65 applications came in, thereby eating up the initial allocation of $650,000. Because the response was so overwhelming, the council allocated an additional $1.8 million. Since the application period reopened on July 13, another $560,000 has been awarded, leaving $1.24 million available.
Under the Coppell Business Revenue Recovery Assistance Grant Program, which was designed to offset the effects of the reconstruction of South Belt Line Road, about 70 businesses on South Belt Line and Denton Tap roads were eligible to receive a $5,000 grant. As of Tuesday evening, the city had received only 27 applications for this program. Every business that applied was awarded a $5,000 grant, but that leaves $165,000 available.
Mark Hill was one of the council members who had previously said the eligibility for the $5,000 grants should be restricted to businesses that predominantly rely on spontaneous customers, eliminating those whose business models involve appointments and/or memberships. On Tuesday, after hearing how much money has been left on the table, Hill said that restriction should be tossed. The rest of the council members in attendance agreed. (Kevin Nevels, the only council member who owns a business on Denton Tap, was coincidentally the only one who was absent on Tuesday.)
Don Carroll pointed out that there was another restriction on the $5,000 grants: Only businesses south of Sandy Lake Road were eligible. After some debate, the council decided to broaden eligibility to any Coppell business with an address on Denton Tap, all the way up to the city’s northern border.
Carroll also suggested that $200,000 be shifted from the $10,000 grant program (the one intended to offset effects of the pandemic) to the $5,000 grant program (the one intended to offset effects of construction), thereby making 40 more of the smaller grants possible.
John Jun was the only council member who disagreed. He advocated using the $200,000 to create a deceleration lane on the State Highway 121 service road. (Keep reading for details on that.) Doing so, Jun said, would allow the city to save some American Rescue Plan Act funds for future needs.
“It looks like we’re just trying to get rid of the money,” Jun said.
The application periods for these two business-assistance programs were open-ended until Tuesday, when the council set a deadline: Jan. 31, 2023. So if you’re the owner of a small business in Coppell, you have another three months to claim your cash.
Leftover Funds to Pay for Right-Turn Lane
Entering the East Lake neighborhood will soon be a safer proposition — unless you drive like a crazy person.
On Tuesday, the Coppell City Council preliminarily approved the creation of a deceleration lane on the State Highway 121 frontage road, which would make it safer for drivers exiting the highway to turn right on Eastlake Road. There have been five crashes in that area in the past four years, Director of Public Works Kent Collins said, and a deceleration lane would have prevented two of them.
“With the speed of the frontage road, and the fact that it is a right-turn movement, it would be a safety measure that we would recommend,” Collins said.
During the council’s debate, there was some confusion about whether the deceleration lane would be placed at Eastlake Drive, which is about 500 feet past the end of the Denton Tap exit ramp, or at Wingate Road, which is just a hair past the end of the ramp. On this map, Eastlake is the yellow line on the far right, the one marked by a red arrow. Wingate is the next yellow line to the left.
As someone who has used the Denton Tap exit ramp many times, I’m of the opinion that making a right turn on Eastlake would be dicey, but making a right turn on Wingate immediately after exiting the highway would be absolutely insane. Nevertheless, Council Member Biju Mathew said some drivers try to execute that maneuver.
Collins said the city could ask the Texas Department of Transportation to restripe the lanes and install some barricades on the exit ramp to discourage drivers from making an immediate turn onto Wingate.
“That maneuver should not be happening,” Collins said.
There is already a deceleration lane at Westhaven Road, which is marked by the green arrow on the map above. Council Member Don Carroll asked why deceleration lanes aren’t necessary at all five entries to the Westhaven and East Lake neighborhoods. Collins said the Westhaven Road deceleration lane “easily serves” the Westhaven subdivision, but it is not accessible to drivers using “the main ramp for Coppell,” a phrase he said while making quotation marks with his fingers.
The estimated cost of the deceleration lane at Eastlake is $250,000. Collins said the city could ask the Texas Department of Transportation to handle it (and pay for it), but that would mean waiting three to five years. Alternatively, the city could finish the project within a year by financing it through the half-cent sales tax dedicated to infrastructure or through American Rescue Plan Act funds.
