Paul Meltzer is currently running for Denton City Council District 3 in a runoff election on June 10th. I spoke with him before a volunteer meeting on the day early voting began.
Are you originally from Denton?
I’m originally from upstate New York. I had a job as senior vice president for a company that had offices in midtown Manhattan, Louisville, and Dallas. I had in mind to retire at 50, and my wife was looking for a job and decided to go with tenure-track teaching. When we looked at the ads, we saw one for University of North Texas, and I told her I really liked Texas. She figured she at least needed to practice interviewing, but that was the only interview she ever did, and now she’s tenured here. So we’ve been in Denton coming on 10 years now.
What initially made you want to run for office?
It really came down to a couple of votes that I strongly disagreed with the incumbent on. I felt that “Gee, somebody ought to oppose her.” I asked several other people to do it, because I was ready to write someone a check, but nobody was willing to do it. It’s really quite an absurd job, because it’s basically full time and no pay. I mean who could do it? It’s quite demanding, and you get to lose half your friends, so there’s that. I realized that actually I could do it. I had the time, inclination, and relevant experience. But when you go through the process of getting ready to run, you have to distill what is your vision for the city, what is the nexus of your positions, that you can explain to everybody else. So far it’s been a 7-month interview for a volunteer job where your character gets questioned when you basically just want to be of service.
What are the reasons you came up with? What do you want to accomplish?
A lot of it comes down to a concept of wanting to manage the growth that is happening in Denton, in such a way that it doesn’t lose its essential character, and if possible it is enhanced. So in a nutshell what I say is I want Denton to become better, not just bigger. So how you do that is you have to have a clear perception, a shared perception, of what makes Denton special and see how you translate that into economic development policy. Because I think it would be extremely easy to make piecemeal decisions that steamroll the uniqueness right out of the town and it become just like Frisco or any other suburb north of Dallas. To my mind, a lot of that is based on the presence of the universities. It’s based on arts, research, students, and hopefully leads to diverse and interesting homegrown retail and dining that comes out of the presence of that community.
So when you look at the economic and development policy, it’s all upside down if you think those things are what are special about Denton and part of what makes it an attractive place to live and visit. The development policy is all about attracting really big businesses, and the first line of the policy says that it’s to enhance the quality of life in Denton, which I agree with, but I don’t see how what we do accomplishes that. So I want to remove the bias against small businesses. I want to give points for distinctiveness, and for adding walkability to neighborhoods. I want to help create conditions for more walkable and interesting areas for independent small businesses.
There’s been talk online of creating a Bolivar Arts District, which could be our version of Bishop Arts, or there’s talk of revitalizing Historic Prairie Street. There’s lot of opportunities to revitalize in Denton. And to the extent that we do need more intensive infill, which is the term that basically means apartments downtown, instead of plopping them anywhere within striking distance of the universities and potentially destroying these well preserved traditional neighborhoods near the universities, which I think is also part of the character. I’ve been talking about how the area west of UNT, Cement City, is ripe for redevelopment. There’s nothing really to preserve there. I say make a cool, vibrant, urban neighborhood there. Go 5 or 6 stories, include first floor retail, parking structures, green spaces, office space that could be used for tech firms that relate to research.
Coming from spending 30 years of my life going from manager to senior vice president, I’ve lived with the responsibility for fiscal discipline and when you come from that background and see how municipal government is run, it can be a little hair-raising. So I have an equally strong urge to bring some professional management perspective to the managerial oversight that city council provides. So that’s kind of the essence of it. And the last part is that there’s a habitual tenor of city politics of opposition. I don’t quite know how it got started, but it’s always warfare with the battlelines drawn. My background mostly as a new product exec is just not about that. It’s about dealing with the people you have disagreements with, and generating more and more ideas until you find one that everyone can get behind. To me that’s how you get to the best answers. I want to be a part of a city that has that sense of inclusion and creative problem solving. Because I think we have so many bright interesting people who want to contribute.
How did it feel when you saw the results come in on the day of the initial election?
I was watching the results of early voting come in for several days. My former opponent Jason Cole and I would watch the monsoon of votes come in from Robson Ranch, and it was a little difficult getting out of bed some days. On election day I was pretty ready to have a soulful evening with the supporters, talking about it not being an ending but a beginning. The first thing you learn on election day is the results of early voting, and we learned that Don Duff was right at 50%, and we knew that the Robson vote was probably done. Now I actually did much better than people think in Robson, because I relate to them very much in life stage and background, but we knew that was Don’s strength to put it mildly. So if he was at 50%, there was no way it would go up from there, so it just slowly confirmed we’d be in a runoff. It was quite dramatic. It helps now that we’re in early voting again, and we’re experiencing the same pattern again, lots of enthusiasm on facebook, not a lot of voting from non-Robson precincts. I remember my reaction seeing the first day’s voting roster in May was that most of the people who were voting from the precinct I live in, were people who had either been in my house, or I had been in their house, and I had the keen awareness that I don’t think I’d been in 1,200 people’s houses, so I knew it’d be uphill.
How has the campaign affected you personally?
Remarkably so, to be quite honest. I’m not a particularly outgoing person, and my campaign has attracted many shy people who’ve gone with me on this journey of being as open as we can be, and just connecting with people. Some people think that a campaign is about the numbers of connections you make, and I disagree with that, I think it’s about the number of high quality connections you make. Voting in municipal elections is aberrant behavior. Most people don’t do it, less than 10%. Often times people only do it if you’ve made a very strong connection with them, and their values, and given them a very plausible reason to feel that voting is going to be worth their time. So I have learned to just be as open as possible to understanding what people face, their frustrations and their aspirations. I try to transmit that commitment to having an open heart to them and all our volunteers as well. Staying like that for a long period of time is something that changes you. It was something a lot of the other city council candidates would talk about with each other. I have this empathy with anyone who’s gone through it. I don’t mean to be too grand about it, because it’s just a city council race in a small city, but it is a very cool experience that opens you up to other people.
Early voting is open until June 6th at the Denton County Elections Administration building. Regular voting is June 10th at Northlakes Recreation Center. For more voting information, check out VoteDenton.com.
