How a Fort Worth suburb became the 'Mecca for conservatives' that led Texas' reopening

May 28--The weekend Colleyville reopened ahead of Texas, more than a dozen people gathered outside the Latin restaurant Gloria's under a radiant spring sun, waiting two hours to enjoy margaritas al fresco. A few couples, sitting in the parking lot's grassy medians, brought lawn chairs. They had come because Colleyville Mayor Richard Newton signed a proclamation allowing on April 24 for people to dine at restaurant patios, gather at churches if they followed social distancing guidelines and book appointments at gyms and salons.

The rest of Texas was shut down. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, both Democrats, were even attempting to add further restrictions by requiring residents to wear masks. In Tarrant County, Republican Judge B. Glen Whitley suggested it could be two to four weeks before Tarrant reopened, saying on April 21, "Now is not the time to relax."

A majority of Texas agreed: A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll showed two-thirds of Texans approved of the shutdown of nonessential businesses and three-quarters approved of stay-at-home orders. But Colleyville showed something else. A mixture of visitors and residents at Gloria's that Saturday said they were out to stimulate the economy or to escape the boredom of their houses. Or, as a middle-aged Springtown woman named Patty Kelley put it, "I feel like we're proving a point."

Three days later, the Colleyville model won out. Gov. Greg Abbott announced April 28 he would start Phase 1 of reopening Texas on May 1. He also did not challenge Colleyville's early reopening, even though his executive order said "people shall avoid eating or drinking at bars, restaurants and food courts, or visiting gyms." (Newton said he coordinated his plan with the Attorney General's Office.)

That Colleyville led the way to reopening was predictable -- and popular -- for many of its residents, and a sign of an influence that far outweighs its size of 27,000. The suburban city 15 miles northeast of downtown Fort Worth has maintained a strong sense of conservatism and liberty more common among rural towns, making it an outlier among the Metroplex's rapidly growing and changing suburbs -- and a barometer of the Republican base.

"When you get Colleyville up on its hind legs, Abbott is going to see that and think primary," said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at SMU and author of "Lone Star Tarnished."

"He's not going to think about polls that say two-thirds to three-quarters want distancing to continue or are comfortable wearing masks because that's the general election and lots of people who don't vote at all. Colleyville is the Republican Primary, so he does have to pay attention."

In 2016, 70% of Colleyville voters, who typically turn out at some of the highest rates in Texas, chose President Donald Trump, compared to 52% statewide. Two years later, when droves of Republican suburbanites switched sides in the Fort Worth, Dallas and Houston areas, Colleyville stayed resolute in its Republican support, with 69% of voters picking Ted Cruz over Beto O'Rourke (its similarly wealthy and Republican neighbor Southlake saw the Republican vote fade from 68% in the 2016 presidential election to 64% in the 2018 senate race).

In Colleyville elections, Republicans deemed not conservative enough are accused of being Democrats, like Vanessa Steinkamp. A picture of her with Barack Obama circulated as part of a negative campaign mailer last year, and she lost a City Council race to a candidate recommended by the tea party. Those elected as mayor or to City Council are obligated to leave office after two consecutive three-year terms because voters chose to set the limit in 2016 in a move that some residents describe as the ultimate conservative check on government.

"(Colleyville) is a Mecca for conservatives," said Nelson Thibodeaux, a longtime resident, Republican activist and entrepreneur whose website Local News Only mixes coverage of Colleyville and neighboring suburbs with editorials from the likes of Michael Quinn Sullivan, CEO of Empower Texans.

So where critics saw Colleyville's reopening as a legally-vague health risk, many residents saw a citizen-led small government acting on its own behalf. Chris Putnam, a former Colleyville councilman who unsuccessfully challenged Republican U.S. Rep. Kay Granger in this year's primary, described the reopening as a success story unique to Colleyvillle, posting on Facebook that the city was "still leading -- unapologetically. We built a citizen/taxpayer-first government in Colleyville that is the model for limited, conservative government in Texas -- and should be for all of America."

