Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 23
Former Lariettes Invited to Dance Again • Coppell ISD Voters May Consider Tax Measure • Coppell Taxpayers May Pay a Bit More • Coppell Really Wants to “Eat Mor Chikin”
You are reading a special edition of the Coppell Chronicle, as this is the first one to carry a double byline. Please allow me to introduce Samantha Handshy, this newsletter’s inaugural intern. She just graduated from Coppell High School, where she was on the staff of KCBY-TV for three years, and she’s about to enroll at UT-San Antonio with a journalism degree as her goal.
I had no intention of taking on an intern this summer, but Samantha sent me a persuasive email that included a copy of her “extended” resume. I thought to myself, “You know what? I like this kid’s gumption. Let’s see how this goes.”
So far, it’s going pretty well. Samantha wrote the article about the Lariettes in this edition, and she’ll pen at least one article in each of the August editions.
Former Lariettes Invited to Dance Again
Jaqueline Tapella will never forget her time as a Lariette. She made some of her best friends while kicking and dancing with the Coppell High School drill team.
“High school is a very important time in your life when you’re trying to figure out who you are,” said the 2001 graduate. “Having had the opportunity to stand alongside other girls and help and support each other, while also making people happy watching us dance, was a really special time.”
Tapella will soon have an opportunity to relive those special times. The award-winning drill team will celebrate its 60th anniversary on Aug. 30 with a special performance featuring Lariettes of all ages.
“A ton of people are excited just to see each other again and think about old memories,” Tapella said.
The Aug. 30 performance, which will happen at halftime of the Cowboys’ game against Sachse, will include the current Lariettes and their director, Hayley Mitchell, an alumna who graduated in 2003.
“We’ve never done something like this before, so just knowing that we have so many alumni that want to be a part of this event is really cool,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell’s two sisters, Hillary Clark and Cali Hoffman, are also former Lariettes. Clark is the director of the Silver Stars junior varsity drill team, and she thinks it is crucial for the current Lariettes to connect with their past.
“When you’re a part of something so big, you want to know what happened 20, 30 years ago,” said Clark, who also graduated in 2003. “No matter what your time on Lariettes looked like, it’s the experience and the memories that will bring everyone together.”
All of the alums who register by this Wednesday will be brought together for a rehearsal on Aug. 24. The Aug. 30 performance, which coincides with the Lariettes’ annual Spaghetti Dinner fundraiser, will be followed by a celebration tea the morning of Aug. 31.
The Lariettes were kicking it long before the opening of Buddy Echols Field in 1989. Their history dates to 1964, when Coppell’s population was less than 1,000. Since then, the Lariettes have remained grounded in Coppell spirit.
“The generations of sisterhood and family that the Lariettes bring is unlike any other organization,” senior Captain Emme Ratliff said. “It is important to keep the Lariettes rooted in tradition because it preserves the foundation the team was built on. It keeps our values and identity as a whole intact.”
Leigh Walker, who graduated from CHS in 1991, is one of many former Lariettes who are ready to return to the field come August.
“To be able to connect with people that came before you and that came after you — all doing the same thing of getting together to work hard, have a common goal, and put on an amazing performance for our community — is what it’s all about,” Walker said.
Like Tapella, Walker returned to Coppell to raise her children, who include two CHS graduates and a freshman at CHS9. Walker has poured her heart and soul into the district as a Coppell ISD trustee for the past eight years, and she’s ready to put her heart and soul back into being a Lariette.
“You’re a part of the Coppell community as long as you want to be,” she said.
But if you want to be a part of this performance, you have to register by Wednesday. Click here to do so.
OK, this is Dan back on the keyboard. How about a hand for Ms. Handshy, everybody? Her ensuing articles will be about topics that are far-less glamorous than the Lariettes: DART’s Silver Line trains, a controversial zoning case not far from those trains’ tracks, and homelessness. Those articles will be emailed to paid subscribers only, so if you’re a free subscriber, consider upgrading for only $30 per year.
Speaking of topics that aren’t so glamorous, let’s talk taxes.
Coppell ISD Voters May Consider Tax Measure
It appears likely that Coppell ISD voters will see a tax-ratification proposition on the ballot in November.
Before a school district’s trustees can call a voter-approved tax-ratification election (VATRE), the district must hire an outside firm to perform an efficiency audit. On Monday, Coppell ISD’s trustees were briefed on the results of an audit performed by Rutherford Taylor & Company.
