(Updated at 7:30 a.m. 6/13 to include Ann Bacchus' denial that she spit in the direction of opponents at a polling place.)
Facing perhaps the biggest challenge in Plano City Hall’s history, leaders and residents need industrial-sized shovels to dig out of a manure-slinging municipal election season that oozed with disdain, nastiness and even hate.
Throughout the spring, Plano’s City Council races, which mercifully ended with Saturday’s runoff, hit new lows of bad behavior from the candidates and their supporters. The worst of what we saw in other campaigns across North Texas, including Dallas, didn’t come close to the garbage that flew in Plano.
Saturday’s defeat of council member Ron Kelley by Shelby Williams and Lily Bao’s victory over Ann Bacchus for an open seat means Mayor Harry LaRosiliere’s long-held majority support has evaporated. Now municipal decision-making must move forward with a council divided, 4-to-4, between LaRosiliere and his bloc versus those elected leaders who are likely to oppose him on key contentious issues.
Tie votes won’t mean a measure technically failed, but no action will result. So council members who oppose, say, approval of tax incentives for a new commercial development effectively would win the day. While some are hopeful that a 4-4 council can lead to grand compromises, a “just say no” faction would actually have the edge.
Plano set itself up long ago for that potential governing gridlock. While most North Texas suburbs have councils with odd numbers of council members, Plano established six seats in 1961; a 1988 charter election increased that number to eight.
The city apparently didn’t consider that a day might come when an overwhelming council majority wouldn’t see every important issue the same way. The new council almost certainly will agree on most decisions before it, but the topics that have torn the city apart in recent years — particularly taxes, traffic, high-density development — now could end in standstills.
I’ve written repeatedly about Plano residents’ belief that LaRosiliere and his council bloc weren’t listening to them. Those council members’ arguments — that they are doing what’s best for Plano — have struck me as perfectly reasonable. But the most recent election results show a majority of residents feel otherwise.
Many of the voters I talked with said this election was a referendum on the development-friendly faction of the council, which they believe has arrogantly rammed growth down residents’ throats. And Gov. Greg Abbott’s endorsement of Williams and Bao sealed the deal for many voters.
What passed for campaigning was a smutty mess: Homophobic and Islamophobic comments on social media. Whispers that developers would walk away from important projects. Statements such as “evil people who claim to be Christians” and candidate signs and literature defaced with “liar” and the 666 “sign of the beast.” Accusations of law-breaking and political conspiracies involving conservative Empower Texans and liberal out-of-state donors. In the final days, Bacchus' opponents captured video of her appearing to spit in the direction of opponents at a polling place. Bacchus denied she did so.
Amid the false accusations, name-calling and shameless behavior, I was most struck by the absolute absence of middle ground. Supporters of each candidate were certain theirs was the champion and the opponent was the devil incarnate.
Now Williams and Bao, whom voters put into office on a platform of “fiscal fresh air,” will face the hard challenge of governing. They’ll have to figure out what to cut from the city budget to keep their low-taxes pledge.
LaRosiliere referenced those promises — and how residents will feel about service cuts that accompany budget-slashing — when we talked Tuesday. With the campaign over, he is focused on governance instead of politics. His colleagues should be too, he said. He said his goal is to “bring everyone on the council on board for the common cause of the betterment of our city.”
Council member Anthony Ricciardelli, whom the mayor’s foes helped elect in 2017, expressed similar optimism. He sees the record runoff voting as a sign of Plano’s robust civic engagement.
“Now I look forward to working alongside my current colleagues and newly elected colleagues to achieve great things," he said.
Outside the Plano municipal building, a lot of people are muttering the oft-circulated Facebook adage that “Mr. Rogers did not adequately prepare me for the people in my neighborhood.” But a little talk is bubbling here and there about how residents themselves move forward from an election that, at times, devolved into outright hate.
Michael Thomas, a Plano resident since 2010 and a member of the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, supported the two candidates who lost in Saturday’s runoff. But he is one of those who hopes for a silver lining in the new council. “Both sides now will have to work hard, and together, to find common ground rather than one faction always getting its way,” he said.
Thomas is putting together a “Plano politics happy hour” on July 17 to bring together residents, especially the most outspoken grassroots leaders in the election warfare.
“If you can’t be civil in this conversation, you can’t stay,” he told me. “But I believe, on all sides, we want what’s best for our city. So we’ve got to find some middle ground — to find ways to disagree better.”
Thomas is right. Conversations that amount to you're stupid, I'm not going to talk to you anymore, which I've heard from plenty of residents, won't get Plano anywhere.
For starters, everyone must be honest that no candidate in the most recent election — winner or loser — ran a completely clean race.
Thomas is particularly bothered that neither side, including the candidates themselves, blew the whistle on out-of-bounds plays. “We’ve got to, both sides, step up and say this kind of stuff can’t happen or else everyone runs the nastiest campaign possible in order to get in,” he said. “And that’s just terrible for any city.”
He also wants to see city politics get back to a focus on local problems and how to resolve them.
Yoram Solomon, who has lived in Plano since 2003 and recently served on the PISD board of trustees, also hopes to see compromise, both from the council and among area residents.
He told me that the 4-4 split is “the best thing that can happen to the city because none of the council members wants a stalemate.”
Although Solomon supported the two runoff winners, he is sickened by the dirty tactics of the die-hard supporters of all the candidates. While 90 percent of residents aren’t part of the extreme camps, “gravity is pulling people toward those positions,” he said.
Solomon spoke out strongly before the runoff about LaRosiliere’s part in the campaign, including the mayor’s references to Williams and Bao as “the hate slate” and to the opposition as the angry crowd. “Feeding fuel to this fire is not something the mayor should have done,” Solomon told me.
When I asked LaRosiliere if he had second thoughts about his “hate slate” Facebook comment, he acknowledged that maybe he shouldn’t have said it in the heat of the battle but “I certainly felt that way.”
I’m not keen on seeing any elected official stoop to the level of rabble-rousers. But if the new leaders genuinely want to effectively serve the city’s more than 286,000 residents, Plano will rebound from this rocky political moment. For now, I’m taking all the council members at their word that they want what’s best for their city.
I wish I had that much confidence that residents on both sides of the city’s political divide can heal from this ugly election.