According to Newton, who is serving his second term as mayor and also served three terms in the 1990s, reopening was based on data. He saw that Tarrant County's hospitals were filled to about half their capacity, that 17 people had been diagnosed with coronavirus in Colleyville as of April 20 and that the White House-favored University of Washington virus-tracking model showed Texas was at its peak. He also relied on a Colleyville belief that government should lean toward ceding control to people. "We were basically pushing the decisions into the businesses' hands and the citizens' hands and giving them as much authority as we could," he said.

No decision in the political career of Newton, a bookish 71-year old who styles his white hair into a comb-over, brought greater fanfare than the reopening. "That was the first time I got a lot of feedback from outside Colleyville," he said. On April 29, he appeared on the national radio show of conservative media star Dana Loesch. Toward the end of a 14-minute interview, their conversation veered into their idea of a limited government's role. "It's common sense," Newton said in his steady, soft-spoken cadence. "We all know this. Take accountability. Don't blame other people."

Loesch, who broadcasts from Dallas, responded by calling him "America's Mayor." "You're making some of the radio staff want to move to Colleyville now," she said.

Staying rural and red

As once-tomato red suburbs like Arlington and Plano have grown in size and diversity and taken on shades of purple, Colleyville has clung to the strict conservative politics of a rural town -- in part because it has fought the changes other suburbs have embraced.

In 1960, 1,500 residents lived in Colleyville, and about the only places to stop were a feed store and Ross Downs, a race track that drew some of Texas' top horses and jockeys. Seclusion was mandated: Regulations once required every home to sit on at least a half-acre. William Tate, the longtime mayor of Grapevine, who grew up in the area in the 1960s, remembered the standard residence of Colleyville as a two-to-three acre farmette, with a barn in the back and a couple of horses or cows. "And those people didn't want to be a suburb," he said.

Even as Colleyville grew, it continued a cycle of opposing residential and economic development projects thought to bring in outsiders or that would lead to a rapid increase in population. In the early 1980s, for instance, residents sued the city and a developer over the town's first proposed multifamily housing plan and tried unsuccessfully to take their case to the Texas Supreme Court. The result of decades of restricted growth is a Colleyville that is 90% white and has a median household income of $175,000. Nearly two-thirds of residents have a bachelor's degree, a rate more than twice as high as the rest of Texas.

The atmosphere of frontier, anti-density and wealth creates an eclectic mix: Sprawling properties that look like mini ranches are spaced between new subdivisions, some of them gated. On John McCain Road, a dealership that sells Porsches and Jaguars is next to an RV sales lot. Colleyville Boulevard, the main north-south thoroughfare, widened from four lanes to six lanes this year, after years of heated discussion. Plans to build sidewalks cause controversy. The city has fewer than 100 apartment units, according to the Census. The de facto downtown, The Village of Colleyville, is stuffed with offices but hardly any retail stores or restaurants that attract foot traffic. Colleyville has collected $4 million in annual sales tax in recent years, about one-third as much as Southlake, which is similar in population.

While Southlake has carved out a reputation for high-end shopping and dining (and fellow neighbor Grapevine for tourism), Colleyville has hooked residents, many of whom are entrepreneurs, on its "no-new-revenue" property tax rates and relative open space. "We've decided who we want to be and so protecting that and making sure we stay that way is very important," Newton said. He moved to Colleyville in 1986 after leaving a tenured professor position at Texas A&M to work as an engineer for Frito-Lay and owns a home on a 2.25-acre wooded property with a creek running through it.

Natalie Genco, who has lived in Colleyville for about 20 years, has noticed that an independent streak is particularly strong among those accustomed to the town's rural living. "I feel like the people who like more room seem to like more independence," she said. "Those are some of the feistiest neighbors."

