INSIDERS

Jack Harvard



The Mayor



From his office in the small, colonial-style building called Willow Bend National Bank, bank president and Piano Mayor Jack Harvard sees more than upturned dirt. He knows it won’t be long before the land at the intersection of Preston and Parker roads is lined with commercial development supported by hordes of new homeowners. Harvard’s fledgling bank will be smack in the middle of it all, and that suits him just fine.

Some might say that Harvard’s reputation has come full circle. It was only eight years ago that he was best known as a “radical” homeowner, fighting commercial developers who wanted zoning changes that he believed would have hurt the desirability of his Piano neighborhood. After two terms as a Piano City Council member, one City Council race defeat and two years as mayor, Harvard is widely respected.

He gained attention last year as Piano’s representative to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Board. He says he fought to have a transit line drawn straight to Piano from downtown Dallas because he didn’t want to see the tracks stop at Richardson.

“I took a position on that because it looked for a while like it was suburbs against Dallas, and we really didn’t want that,” he said. “If downtown Dallas dies, Piano will die 20 years later, if that makes sense . . . That is why it is important to work together-not as suburbs against the city, but all of us as a region.”

Harvard knows that none of the transit plans will matter if Piano can’t attract a stronger business tax base. That’s why he’s so pleased with Electronic Data Systems’ plans to develop its headquarters there and Texas Instruments’ plans to develop a large office complex in Piano. It’s estimated that those corporations and related businesses will provide several thousand jobs in Piano by the year 2000.

Historically, Piano has been a bedroom community, which, Harvard says, is the reason that big business has shied away from building there. “What we are trying to do is turn Piano into a northern business hub so that there are as many people driving north as there are driving south each day,” he said.

His term as mayor has been easier than his four years as a Piano City Council member because he acts as a mediator rather than as an activist, he says. “As mayor, I’m not supposed to take a position, and I will not take a position on an issue unless it is extremely important that I have mass support. We had that need with DART. But as far as a zoning case . . . Let’s face it, if a zoning case goes this way or that way, it really doesn’t have much impact 20 years from now if a building is four stories or eight stories. My philosophy has been and will continue to be to try to work out our problems before they happen.

“One of the things we do now is we try to keep you from reading controversial things about Piano. The only [controversial] thing you’ve read about Piano in the last two years is the suicide deal. I get really irritated about that.”

Although the city may now be relatively free of controversy, Harvard raised a few eyebrows a year ago when he left NorthPark National Bank as its executive vice president to form Willow Bend National Bank.

“If I’ve done anything controversial, it has been that I’ve been able to read where the growth is going to go,” he says. “I’ve gone into a location where the growth is coming. What I did, frankly, is look at zoning maps; I looked at the demographics of both the city and the council of governments. I saw [that] the population center of Piano is going to be at the intersection of Parker and Preston. If that’s going to be the population center in the long term, the best place to have a bank is right here.”

Harvard has filed for reelection as Piano mayor and, as of last month, had no opponents. He says that if he wins, his second term will be his last taste of politics.