Newly elected Magnolia Mayor Chris Blair said infrastructure, staffing and rebuilding trust with residents will be among his top focuses as he steps into office after winning the May 2 mayor race with 45.4% of the vote.
Blair, a local entrepreneur who grew up in Magnolia “on the dirt roads,” said he ran after years of watching the city’s infrastructure needs grow without enough change. He said his early priorities include steadying staffing at City Hall, addressing lift stations and water wells, improving roads and moving forward with the next phase of the city’s wastewater plant.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you decide to run for mayor?
That was easy. The fact that I have waited for about eight years, nine years, to see if anybody was going to step up and start taking us in the right direction of our infrastructure, and I didn't see any change happening. I decided to go ahead and put my hat in the ring and hope for the best by bringing my leadership and a team around me to make everything better for the city, as far as our infrastructure and helping the citizens and small businesses of the town.
What do you think this election showed about Magnolia residents' wants from city leadership?
I possibly think that they want younger, fresher eyes on things that see vision a little bit differently than what we've been used to with normal politicians coming in. I'm definitely not a politician, just a citizen that's been kind of fed up with what's been going on, and trying to be here to make a change and get what's needed for our city and our infrastructure.
As you step into office, what are your top priorities for the city?
Staffing is one of them. We have a lot of interims here. We need to find steady employees that want to work for the betterment of Magnolia in City Hall, and then start working on the infrastructure of our wells and our lift stations that are decrepit, get more water wells in place, get our roads fixed, and hopefully get the next portion of the wastewater plant up and going, and then start working with local entities to see what other issues that need to be addressed for them and everybody as a community come together.
What do you hope to accomplish in your first year as mayor?
Not to drown in the first year, hopefully making a solid foundation to move forward. I know the first year is going to be a lot of evaluation of everything, getting the motion of how everything's working and moving here, and then once we kind of get that and start getting a good foundation built, I think that we can move forward in a positive direction for everybody, whether it be the people that have been here for a lot longer than me or the newer people are coming in and make everybody feel at home.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing Magnolia right now? And how do you plan to address it?
The biggest challenges are the overwhelming development that's happening, it's taken a lot of our resources that we weren't prepared for throughout the years, so the biggest challenge there is trying to get all that infrastructure built back up for the extra growth that we're going to start expecting coming through here. That's really the biggest portion right now, is the infrastructure.
Start by once we identify more of the issue, look for state and federal helping grants and such that can come in here and help us build the infrastructure a lot quicker and get a lot more engineers on deck and more pieces involved in different areas of Magnolia to help get that up and going, because we can't focus in one general area. We have so many issues that are spread throughout.
Growth has been a major topic in Magnolia. How do you plan to balance new development with preserving the city's small town feel?
I believe with the new development we need to slow down the big demands that these developers come in and get from us, and not really give back to our infrastructure that we need immediately, not five or 10 years down the road. With that being said, we'll be hopefully a little stricter on our demands, like they demand of us. Then we need to start looking at some areas in town that we can preserve and better, and make what we never had was like a town square feel here in town. We need to figure out a better way of finding a certain area.
What are the biggest challenges facing the City Council right now?
That's a tricky one. I say the biggest issue is trust from the citizens, that's the biggest challenge we're facing. Citizens have lost trust and Magnolia leadership, and I'm hoping to bring a good leadership mentality.
What are your priorities going into this fiscal year budget?
A lot of lift station repairs, we're spending a lot of money in wastewater haul-offs to multiple companies. We need to get our lift stations up and running in a more proper manner, where they're not overloaded, and a lot of underground water works needs to be done. So we need a budget and find enough extra money for that aspect, because that's really urgent. The next thing would be getting the other wells up online.
What is your vision for the city?
My vision would put a bubble around what we have and not let anything else come. My vision really is for the city to just grow in a responsible manner to have all our entities, such as our fire department, our city hall, our police department, our constable, our county commissioner, everybody come back together as a community. What I grew up here having was that everybody wasn't a separate entity, everybody felt like a community, and all of them work together just like the school district and everything else. I think through the years everybody has kind of had to fend for themselves and lost some connection between City Hall and each branch that we have.
So I hope to bring all that camaraderie back and give that feeling to the rest of our citizens that if we're all together working together to make everybody happy. I think that a lot of more people will probably come through town and not be so angry about traffic if they just know that everybody's working together—that's it.
What do you want residents to know about how decisions will be made under your leadership?
I want them to know that I'm going to fight as hard as I possibly can for the things that I know that have been voiced in the community, it may not always turn out that way, you know, City Hall or City Council gets that vote. So I'm hoping to grab those guys, get our camaraderie built, and my vision instilled upon them to where they can see things a little differently, and hope they have that same vision to keep Magnolia of what it is, and try to preserve it as much as possible.
You're not going to be able to please everyone, because we do have a lot of new people coming in that would like to see a bunch of skyscrapers and then we have, you know, maybe 80% or more of the older generation, like myself, that I could keep it small. So I just hope that they understand that it's not going to be a quick turnaround. There's a lot of work to do. I'm going to give it my damn best.
Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you would like to address or include?
I would just say for people to realize that they're moving into a small community and be patient with the older people that don't want to see the growth right away, and just be more involved in the community, whether you're just now moving here or if you've been here for a long time, and everybody just get together, bring that community back, and don't be afraid to reach out to me and my council members to see things they want to start seeing again. I know that a lot of people voice their opinions. We don't decorate for Christmas today, more and stuff like that. So I think a lot of people want to bring that little charm back, and I'm working on that.