The Empower Texans surge

In 2008, when a 27-mile TexRail airport line was announced, Colleyville's conservative political landscape grew to a new level of feistiness that has continued to today. The initial plan included a train stop in Colleyville, and Genco started a petition to oppose it. Despite surveys showing 80% of Colleyville respondents wanted passenger rail, she said she found Democratic and Republican residents who wanted to stop the train. As did the new tea party.

Several chapters started up in Texas after Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, none of them stronger than the Northeast Tarrant tea party, co-founded by then-Colleyville resident Ellen Lopez and Grapevine resident Julie McCarty. Lopez was concerned about what she describes as a national "transformation of the country," the prospect of health care reform and higher taxes. "Increasingly, Colleyville residents felt targeted/used by city government on top of what was happening federally," Lopez, who now lives in Arlington, said over email.

The train station, which had to be funded in part with Colleyville money, became a rallying point. Between November 2008 and May 2009 the number of signatures on Genco's rail petition went from about 100 to over 700, enough to force the City Council to hold a hearing and to eventually put a moratorium on funding a station. Because the tracks had gone through Colleyville for a century, the city had no authority to take the next step and stop the train line.

But the movement against Colleyville's incumbent politicians, blamed for a lack of transparency and putting economic development ahead of the wishes of citizens, didn't end there. Chris Putnam, who won a Council seat in 2014 with a message of protecting Colleyvillle's small-town culture, warned of damaged property values. Newton came out of political retirement to run for mayor in 2016, pushing to pass a resolution opposing the line, which he acknowledged could not be stopped by the city. Council candidates Tammy Nakamura and Bobby Lindamood Jr. supported the same resolution, as well as elimination of tiered water rates, and they won a clean sweep against incumbent Republicans in 2016.

In addition to running on anti-density platforms, Nakamura, Newton and Lindamood were all recommended by Empower Texans. The deep-pocketed group founded by West Texas oilman Tim Dunn advocates for limited government and low taxes -- and against excessive government spending and social issues like abortion rights. It funds and endorses political candidates to run against establishment Republicans in primaries and operates the news site Texas Scorecard.

Colleyville has been a bright spot in recent years for Empower Texans and the Northeast Tarrant tea party, which changed its name last year to the True Texas Project. As the tea party has declined to near extinction nationally, True Texas Project's recommended candidates have thrived in Colleyville, with all of them winning from 2017 to 2019. At a True Texas Project event last year, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, praised Colleyville's support of his tax policy, saying of Newton and other city council members, "Elect these guys forever."

Elsewhere in DFW, such as in Grapevine, Hurst, Euless and Southlake, True Texas Project-backed candidates have won less often. The same has been true for Empower Texans: The group reported that 37% of the 60-plus local candidates it endorsed from 2014 to 2016 in the Metroplex won.

To Mike Taylor, a former Colleyville City Council member who drew the ire of Empower Texans and the True Texas Project, the success of the two groups in Colleyville stems from using the "dog whistle" of density to gain the attention of residents and then consolidating support with a strong online and grassroots campaign operation. "They're there and they're going to be there for a while because they're well organized," he said. "They have plans for things that have nothing to do with Colleyville. It gives them exposure. Everything is to try to get media attention."

Taylor, a Republican, felt similarly about the decision of Colleyville to reopen ahead of Texas. "This was all about being the first," he said. "Colleyville, we used to like being quiet. If there was any news it was about our families and schools. Now we have politics being the center of attention."

Newton said he had no idea Colleyville would be the first to reopen and didn't learn that until being swamped by media requests. When asked about outside influences, he again emphasized the coronavirus data, which, a month later, looked good for Colleyville. In the month since reopening, as of May 20, the city had fewer new cases, five, than it did in the previous month, 17. Tarrant County's seven-day rolling average of daily new cases had stayed flat since May 1, and Texas' number, as of May 20, had increased about 30% and the state's highest single-day death toll, 58, happened between May 13 and May 14.

Thibodeaux, the longtime Colleyville resident and proprietor of Local News Only, calls the tea party and Empower Texans affiliations overrated. "If they happen to be influential on people in Colleyville then so be it," he said, acknowledging Empower Texans honored him in 2018 with a Conservative Leader Award. "But to be cast in a light where this is a bunch of folks who meet in a garage somewhere and talk about overthrowing the government is ridiculous."

