Coppell Government

The City of Coppell is a great place to live. Coppell is run in a Council-Manager format in which we have elected council members and an elected mayor, who is the head of the council, they then hire a city manager who runs the day to day operation of the city. The Mayor of the city of Coppell is Karen Hunt, and the City Manager is Clay Phillips. The mayor is elected in a general election, in which everyone in the city votes for one mayoral candidate. The City Manager is appointed by the Mayor and City Council.

Yes the city has a sex offenders list, but it was very difficult to find, and navigate. The city website is somewhat difficult to get around and it took some digging to find the things I was looking for. In the past, we have had issues with the flood plain behind our house and did not find any useful answers until we finally talked to the city manager.

I did not vote in the last local election because I was not able to. From my point of view I really don’t see much of the decisions that the city council makes, but everything that I do see, it seems like they are making good decisions. One thing that I really appreciate that the City Council decided long ago is the sign and building regulations in Coppell. I love the fact that all of the commercial buildings in Coppell are red brick, with similar styles. It is also very nice that businesses are not allowed to have large signs; all of the signs are less than 5 feet tall. There have also been some bad things that the City has done. One of the biggest mistakes that they made was concerning the North Lake property. It has kind of been no-man’s land since the power plant has been there, but once the power plant shut down, the land went for sale, and many Coppell residents wanted for Coppell to buy the land so that the lake could be used for boating once again. But Coppell was unable to purchase the land and Dallas decided to allow thousands of town homes to be built on the land (Which is under Coppell ISD but not the City of Coppell) causing Coppell ISD to have to build more schools and bringing lower income housing to the Coppell area. I will most likely not vote in future local elections because I will be at college in Waco.

I think that in most cases Local government has a much greater affect on us then national government does. Local government can affect your day to day life immediately while the national government, even if they do something that can affect me directly, it seems to take ages for anything to actually change.