The Greenville-based accounting firm compared Coppell ISD to eight peer districts — including Southlake’s Carroll ISD, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, and Highland Park ISD — in a variety of financial categories such as expenditures per student, teacher salaries, and unassigned fund balance. Bottom line: The auditors found that Coppell ISD spends its money efficiently.
“Y’all are right in line with everybody else,” Rutherford Taylor’s Robert Lake said. “There’s nothing that stands out to make you skew from basically doing the best job that you can do with the finances that you have.”
Also on Monday, Chief Communications Officer Angela Brown briefed the trustees on the results of a recent survey. Last month, 300 Coppell ISD voters — including yours truly — were asked whether they would support increasing the district’s maintenance-and-operations (M&O) tax rate by about 3 cents. (See “Coppell ISD Surveys Voters About Tax Hike” in Vol. 4, No. 18.) The slide below demonstrates how the level of support increased from 38 percent to 61 percent over the course of the survey, as the respondents were given more information.
“You can see that with education and information, we were able to move the vote,” Brown said.
Brown reminded the trustees that a similar survey was conducted before the 2023 bond election, and the level of support in that survey never got to 50 percent. Yet all four propositions in the 2023 bond package were approved by voters, with levels of support ranging from 52.5 percent to 64.5 percent.
Coppell ISD trustees met twice last week. By the time they got together on Thursday, Chief Financial Officer Diana Sircar had received the latest certified property values from the Dallas Central Appraisal District. Because Coppell ISD’s values rose by 10.3 percent, the state will mandate a 4.7-cent reduction to its M&O tax rate. So even if voters approve a 3.17-cent increase in November, the M&O rate would still decline by 1.53 cents.
Most of the trustees seemed to be in favor of putting the question on the ballot. If approved by voters, the VATRE would generate an extra $2.4 million for the district after the state recaptures its portion for Robin Hood.
“We’ve got to start pulling every lever we have and turning every stone over,” Board President David Caviness said during Monday’s meeting. Although Caviness expressed some concerns about conducting a VATRE just 18 months after a bond election, he said he views them in the same light: “It’s not us saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna raise your taxes.’ It’s us going to the community saying, ‘Here’s the case. You know, here’s the reason why we think we need to do this,’ but it’s ultimately their decision.”
Trustee Jobby Mathew echoed a portion of Caviness’ comments.
“When we started this budget process of identifying what we need to do, I think one of the promises we made to the community was we would explore every revenue-generating opportunity there was,” he said. “This is our largest lever.”
The trustees are expected to officially call the VATRE during their Aug. 19 meeting.
Coppell Taxpayers May Pay a Bit More
It appears likely that Coppell residents will pay more property taxes to the city next year.
During the City Council’s second budget workshop on Monday, Director of Strategic Financial Engagement Kim Tiehen said it looks like the city’s average homeowner with a homestead exemption will pay an additional $96.29 per year, or an extra $8.02 per month. Those are preliminary numbers. Tiehen could not provide the council with an official tax rate calculation, because the city had not received the certified values from the Dallas and Denton appraisal districts. She expected to receive those on Thursday.
“We will lock ourselves in a room and calculate your tax rate and have that for you next Monday,” Tiehen said.
The third and final budget workshop is scheduled for 6 p.m. tomorrow. The council will vote on the budget and tax rate for fiscal 2025 on either Aug. 27 or Sept. 10.
On Monday, Tiehen told the council that the general fund’s expenditures in the proposed budget for fiscal 2025 would be 7.7 percent higher than those in the adopted budget for fiscal 2024.
For example, Tiehen said the Culture & Recreation portion of the budget would increase by 4 percent due to higher salaries, increased electricity costs, the replacement of an automated system for handling materials at the Cozby Library, and new furniture at the Coppell Senior and Community Center.
Although the Community Development portion of the budget would include higher salaries and two new positions — a senior code enforcement officer and an economic development coordinator — Tiehen said that portion would decrease by 1 percent because the amount of money allocated to a food truck park is being cut in half, from $1 million to $500,000.
Salaries and benefits accounted for 60 percent of the general fund’s adopted budget for fiscal 2024. That category accounts for 69 percent of the proposed budget for fiscal 2025, and the dollar amount for salaries and benefits would go up by 12 percent, from $45,637,464 to $51,238,235.