The council went with the latter option. Even with the expanded eligibility of the business-assistance grants I wrote about earlier in this edition, the council’s collective hunch was that $250,000 of the $1.24 million allocated to those programs will be left untouched.
Vintage Store Expands Product Lineup
The Coppell Historical Society has taken another step toward turning Heritage Park into a museum by first turning the park’s vintage Minyard’s store into a gift shop.
The new offerings within the store were marked by a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday, coinciding with the society’s annual Pioneer Day celebration. About 100 former Minyard Food Stores employees were in attendance thanks to Officer Joe Boyd, who worked for the chain before becoming a Coppell cop.
Until Saturday, the only items for sale inside the vintage store were candy and soda. But now there are a series of items that are handmade by local artisans and intended to evoke the era of Coppell’s earliest days. They include quilts, bonnets, and aprons, as well as wind chimes made of cutlery.
Many of the newly available items were created by Brian and Lauren Moman, a couple who both graduated from Coppell High School in 2003. He made slate coasters etched with Coppell-centric designs, wooden ornaments that resemble the vintage store, and wooden spoons branded with “Coppell Y’all.” She created a line of bath and beauty products that are all infused with a “Grapevine Springs” scent.
For now, the vintage store’s hours are unchanged and extremely limited: 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. Chris Long, the historical society’s president, said the hours will be expanded to three days per week by the end of year, which is a condition of achieving museum status.
How Much Would Bond Raise Taxes?
If Coppell ISD voters approve a bond package next spring, residents of the school district are going to finance it via higher taxes. Here’s a look at how much higher those taxes could be, depending on the size of the package and the value of your home:
Those figures were presented during a “Futures Conference” hosted by Coppell ISD on Thursday at the Coppell High School Ninth-Grade Center. The primary speaker was Cindy Powell, a former chief financial officer for Arlington ISD who now works at Cooperative Strategies, a consulting firm that helps school districts assess and build facilities. She offered a couple of important caveats regarding those estimated tax increases:
The estimates account for the $40,000 homestead exemption that all Texas homeowners get on their school taxes.
School taxes on homesteads for Texans who are at least 65 years old cannot be increased.
The increase would be for the interest-and-sinking portion of the tax rate, also known as the debt-service tax rate. Powell told conference attendees that funds raised through debt-service taxes are not subject to recapture under the state’s “Robin Hood” system. (The tens of millions that Coppell ISD sends to the state through recapture are all raised through the maintenance-and-operations portion of the tax rate.) That makes sense, but it’s something I never realized until Thursday.
Powell’s presentation touched on many of the topics that are being considered by the 60-member Bond Steering Committee, including fine arts (see “Fine Arts Goals Get Fine Tuned” in the June 5 edition), athletics (see “CISD and YMCA May Pool Their Resources” in the July 3 edition), and early-childhood education (see “Do Littlest Kids Warrant Big Investment?” in the July 3 edition). Once Powell was finished, she asked the folks in the room to do an abbreviated version of the Future Facilities Survey that was available to the public until noon on Friday.
I was one of five dads at my table, and our activity on Thursday evening was a group effort. For example, we arrived at this consensus when asked to prioritize four potential new programs for CISD’s middle schools:
STEM (science/technology/engineering/math)
Orchestra
International Baccalaureate
Fine arts dance
(When I filled out the survey as an individual, I ranked orchestra first, followed by IB, dance, and STEM. My rationale was that I’m pretty sure middle schools already teach science and math.)
Your next opportunity to influence the Bond Steering Committee will be on Nov. 10, when a “Community Dialogue” session will happen at New Tech High; a related survey will be accessible the following week. Meanwhile, you can join the committee for facilities tours this week by signing up here.
The committee is expected to offer its recommendation on a bond package to the Board of Trustees in January.
