OLAF GROWALD
Mayor Betsy Price, who’s stepping down from her office after 10 years, is Fort Worth Inc.’s inaugural Person of the Year for the full plate she attacked in 10 years as mayor — and for the tough job of navigating the last year and a half in the city’s history. The magazine — celebrating its sixth year in circulation — decided to name a Person of the Year for the first time in conjunction with our annual issue The 400: 400 of the Most Influential People in Fort Worth. The criteria were simple: The award will go annually to a person “who has demonstrated significant contribution to making Greater Fort Worth a better place to live and work, with emphasis placed on their contributions over the last year. The magazine staff proposed a short list, and then we put the question to 12 prominent people in the Fort Worth community and asked them to tell us who they thought should win this award — and to tell us at the same time if they thought we were off base and should be considering other people. Our panel quickly narrowed it down to three people, giving Mayor Price the most votes.
Price is a denizen of The 400, an issue our editorial staff has compiled and published for four years. It aims to identify highly influential people across the Fort Worth area, from arts and culture, to business, professions, nonprofits, philanthropy, government, and more. We have few objective criteria for defining influence and what it takes to make this list. It's certainly possible we've missed some people, but that's what makes the hunt so much fun for us every year.
Back to our Person of the Year.
Another of the three candidates our panel zeroed in on: the Fort Worth activist Opal Lee, who has spent years jawboning everyone within range about why the government needs to make June 19 a federal holiday commemorating the day Black Texans learned they were free. Lee walked from Fort Worth to Washington in 2016 to make the point.
And then there was Fort Worth restaurateur Jon Bonnell, who kept his restaurants afloat and employees employed with his first-into-market $40 COVID family meal packs, stood up for staff members confronted by customers angry over mask mandates, showed up at other restaurants for takeout and touted them to his robust Facebook following, and struck a conciliatory posture when Black Lives Matter protestors downtown marched by his restaurant. Customers lined up in droves for Bonnell’s meal packs, paying back some small measure of the goodwill he’s built for years in the community.
The magazine’s ownership had the last word but went with our panel. The conversation, for sure, was full. Lee is 94 and obtained the national spotlight for her quest. Visit Fort Worth had just given Lee its annual Hospitality Award for making Fort Worth a more inviting place to visit, and the New York Times last summer did a piece headlined “Opal Lee’s Juneteenth Vision Is Becoming Reality.” And the imperative on Bonnell: We felt it's certain he'll never face a year like this again.
Price tackled everything from budget crisis and underfunded employee pension, to race relations, voter apathy, public education, transportation, economic development, and kids’ fitness in 10 years in office.
Solving the underfunded pension took pressure off the city's bond rating and ensured the solvency of the fund.
When a highly visible police altercation prompted calls for reform, Price formed the city’s Race and Culture Task Force to examine inequity in the city.
When Price observed that relatively few people vote in city elections, she created the Steer FW young leaders’ initiative. Price invited citizens to engage with City Hall, holding regular walking and bicycling town halls and leading throngs of cyclists in a spirited ride down the new Chisholm Trail Parkway before its opening to cars.
Despite grumbling in some quarters, she signed the city on to the ultimately successful campaign to win Blue Zones Project certification for Fort Worth, a designation based on measures connected to healthy living and community. Price’s Fit Worth put healthy living in front of schoolchildren.
Many supporters advised Price to leave public education alone, but she tackled it as a major workforce and economic development issue. Public transportation was another issue on the mayor’s heaped plate; during Price’s tenure, the community launched TEXRail commuter rail from the Near Southside to DFW Airport.
And when COVID hit, Price was one of the region’s most prominent voices and faces in communicating mandates and encouraging people to wear masks and abide by other protocols. She formed the Fort Worth Now task force to figure out ways to help small business recover and search for new opportunity.
The magazine interviewed the mayor on a range of topics in late April.
Why Run for Mayor in the First Place?