More than follow Empower Texans, he said Colleyville residents have rallied for devoted Republicans who have separated from the moderate Republicans squeamish of Trump and conservative social issues.

The divide has become apparent in conflicts that erupt regularly in Colleyville. Former and current council members have bickered on a prominent Colleyville public Facebook group. In 2015, Taylor was accused of releasing negative campaign literature about Lindamood, who sued him (Lindamood's campaign was financially backed by Dallas hotelier and prominent Republican donor Monty Bennett). The next year, the Protect Colleyville PAC was created to support incumbent council members against challengers Newton, Lindamood and Nakamura. To oppose it, another PAC sprung up, the Preserve Colleyville PAC.

Kathy Braatz, a Democrat who is running for Tarrant County Commissioner, moved to Colleyville from Arlington in 2010. She likes her house, her neighbors and Colleyville's convenient location but had no idea the town was home to a strong conservative base and frequent political battles.

"Politically if I had known how it was," she said, "I probably would've tried harder to find a house in Grapevine."

A new movement?

Colleyville's resistance to staying home caught on throughout the rest of the state. On May 1, Putnam organized an event at Thirsty Armadillo in the Stockyards that he called Texas Independence Day 2.0. On April 24, the same day of Colleyville's reopening, Shelley Luther, backed by a group called Woke Patriots, opened her North Dallas salon. When she was jailed for contempt by Dallas judge Eric Moyé, protests followed. Lopez, the Northeast Tarrant tea party co-founder, attended an Open Texas event in Dallas to rally for Luther's release. The protesters' belief that the government had overstepped its bounds reminded her of the roots of the tea party in Texas. "My role in Colleyville politics years ago is based on the same principles we are involved in today in this pandemic," she said.

If the groups opposing coronavirus restrictions create momentum similar to the tea party of the early 2010s, it could reshape elections in future primaries and this fall, when Republicans will try to stave off Democrats from taking over the Texas House. Lt. Gov. Patrick has already promoted the Republican opponent of Moyé on Fox News. Whatever the effect, it may matter less in Colleyville, where the council members up for election in July, George Dodson and Kathy Wheat, are running unopposed. Newton, Lindamood and Nakamura are serving their second consecutive terms and will have to give up their seats in 2022 because of the term limits.

There is a question whether a strict conservatism will continue after their tenures. Beverly Powell, a Fort Worth Democrat, defeated Colleyville resident and Empower Texans candidate Konni Burton for her Texas Senate seat in 2018 and senses the Empower Texans influence is waning in Colleyville and Northeast Tarrant, as it has in other areas. "I really think that we have become very astute voters and that we are wise to the fact that we don't need West Texas billionaires coming in here and telling us how to live our lives in North Texas, in Fort Worth, or Hurst, Euless, Bedford or Colleyville."

Colleyville resident Matthew Laity, who calls himself a conservative Democrat, moderates a popular Facebook group, Colleyville Citizens for Accountability, that acts as a kind of yin to the conservative majority's yang (describing, for instance, the City Council's approval of a $3 million fountain and plaza as a boondoggle). Laity notes that the newer arrivals, who live in the more typical suburban developments, want a Colleyville that is more open to change. "We have a six-lane highway running through our town," he said, referring to Texas 26. "So maybe that rural feel has gone out the window."

Thibodeaux, whose involvement in Republican politics dates to the 1960s, doesn't buy it. In the last 35 years, he's seen the ebb and flow of various leadership groups in Colleyville, and their tenures usually end after they try to introduce too much change. He was part of one such cycle in the late 1990s when he was voted off City Council for leading the expansion of an east-west thoroughfare. No matter how Texas grows and evolves, Thibodeaux expects Colleyville will keep fighting to do its own thing. "This is a red city," he said. "And it's going to remain a red city."

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