Chronicle Crumbs
• Last week, The Dallas Morning News published a front-page article about the campaign for the District 14 seat on the State Board of Education, which features Democrat Tracy Fisher of Coppell versus Republican Evelyn Brooks of Frisco. The article includes portraits of both candidates. District 14 sprawls across more than a dozen counties, from the Red River to Fort Hood, so I thought it was interesting that Brooks had her picture taken in Coppell.
• In the Sept. 18 edition (“Big Campaign Signs to be Limited”), I reported that the Coppell City Council was in favor of prohibiting T-posts on the medians within the Town Center parking lot. On Tuesday, they extended that prohibition to the curbs along Parkway Boulevard, because staffers discovered there are water and electrical lines under that ground too.
• Park Operations Manager David Ellison said his staff loads more than 144,000 bags into Coppell’s 60 Dogi Pot stations annually, and the price of those bags has risen by 30 percent in the past year. “When you’re trying to plan for a budget,” Ellison told the Parks and Recreation Board this month, “it’s very difficult to anticipate that much of an increase.” The cost would be a lot higher if all Coppell residents with canine companions actually picked up their poop.
• The Coppell ISD Education Foundation’s Give for Grants campaign is up and running. Teachers throughout the district have submitted grant requests, and you can choose which one (or ones) you would like to fund. Click here to peruse the proposals. The deadline to contribute is Oct. 31.
• This North Texas Real Estate Information Systems data regarding September home sales and leases in Coppell was compiled by the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University:
I plan to publish these statistics — which may delight some readers while horrifying others — on a monthly basis.
Community Calendar (Halloween)
Halloween is on a Monday this year. Every time it lands on a day other than Saturday, at least one Coppell resident asks whether they should expect trick-or-treaters to ring their doorbell on Oct. 31. The answer is always “yes.”
However, if you don’t want to send your costumed kid out in search of candy on a Monday evening, you have other options:
Trick or Treat on the Trails: Costumed characters can collect candy at the Biodiversity Education Center between 5 and 7 p.m. on Oct. 28.
Scare on the Square: Businesses in Old Town will welcome trick-or-treaters between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Oct. 29.
Trunk or Treat: Community organizations, businesses, and families will give out candy in The CORE’s parking lot between 6 and 8 p.m. on Oct. 29.
Community Calendar (non-Halloween)
Candidate Forum: The candidates for State Senate District 12 and State House District 115 have been invited to participate in a forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Irving at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday at North Lake College.
Spooky Terrariums: If you’re a teenager who loves Halloween and wants to try your hand at gardening, then sign up for a crafty evening at the Cozby Library and Community Commons on Thursday.
Pinot for Polio: The Coppell Rotary Club will host a wine-tasting fundraiser from 5 to 9 p.m. on Thursday at Landon Winery. Three tastings with food pairings cost $15.
Farm to Table Dinner: This Coppell Farmers Market fundraiser is scheduled for 5 p.m. on Saturday at the Coppell Senior & Community Center. The seasonal menu will feature ingredients sourced from and prepared by the market’s food producers. Tickets are $108.
Arts Gala: The Coppell Arts Center Foundation’s inaugural fundraising gala promises “a night of Rat Pack-inspired glitz and glamour” at the Coppell Arts Center (of course) at 7 p.m. on Saturday. Tickets are $125.
A Choir for All Ages: Singers from the Coppell Children’s Chorus, Coppell High School, Ouachita Baptist University, and the Coppell Community Chorale will perform at 3 p.m. on Oct. 23 at the Coppell Arts Center.
Work in Coppell Virtual Job Fair: If you’d like to work closer to home, sign up for this event featuring a variety of Coppell employers — from AAA to Vari — that is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Oct. 25.
DEA Prescription Drug Take Back Day: Coppell police officers and volunteers will collect your unused medications between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Oct. 29 at the Coppell Justice Center.
Thanks for heads up regarding drug take back date. I’ve been wondering when that would be and hoping I hadn’t missed it
There’s lots to learn and digest in this week’s Chronicle. I do like that the new bond is focused on The Arts and STEM. I do think Coppell needs a natatorium. I hope it comes to fruition.
Have you heard anything about building a new Pinkerton?