Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 22
City to Cover School Officers’ Salaries • Chamber Seeks More Funds for Marketing • Library’s Anniversary Marked by Postmark • Plans Call for 3 Homes on Mockingbird
Coppell was ranked fifth on a list of the 10 Best U.S. Suburbs published by Travel + Leisure last week. The only other Texas suburb listed was Cinco Ranch near Houston; it was the runner-up to Johns Creek outside Atlanta.
Seems like a bogus list, if you ask me. I refuse to believe there are four American suburbs better than Coppell.
City to Cover School Officers’ Salaries
Coppell is poised to do Coppell ISD a financial favor: fully paying for the school resource officers at the district’s 14 campuses in the city.
When the Texas Legislature mandated armed security officers at all public schools, the city and the school district agreed to split the costs 50-50. On Monday, Council Member Don Carroll suggested that the city could pick up the district’s half of that bill for the upcoming school year.
“Public safety certainly falls in the realm of the city to a great extent,” Carroll said. “We know the school district is going through its own challenges.”
Carroll made this suggestion as he and his peers were discussing the fiscal 2025 budget for the city’s Crime Control and Prevention District. That budget calls for a $735,000 reimbursement from Coppell ISD for the school resource officers.
The city is budgeting as if Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s proposed changes to the distribution of sales taxes (aka Rule 3.334) are already in effect. Carroll pointed out that the Crime Control and Prevention District’s budget for fiscal 2024 includes between $2 million and $3 million worth of excess revenues, because it is funded by sales taxes and because Rule 3.334 is on hold pending the outcome of a lawsuit.
“I completely agree with the way we budget, because we have to budget like sales tax is going away. The reality is it hasn’t,” Carroll said. “So I would like to look at this on a year-to-year basis and see — do we have additional funds that could be utilized for something like helping out the school district with public safety?”
Mayor Pro Tem Kevin Nevels thanked Carroll for his suggestion: “This is something that we could do to help that unfunded mandate that Austin has imposed on our school districts.”
After stressing the importance of public safety, Council Member Ramesh Premkumar played devil’s advocate: “By footing this bill from our side, are we going to be encouraging Austin to be doing more unfunded mandates because cities like Coppell can afford it?”
Carroll’s response was that Coppell’s close working relationship with Coppell ISD is a rarity in Texas, but Mayor Wes Mays said that was a moot point: “Austin’s not even gonna see this. It’s not even gonna be on their radar screen.”
Council Member Jim Walker was also on board with Carroll’s idea, but he said it must be made clear to Coppell ISD that it would be reassessed on a year-to-year basis. In 2021, Coppell and a handful of other cities sued Hegar to block the implementation of Rule 3.334. (The suit is supposed to finally go to trial on Oct. 14, but that date has been delayed many times.) If the cities don’t prevail, Walker said, then the financial buffer Coppell has built up will dwindle over time.
“If someone asked me, ‘Well, five years ago, when you spent a little bit of the buffer on the safety of our schoolchildren,’ I’d be able to defend that all day long,” Walker said.
The City Council will have two more budget workshops tomorrow and on July 29. The city’s full-length proposed budget will be posted for public review on Aug. 5.
Chamber Seeks More Funds for Marketing
Before their budget workshops began, the City Council was briefed on the “Discover Coppell” marketing campaign managed by the Coppell Chamber of Commerce.
Ellie Braxton, the chamber’s president and CEO, told the council on July 9 that she is requesting $374,000 for fiscal 2025, which would be about 4.5 percent more than the campaign’s current budget of $358,000. Braxton attributed the increase to two factors.