by Wendy Davis
After she invited me to help so that I could bring in additional resources, we worked to gradually grow the program to the point that it is now serving approximately seven hundred kids at no cost to their parents. It partners for facility space with the Fort Worth school district, which provides the use of school buildings and helps, along with the parks department, to staff the program with trained child-development folks who work to provide a summer program of learning enrichment as well as recreation. My most important role was to secure city funding for the program, and I proudly succeeded and also secured Mobile Summer Rec as sacred ground; even when the budget would ebb and flow, even when times were tight, Mobile Summer Rec always got what it needed. We, along with Roberta, Fernando, and the committed staff of our parks department, made sure of it. It remains one of my proudest shared accomplishments during the time I served on the city council.
One of the most poignant experiences with the program came very early in its development. Roberta had arranged for field trips to occur on most Fridays. But the trip costs would have to be borne by the parents. I had come, at Roberta’s invitation, to welcome the parents and kids to the first day of the camp that year, and I will never forget watching a mother have to explain to her two children, who’d been jumping up and down with excitement as they read off the field-trip opportunities from the flyer, that they would not be able to participate. She couldn’t afford the costs for zoo admission, museum admission, or admission to the public swimming pool. I could see the crushing disappointment in her face, and I left the park that day determined to do something about it.
As soon as I was back in my council office, I got on the phone, calling generous community leaders who I knew would be willing to make donations to the field-trip program. I raised enough money to fund the field trips for every child who wanted to participate. And every year after that, two months before camp started, I’d send out fund-raising letters and manage to get the field trips underwritten. I’m proud to say that the person who won election to that seat after I stepped down, Joel Burns, continued to work to keep the program funded and raise money for the field trips. And he’s taken it to a whole new level of success.
I also had the privilege of working on big-picture things—in my second term in office, Mayor Kenneth Barr appointed me the chair of the powerful Housing and Economic Development Committee, and I became part of the team to pitch companies to move to Fort Worth. I learned a great deal in the role, about the power of public-private partnerships and the ability to stimulate job creation and investment through public participation. I was also proud to work with our able and talented economic development staff to structure the agreements so that companies that failed to hold up their end of the bargain in exchange for the public dollars they’d received to fund a project—creating a certain number of jobs; using local companies and minority- and women-owned businesses during and after construction, among other things—would lose their public funding through “claw back” mechanisms we would employ to reduce their funding in proportion to their failures. Through that role I was able to play a vital part in shaping the growth of my community. Today, there are many projects I can look at with pride, knowing I helped to make them happen. It felt just like the end of a long day in my grandma’s garden, when we sat on the porch and surveyed our handiwork—economic development gave me the opportunity to experience that same satisfaction of the benefit of hard work well done.
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It was never easy, though. Guided by what I’d learned in the Warren Court class, I worked to understand why people believed what they believed, especially within the council itself—and especially when dealing with one of our brashest and most conservative members, Chuck Silcox. Chuck had been on the council for many years and used his overbearing size and loud voice to intimidate his way to getting what he wanted. Needless to say, he and I butted heads quite a bit. I believed in development standards—meaning I believed in sustainable building standards for commercial and residential development, he did not; I believed in the use of public-private partnerships to stimulate investment and job creation, he did not; I believed in zoning standards that would concentrate mixed-use developments into our urban core, he did not. Time and again, I would find myself on the receiving end of his booming voice and his imposing stature. But I never backed down.
Later I discovered that behind Chuck’s brusque exterior, he had a soft heart for animals and for people struggling to make ends meet. In other words, he had a soft spot for the vulnerable, and eventually I would learn why: a close family member of his was homeless and an alcoholic. Understanding that he could be reasoned with when talking about how people could fall victim to the harsh actions of others, I was proud to work with him on expanding our anti-discrimination ordinance and to join him one evening on the council dais in doing so. Chuck had come so far on the issue of adding sexual orientation to the ordinance that he was not only the last vote and therefore the deciding vote, but he actually made the motion for passage we needed, which was hugely significant. Though he and I continued to oppose each other on a variety of issues, and though we could still have some good old-fashioned knock-down, drag-out fights, we became friends. True friends with a real respect for each other. I was deeply saddened when he succumbed to illness and passed away in 2008. And I was proud to attend the grand opening the following year of a new animal shelter, named, appropriately, in honor of Chuck.
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I was also guided by what I’d learned from Judge Buchmeyer about the importance of deconcentrating public housing. It helped me through a tremendously contentious time involving the relocation of residents from the Ripley Arnold public housing projects downtown to free up the property for Radio Shack’s corporate headquarters. Just as had happened in West Dallas under Judge Buchmeyer’s oversight, an agreement was reached (one I had helped to broker) with the residents of the housing authority that they would be moved into areas of the city that were not low-income ones. It would involve the purchase by the housing authority of an apartment complex in an affluent area of my district, which they intended to use for a mix of tenants, by income, some paying market rate as before, but with the intention of setting aside about 20 percent of the units to be used for relocated residents from Ripley Arnold. It was one of the true tests of my character while on the council. I had to face the wrath of a community that was angered and frightened by what the purchase of the apartment complex might mean to their neighboring homes and property values.
