Following up on yesterday’s effusive Plano love fest, I wanted to point to some interesting points raised by Eric Nicholson on the blog formerly known as Unfair Park. Plano’s new comprehensive plan, which controversially calls for denser development along corridors and throughout the city, has drawn plenty of criticism from suburbanites who fear that more apartment dwellers in their communities could harm schools and property values. That hasn’t fazed Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere, who has been the champion of the Plano Tomorrow plan. Sure, he’s shown guts, dismissing opposition as “noise” and keeping the city focused and on track. But his leadership is all the more impressive considering the recent track record of suburban DFW mayors:
This is all much harder than LaRosiliere makes it look. During her tenure as Richardson’s mayor, Maczka advanced a similar position, arguing that her inner-ring suburb needed to remake itself as denser and more urban in order to survive as an attractive place to live in the 21st century, but her message was lost in the noise, first in her anti-apartment campaign stance, then in the fallout from the aforementioned scandal. LaRosiliere comes off better still when you compare him with North Texas’ most famous suburban mayor, Irving’s Beth Van Duyne, whose vision of leadership involves mining the more despicable veins of Tea Party nativism by trading Islamophobic conspiracy theories with Glenn Beck while trashing a 13-year-old constituent.
How he’s managed to do this while leading the largest city in Tea-drunk Collin County — the same county that repeatedly elected a politician as objectively awful as Ken Paxton — is a mystery, but it’s damn impressive. If he keeps it up, we may have to upgrade Plano’s status from crappy suburb to decent pseudo-city.
