Brian Livingston is running for Frisco City Council, Place 6.[/caption]Place 6 is the seat of Scott Johnson, whose term expires in May 2017.
Livingston said serving within city government has been an ambition he has had since college.
“I always said if I was the right person at the right place at the right time, I wanted to run,” he said. “I think with the turnover we’re going to be facing on the Council coming up, now is the right time for me to run.”
Livingston has spent his career on the business side of the restaurant industry. Before coming to Frisco, he was the CFO of Firebird Restaurant Group. There, Livingston said he handled a $100 million-plus budget and 1,800 staff members.
“It was [a] pretty complex, big organization,” he said. “It’s important to have someone who’s done that because the city of Frisco is becoming a very big organization.”
Livingston has also worked as a commercial banker. Today, he and his wife own the Celebrity Café & Bakery locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and the Texadelphia locations in Frisco and Plano.
Livingston and his family moved to Frisco six years ago. In that time, Livingston has gotten more involved in local government. He has served on the Frisco Convention & Visitors Bureau board and is currently the vice chair for the board of adjustment/construction board of appeals.
If elected to Council, Livingston said the areas he would like to focus on include infrastructure, staffing for the police and fire departments, the city budget, road congestion and local government transparency.
He said he would also like to focus on efforts to make the city more enjoyable for residents, which includes more parks development and welcoming more arts into the city.
“We’re growing, and I think that’s great, but I want to make sure that we don’t lose the feel of why everybody moved here,” he said. “I want to continue the things that our existing City Council has always wanted to do. I would just like to slow the speed of the growth down a little bit so we don’t overwhelm everything.”
As a small business owner, Livingston said he would like to help other small businesses in Frisco.
“The thing I’ve heard from small businesses is they want a shot at the table,” he said.
Livingston received a bachelor’s degree in business administration and finance from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in business administration and accounting from the University of Texas at Dallas.
City elections will take place in May 2017. For more information on Livingston, visit www.brianforfrisco.com.