On the evening when the issue was first raised during a city council meeting, the council chamber was filled to overflowing and many people had to be moved to other areas of the building to watch remotely. People were angry, screaming, primarily at the mayor and me. In the following weeks, we held several town hall–style hearings in church auditoriums large enough to hold the hundreds of people who wanted to be heard. It was rough. My girls felt the impact at school, each coming home with stories of having heard criticisms of me from friends. For months, I had to stop going to my local haunts because I’d had several experiences, whether at the dry cleaner’s or the grocery store or a local restaurant, of people angrily confronting me. It was one of my most challenging experiences in elected office. It brought into stark relief the fact that policy making has real-life impacts, and that our decisions as policy makers change people’s lives in ways that won’t always make them happy. Little did I know that the experience would serve as a precursor of, and preparation for, challenges that I would face during my time in the Texas senate and that it would help better prepare me for the fact that public service isn’t always about doing what’s popular. I’d seen Judge Buchmeyer do brave, hard things in the face of anger, and I knew I, too, could get through this by listening and being as responsive as possible to legitimate concerns. We set up a task force of representatives from the housing authority, the relocated residents, the residents of the surrounding community, and the police department to address problems, a
nd ultimately the housing authority moved ahead with the purchase of the complex and the relocation. In time the anger subsided, and today it stands as a model of how mixed-income communities can benefit generations of children to come. In fact, one of my former senate staffers is now engaged to be married to someone who credits the move as something that changed his life for the better. By moving from Ripley Arnold, he had been able to attend a top-rated nearby elementary school, he came to aspire to be a college student like most of his classmates did, and he ultimately became a proud first-generation college graduate in his family.
These are the stories that make public service so worthwhile, and these are the ones I remind myself of on tough days, when the work can feel frustrating because achieving your desires for your constituents is harder than it should be. When politics gets in the way of doing the right thing—when people who are elected to serve their constituents instead serve a lobby interest or an ideological score card—those are the days that make me want to pound my desk and call it out for what it is. But working effectively in the political arena means keeping enough alliances to get things done. And so I take a deep breath and move on to the next challenge.
After my fifth election to serve District 9 on the Fort Worth City Council, I made a decision to step down from my seat about midway through the term to run for the Texas senate. In the nine wonderful years that I served my constituents in that local office, I am proud to say that I never took my district for granted, I never forgot that serving my constituents was a privilege, and I always viewed being in public office as I think it should be viewed: that the job belongs to the people. And while you’re the person who’s being honored with the seat, it’s their seat, not yours, and you have to remember to respect that. For me, serving was the perfect marriage of all my life experiences, of all my education and my struggles. And that’s why I think I could so comfortably move across the different environments of the people I represented. I felt just as comfortable sitting at the kitchen table in the humblest home, trying to work on a neighborhood issue, as I did sitting in a corporate boardroom. I had a foot in both of those worlds from my past and my present that helped me serve my community the best way possible.
It’s my hope that the people in my beloved neighborhoods would tell you that they saw me as someone who genuinely cared, someone who went to bat for them over and over again, someone who worked really hard for them and who was a true partner. Someone who was willing to go the distance for them and fight when a fight was what it took. From the mall in the Latino area of my community that was saved through a public-private partnership (one of the ones I got Chuck Silcox to vote for!), to the new streets and streetlights in neighborhoods that needed them, to the summer day camp program that I helped grow, to the numerous new economic development projects throughout my district and the city as a whole that have provided thousands of jobs—these were the things I fought alongside my constituents to provide.
Through that service I gained something invaluable: clarity and certainty of my mission in life.
It was on the Fort Worth City Council that I figured out that public service was my calling. The compassion and the character that grew from the struggles I’d had in my life, coupled with the amazing education I’d had the great privilege of receiving, made me a true public servant. And I’m not embarrassed to say that. I’m a public servant in every sense of those words. I really am. Because I’m in public service for the right reason—to serve—and because I have a sense of justice that is my guiding light, my divining rod, my compass. It’s the filter through which I determine everything I do. You can look through my legislative history during those years (and in the years that would follow in the state senate) and see that compass. It’s in everything I do and in everything I fight for. Every person who is the victim of a predatory high-interest loan, each kid who isn’t getting a good education, any woman who isn’t being paid fairly, or every consumer being abused by an insurer or by a public utility is a personal affront to me.