Council Member Ramesh Premkumar asked whether that increase is primarily attributed to cost-of-living raises and the two new positions. City Manager Mike Land said about half of the increase can be linked to raising the salaries for the top third of the city’s police officers and firefighters, as Coppell is “significantly behind” its peer cities in that respect.
Near the end of Monday’s workshop, Council Member Biju Mathew asked this question: “How do we explain to the citizens, ‘Hey, we got this much increase in property valuation, but we are still spending more money and you have to pay more’?”
Land had an immediate answer: “One explanation would be that it costs us more to do business,” he said, citing the increased costs of electricity, gasoline, and concrete. The budget workshops are an opportunity for council members to remove line items or projects, but nobody had done so. “If you don’t want us to do certain things,” Land said, “it’s pretty simple to come to you and say, ‘These are less. We’ll just do less.’”
As you may have heard, Coppell was ranked fifth on a list of the 10 Best U.S. Suburbs published by Travel + Leisure this month.
“You don’t make the fifth-best place to live in the country by cutting your budget down,” Mayor Wes Mays said during Monday’s workshop.
Mays referenced the Travel + Leisure article again on Tuesday, when he invited residents to tomorrow’s final budget workshop: “Please join us as we work diligently to ensure that Coppell maintains its high-quality services, [and] that number five ranking, while also respecting your pocketbook.”
Coppell Really Wants to “Eat Mor Chikin”
Chick-fil-A’s locations in Grapevine, Irving, and Lewisville aren’t far from Coppell’s borders, but we really want the city to have its own fast-food joint that’s closed on Sundays.
A recent survey asked more than 1,300 residents what restaurant — or type of restaurant — they’d most like to see in Coppell. Chick-fil-A was the only eatery specified in the responses, and it was the most popular answer by a country mile; it was mentioned by 21 percent of the respondents. Tying for second place, at 14 percent, were steakhouses and Italian restaurants.
The city’s Community Development Department commissioned the survey, which was conducted in May. When presenting the results to the City Council on Tuesday, Project Coordinator Katie Blust said 400 responses were needed to make the survey statistically valid, but 1,317 people participated.
When asked which Coppell restaurants they frequent the most, 9 percent of respondents said Anamia’s Tex-Mex, and 7 percent said J. Macklin’s Grill. The other top answers were McDonald’s (5 percent), San Daniele Italian Eatery & Bar (5 percent), Hemingway Brunch (4 percent), Ole’s Tex-Mex (4 percent), and Victor’s Wood Grill (4 percent).
Anybody who’s dined at Hard Eight Pit BBQ, or just driven by it, knows the barbecue restaurant often has a line out the door, but Mayor Wes Mays noted that Hard Eight did not even appear on the slides shown during Tuesday’s meeting. Council Member Ramesh Premkumar pointed out that the more-detailed dashboard, which you can download below, indicates that Hard Eight was mentioned by only 2 percent of respondents.
“So it’s pulling people from outside our city,” Mays said. “I knew it was, but I didn’t know it was that much.”
(Side note: I’m told that Coppell’s newest restaurant, the Double Yolk Cafe, will start serving breakfast and lunch at 605 N. Denton Tap Road on Tuesday.)
The survey also asked what retail stores — or types of retail stores — people would like to see in Coppell. As with the restaurants, only one specific store was mentioned by name: 16 percent of respondents said they want Coppell to have an H-E-B. Faithful readers will recall that we may be getting an H-E-B in the Irving portion of Coppell ISD, but nothing is official yet.
Although H-E-B was the only specific answer to that retail question, it was not the most popular answer. Supermarkets or grocery stores were mentioned in general by 28 percent of respondents, followed by clothing and apparel stores at 23 percent.
Specialty retail stores were right behind H-E-B at 13 percent, and specialty food stores were further down the list at 5 percent. Mays wondered why ethnic grocery stores didn’t merit a category of their own. Further proving his bona fides as a data analyst, Premkumar noted that only 4 percent of respondents were South Asians.
“They just didn’t care to take the survey,” Premkumar said, “so I’m very disappointed.”
(Unlike the randomly selected respondents to the Coppell ISD survey about a VATRE, anybody could volunteer to participate in this survey.)
