Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 21
Coppell Gripped by Gator Mania • Council Tightens Watering Restrictions • Slate of Parks and Rec Projects Proposed • Irving Rejects 24-Hour Poker Club
For the second consecutive week, this newsletter includes an article I never could have predicted publishing. Can we make it three weeks in a row? Meet me back here next Sunday to find out.
Coppell Gripped by Gator Mania
Hey, did you hear there’s an alligator in Coppell? Yes, yes, of course you did. The gator spotted in the northeast corner of our city was featured on Fox 4, NBC 5, and WFAA last week.
Two of those stories featured interviews with Johnny Ahrens and Joanne Eubank, who have seen the gator multiple times in the creek behind their home on Inglenook Court. Eubank invited me over to see it for myself on Friday evening, but the reptile didn’t show up for our interview. Perhaps the gator had already grown weary of all the media attention.
Ahrens and Eubank saw the creature for the first time on Sunday evening, while they were hosting a family event. Eubank told me they also spotted it on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, between 8 and 8:30 each evening. Twenty-four hours after ducking me, the gator showed up again last night.
“Normally, you wouldn’t want to be close to an alligator, but it’s kind of like you’re at the zoo,” Eubank said on Friday, as we stood next to the metal fence separating her yard from the creek.
The initial sighting happened on July 6 in a pond near Castle Creek Drive. A July 7 email to members of the Estates of Cambridge Manor Homeowners Association said Coppell Planning and Zoning Commissioner Freddie Guerra and his wife, Deeann Bennett, alerted Coppell Animal Services to a gator’s presence. The email also said a resident had informed Mayor Wes Mays, who I’m sure never envisioned receiving such a call as part of his civic duties.
That email, and another one from the homeowners association’s board on Tuesday, made it sound like Coppell Animal Services would work with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to make Coppell an alligator-free city. But Lerrin Johnson, a public information officer with Texas Parks and Wildlife, told me alligator relocations are not a common practice.
“This is considered a last resort and generally only done if a nuisance alligator has been identified and is an immediate danger to the public,” Johnson said via email. “The majority of alligators are not nuisances.”
In case you’re not aware (and I certainly wasn’t), the Wildlife chapter of the Texas Administrative Code includes a legal definition for a nuisance alligator: “an alligator that is depredating or a threat to human health or safety.” I had to turn to Merriam-Webster to find out that “depredating” means plundering or ravaging. (Like this?)
The City of Coppell publicly acknowledged the gator for the first time on Wednesday afternoon, when it posted this image on social media:
Those social media posts included a link to a Living With Alligators document featuring information provided by Texas Parks and Wildlife. The posts also inspired all of the TV coverage.
By Friday, the city had leaned into the absurdity of the situation. A banner referencing “our reptilian resident” and featuring a picture of an inflatable alligator had been added to the city’s website. The inflatable gator subsequently appeared in video clips recorded at The CORE’s outdoor pool, at Grapevine Springs Park, and on a treadmill at the Coppell Senior and Community Center.
Meanwhile, The Dallas Morning News published an editorial billed as “a letter from the Coppell alligator.” Here’s an excerpt: “I mean, just look at this place! You’ve got everything. I’ve got a Market Street just up the road. A little south of here is my Tom Thumb. I’ve been wanting to try Rosa’s Café, maybe get a membership at the Coppell Family Y.”
More than one of my subscribers suspected that I had something to do with that letter. If I had, I would have gone with a much more Coppell-centric restaurant than Rosa’s. In my version, the gator would have wanted to dine at J. Macklin’s.
Council Tightens Watering Restrictions
Coppell’s rules for water conservation have grown more restrictive, and the penalties have increased by a factor of four.
Until Tuesday, Coppell had a five-stage water conservation plan, and residents weren’t restricted to two days of watering per week until we reached Stage 3. According to an ordinance approved by a majority of the City Council on Tuesday, we now have a four-stage plan that restricts us to two days of watering per week by default.