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When I left the city council, my loyal and wonderful aide Kristi and her son Todd put together a video for me, recording some of my most precious memories and friends from those council years. My dad narrated it. In it he describes me as a person who was always nurturing, even as a little girl. And he refers to me as the mediator of our family. I suppose that part is true. With two older brothers and a younger sister, you have to learn to mediate sibling spats—whether it was a war in the backyard, or a battle over G.I. Joes, I had to learn to hold my own with my brothers. I suppose that helped me navigate better in a world that is still dominated by men—whether in local, state, or federal offices. You have to learn how to play well with others and develop a skin as thick as rhinoceros hide. I think I’ve managed to do both.
The mediating part came fairly naturally. But when you’re a girl as shy and fearful as I grew up being, the thick-skin part had to be learned. I think, were my dad alive today, he’d tell you I learned that part pretty damned well.
SIXTEEN
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
—KAREN BLIXEN
THE YEARS THAT JEFF and I shared with our girls on Mistletoe Drive were, for the most part, happy ones. They were punctuated with the stresses of my time away in law school, my runs for public office, and Jeff’s move to the new title company of which he became a part owner and the years spent building that company into a competitive, thriving one. The loss of our expected “Baby Lucas” through an ectopic pregnancy took us off course and into a crevasse, but it was one that we moved out of together and weathered as well as could be expected. But it was the loss of Tate in the spring of 1997 that nearly undid me, and therefore us. Both of us grieved deeply. But my grief was so black, so incalculable, that I found it almost impossible to climb out of the void I fell into. Jeff and I had been married for just shy of ten years at that point, and our marriage had sustained many stresses. Regaining a desire for intimacy after losing Tate was tremendously hard for me, but Jeff was patient. He let me heal at my own pace and in my own time. And, eventually, our shared grief over Tate and our ability to respect each other’s journey out of that grief helped us to survive the loss with our marriage intact.
We were partners. In all things, always partners. We cheered each other on and supported each other through disappointment and celebrations. Everyone who knew us during the seventeen years of married life that we shared together would likely tell you that ours was a marriage to be admired. And I would proudly say the same. During those years, as Dru grew older and witnessed some of her friends’ parents divorcing, she would ask me for reassurance that this would not happen with her dad and me. And, with all honesty and candor, I would soothe her anxieties and assure her that, no, it would not.
Jeff and I built a family together that was filled with traditions, good humor, and fun. Our home, though by no means in perfect condition, was well laid out for social gatherings. And we loved to play host. Whether it was for neighborhood events, shared times with other couples who were our friends, or for extended family gatherings, our home was a hub of activity. And we both enjoyed and contributed to making these gatherings work. Jeff, the consummate host when it came to serving excellent wine. Me, the less-than-perfect, but decent host(ess) when it came to experimenting with cooking and serving a good meal.
The girls continued to grow with nothing more than the typical bumps and bruises that a growing girl in the world attracts. My dad’s theater continued to succeed and gain tremendous respect in the live theater community. My brother Joey came to live with us for a few years following a difficult divorce from the marriage he had entered so very young; he stayed in our modest guesthouse and built a fairly thriving handyman business. And he and I had time together again. Often, we would sit down over the daily New York Times crossword puzzle and, as a team, could do a good job of getting through it. Sometimes we played chess, bu
t he, always the cleverest of my siblings, could shut down just about any strategy I tried to employ. After Joey moved on to Tennessee again to rebuild his life there, we took in Jeff’s sister and her children, who also lived in our guesthouse for a couple of years. Family came first for us, and we shared a commitment to taking care of them. We were blessed in so many ways and I felt lucky and grateful for everything we had, and for the ability to extend our blessings to the people that we loved.
Together, we created traditions for the girls and for Jeff’s son, Erik, who had moved from Louisiana to Virginia, and eventually to Plano, Texas. During those times when he lived at a distance, Erik would stay with us usually one weekend a month, or Jeff would go to visit him. And during the summer, we would have him for at least a month, and sometimes more. After some of his first visits to us, when Jeff and I were only dating and had not yet married and begun living together, Erik would often bring his best friend, Drew, from Louisiana on his visits. Drew eventually became as much a loved and cherished part of our family as our own children, ultimately coming to stay with us almost as much as Erik did. When our own Dru was born in 1988, we began referring to them as “Big Drew” and “Little Dru” and they still refer to each other that way. Occasionally Amber and Erik felt the typical strains that can occur between stepsiblings. But for the most part, our time together as a complete family were filled with fun. We had a pool for the kids to swim in and we played lots of games, just as I had with my own dad growing up. We began taking yearly vacations in the summer to Breckenridge, Colorado, where one of Jeff’s business partners had a condo, and we built traditions there—competing with one another to see who could get through the “human maze” the quickest, racing one another on sleds down the Alpine SuperSlide, daring one another to climb the highest on the Rockpile Climbing Wall, riding the ski lifts up to the top peaks and hiking (or once, unsuccessfully, mountain biking) down. We laughed so much when we had all the children with us. They were our strongest tether, our deepest connection to each other.