In addition to his time in DeSoto, Wright has extensive experience in the finance area of municipal work, with his career taking him to Davenport, Iowa; and Aurora and Highland Park, Illinois. He came to Texas in 2020, when his stint began in DeSoto.
He grew up in Chicago and is married to April, and they have three children: Owen, 13; Mason, 11; and Brynn, 8.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you want to come to Trophy Club?
Trophy Club is a great community. I think when you take a look at the types of things Trophy Club has going on, it’s a well-thought-out, master-planned community. It has very interesting development along [SH] 114. You look at the parks area. I think there’s a great opportunity for us to work on continuing to develop how the parks in this community really enhance the quality of life for our residents. All of that combined. And then I’m a really big person on strategic planning, and one of the things I noticed about Trophy Club was that it really doesn't have a strategic plan, and that’s something I put together in DeSoto, loved doing, and it has really changed how that city functions on some things. ... We don't really have one yet in Trophy Club, but there is talk and desire to have one. It would be a place where my skill set and the needs of the town would come together very well on that.
What sort of experiences or what things did you learn in DeSoto that prepared you to come here?
First of all, the value of a strategic plan—a long-term vision for the community that is developed with the input of the community. When you think about how towns and cities function from one election cycle to the next to the next, if you don’t have an overarching plan for how it is that this community continues into the future, what ends up happening is you go from election to election changing focus to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. What I saw there [in Trophy Club] was the value of having that long-term strategic plan in place, on creating consistency among election cycles and among residents.
A second [issue that prepared me] was just taking a look at the park system and making sure that the park system has what it needs to be able to meet the needs of the residents. In other words, how are you doing maintenance-wise with your facilities; what kinds of programs are you offering; how are you doing investing in the types of the improvements of the parks that meet the needs of your residents? A lot of that comes back to master planning for your park system.
What are some of the challenges you think Trophy Club faces?
For the most part, we are mostly built out. The challenge with being a built-out community is that your tax revenues slow down for you. You don’t have any growth revenue that you can rely on consistently from one year to the next. You might have a little pocket of it, but you can’t reliably [depend] on new growth tax revenue. There’s a revenue component that is just an area of concern that we need to continue to be as efficient and effective as we can with our dollars, knowing that we’re not in a growth environment for tax dollars. Another concern is ... we need solid plans for how it is we maintain our streets, our drainage areas, erosion issues, things like that—making sure that we have good plans for how it is we maintain those areas and that we have adequate funding to address those things over time. I think another thing is how it is we start to address the revitalization of our housing areas, ... how revitalization continues to happen so that we have a housing stock that remains to be a quality stock for people who want to come and live here.