“I was raised in a family that believed you take what you’ve been given and give it back to your community,” Price said. “And I ran for tax assessor because my business put me in that office, and it was a mess, and I said, for years, somebody needs to straighten this office out. And finally, my family and my clients said, ‘Well, you need to do that,’ and I had never thought about politics at all, or public, that type of service.”
Then friends urged her to run for mayor with the city’s budget picture strapped by recession and a troubled pension weighing heavily.
Price didn't want to run for mayor. “And finally, my family said, and my minister said, ‘Well, why not? You've got a door open. You should step through.’”
When, Fort Worth Now?
Price’s Fort Worth Now task force, chaired by Crescent Real Estate CEO John Goff and banker Elaine Agather and formed to help business recover from the pandemic and look for new opportunity, is drawing closer to determining what it should say is new opportunity, Price said.
“I think they’re about to decide the real niche is, let’s grow what we have here, and that in turn will make us more attractive to outside businesses coming in,” Price said. “The beauty of Fort Worth Now is that we were able to get CEOs to the table who have not traditionally. They’re running their business, and they haven’t been actively engaged with the chamber or with the city. This gave them a chance to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll help.’”
The task force early on helped get personal protective gear out into the community and get federal CARES Act money into the hands of small business. “We weren’t going to hold it back to see if we could use it on the city,” she said.
The Fort Worth CPAs and local bankers’ association were recruited to run volunteer clinics for small business. “So many of these small businesses have never done a profit and loss statement,” Price said. “Grants require a P&L to show that you’ve really lost some money this year.”
Race Relations
A police altercation, in which a woman called the police but ended up being the one in handcuffs, prompted Price to appoint a Race and Culture Task Force to examine inequities in the city. The council adopted virtually all of the recommendations, including the hiring of a civilian police monitor to, among other things, monitor citizens’ complaints and review policies and procedures. Kim Neal, who held a similar job in Cincinnati, is Fort Worth’s new police monitor. More contentious was the panel’s recommendation for a citizen review board and whether the mayor and council will put one in place.
“I don’t spend a lot of time looking back on regrets,” Price said. “I think what you do, you learn from what you did and you hopefully get better at it. I’ve said before, my biggest regret was how we initially handled the Jacqueline Craig issue. That was our first really big racial tension issue. I don’t think they were as prepared for it as they should’ve been. We learned a lot from that.”
She gives the city higher ratings for its response to the shooting of Atatiana Jefferson in her home by a Fort Worth officer called to the home at night to investigate an open front door, entered the lot from the rear, and ended up shooting Jefferson through a window. A grand jury indicted the officer on a murder charge. “We did much better” in terms of the city’s response, Price said.
Price said Fort Worth is no different from other big cities in racial tensions. “I think part of what Fort Worth does do well is that we tend to have more open dialogue,” she said. But she added, “I don’t think race relations are ever going to change until everybody gets a piece of this. The city can’t drive what happens in race relationships. We can convene, we can facilitate, but it’s got to be person to person, business to business, if you’re going to really change this culture of this country.”
Lagging Kids
To help address lagging performance of children in Fort Worth’s public schools, Price helped organize Read Fort Worth — a partnership of the city, Fort Worth schools, and private sector to recruit and send volunteers into the elementary schools to read with students who are behind. When the initiative was started, 34% of Fort Worth ISD third graders were reading on level, which the city’s thought leaders identified as a major workforce and economic development issue. The initiative struggled early on to find the volunteers, and COVID has thrown literacy rates back. The schools and Read Fort Worth will host summer programs for children and visit the homes of 1,000 students who were enrolled last school year, but not this year.
The initial goal of 100% of third graders reading on level by 2025 seems unattainable. “It was a hugely optimistic goal, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” Price said.
She made clear the costs of not containing the problem. “It’s workforce,” Price said. “Education is economic development. Education is crime. Education is poverty. Without an educated workforce, you can’t recruit businesses, you can’t maintain businesses, you can’t grow your college number of graduates in your city. Kids who don’t have a good education tend to be much more involved in crime, drop out of school; they’re a lot more likely to end up in prison. And the poverty level just continues to grow the lower your education achievement, and who wants that for a child? To not be able to succeed.”