Blust said the city intends to hire a consultant “to determine how feasible it might be to attract some of the desired stores and restaurants mentioned in this survey.” If you’re a consultant who wants in on that action, you have until 10 a.m. on Aug. 6 to submit your bid.
Updates from the Sports Desk
• Emily Witt has been named the girls athletic coordinator for Coppell ISD and head softball coach for Coppell High School. Witt will be the fifth person in five seasons to handle the latter role. Mike Dyson wrapped up a six-year stint coaching the Cowgirls in 2021. He was followed by Ashley Minick in 2022, Kim LeComte in 2023, and Robbie Moen in 2024. Witt, who previously coached at George Ranch High School near Houston, will be introduced at 6:30 p.m. on Monday in the Coppell High School Lecture Hall.
• Ravyn Terry has been promoted to head girls basketball coach at Coppell High School. She’s replacing Ryan Murphy, who took over the boys basketball program after leading the girls for five seasons.
• Ben Dodson, a 2015 graduate of Coppell High School, has been named the new head boys coach of the Coppell Lacrosse Association. He spent the past five years assisting his predecessor, Matt Mueller, who retired.
• The U.S. indoor women’s volleyball team, which includes Coppell High School graduate Chiaka Ogbogu, will open its Olympic schedule with a match against China that will air at 10 a.m. Central on Monday on USA. Their other preliminary matches will be against Serbia (10 a.m. Central on Wednesday on USA) and France (6 a.m. Central on Aug. 4 on NBC).
• Coppell resident Hannah Bilka, who recently signed a three-year contract with the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s team in Boston, was celebrated at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. After Mayor Wes Mays read a proclamation in her honor, Mayor Pro Tem Kevin Nevels asked Bilka to autograph his hockey stick.
Chronicle Crumbs
• If your commute involves Freeport Parkway or Southwestern Boulevard, take note: The contractors working on DART’s Silver Line tracks plan to completely close a stretch of Freeport for four days (Aug. 2-5) before completely closing a stretch of Southwestern for four days (Aug. 9-12).
• Although the numbers weren’t finalized, Coppell City Manager Mike Land said on Tuesday that it appeared the total cost of cleaning up storm debris would be about $275,000. That number could have been much higher. (See “Council Assigns $400K to Storm Cleanup” in Vol. 4, No. 18.)
• Dallas College threw a lot of public school districts for a loop by adjusting the dates of its next spring break, but Coppell ISD’s trustees on Monday opted to stand pat. The district’s spring break will still be March 17-21.
• On Monday, Yanet Cardoza was named the new principal of Denton Creek Elementary School. She’ll replace Chris Gollner, who’s moving across the parking lot to Coppell Middle School North, because Greg Axelson has moved across town to the Coppell High School Ninth Grade Campus. Denton Creek has been a Dual Language Immersion school since 2009, and Cardoza will be its first bilingual principal.
• Denton Creek has a new Little Free Library, courtesy of one of its former students, Aman Kaistha. The son of Amit and Pam Kaistha also built a Little Free Library for Wilson Elementary as part of his Eagle Scout project.
Community Calendar
Teen Movie Monday: Teenagers are invited to a screening of Hidden Figures at 3 p.m. on Monday at the Cozby Library and Community Commons.
Teen Trivia: Teenagers are invited to show off their knowledge of the last 50 years at 1 p.m. on Tuesday at the Cozby Library and Community Commons.
Greater Tuna: Theatre Coppell will stage six more performances of the beloved play about the wacky inhabitants of Texas’ third smallest town. The next show is scheduled for 8 p.m. on Friday at the Coppell Arts Center.
Caregiving Heroes: This support group for people who are assisting loved ones with aging or other concerns will meet at 10 a.m. on Saturday at First United Methodist Church of Coppell.
Mastering Your Voice: The Coppell Community Chorale will offer a two-part workshop on Aug. 5 and 12. Both sessions will begin at 7 p.m. at the Coppell Arts Center.
Viviz: The Korean band’s world tour includes a stop at the Coppell Arts Center at 7 p.m. on Aug. 7. The marketing materials say Viviz “are prepared to do a full musical takeover of your city,” so stand apprised of that.
Spotlight on Broadway: The Coppell Community Chorale will perform songs from Heathers, Avenue Q, Kinky Boots, Six, Hamilton, and other musicals at 7 p.m. on Aug. 17 at the Coppell Arts Center.