Tony Moline

So make sure all is well within the chamber, and the rest works out?

The nice thing right now when you're the new guy, you can ask all the silly questions that everybody else may automatically already know the answers to, and I get to ask why. I think that's something that is a good thing—why are we doing this? Why is it this way? When you ask that, the answer may be, 'Because that's the way it's always been,' and that's what we'll get right to work on. Just because it's always been that way doesn't necessarily mean it should continue to be that way. I also want to make sure we respect the history of things as well, so I'm not going to change things just to change them, but if a change needs to be made, I'm not going to shy away from that, either.

What kind of relationship do you expect to have with the city, which already has an economic development function?

From my perspective, that's not always a bad thing. The things we can do collaboratively will outweigh the things we do as just the city or just the chamber. I think there's an expectation that businesses like hearing from other businesses, and the chamber of commerce is the voice of business for that community. For whatever reason, and I think it's just a state of mind sometimes, they don't always like to hear the information from the city—they'd like to hear it from another source. That being said, in Coppell, the economic development director is a city entity, so I've already worked on that relationship. In fact, the economic development director was on my board, so we had a very good relationship.

What do you consider to be the chamber's top priority overall?

I really think business retention is something the chamber of commerce can have a strong voice with, and I plan on being at as many of the City Council meetings as possible just to get a feel for what's going on in the city. I look forward to making myself available. I think that's one of the big things as well—the availability of the chamber of commerce to help in any type of business project.