With more and more people moving north of Fort Worth every day, the city of Haslet is in a prime location to welcome that growth. But because of a schism on City Council, the city’s roads and infrastructure projects may not be ready until the expansion has passed them up.
Haslet is at the heart of the booming Alliance corridor, one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Several Alliance distribution centers are housed in Haslet, which borders the runway of Perot Field Alliance Fort Worth Airport.
Roughly 5,000 people live in Haslet this year, meaning the population has jumped 160% since 2020. If the growth continues along that trajectory, Haslet will be home to roughly 13,000 people in 2030.
The divide on City Council has barred progress that is necessary to ensure the city can take in thousands more people. For months, the council has voted and revoted on paying city staff a competitive salary and opening a position to manage all the infrastructure projects.
Just north of East Bonds Ranch Road and directly south of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train yard, the city’s eight square miles are governed by a mayor-council form of government. This means the mayor does not have voting power, but is the chief executive of the city.
In most cities, this is not the case. Typically, the mayor has a vote on the council and the administrative tasks are given to a city manager who works for the City Council.
In Haslet, the five council members often vote unanimously, but the difference of opinion comes with the mayor, Gary Hulsey.
This is Hulsey’s third time as Mayor of Haslet. In 2002, he left the role after serving for three years because there was too much on his plate. When he assumed the position in 2005, he stayed for four years, but resigned before completing his final term because the 2009 council had voted to hire a city administrator. Hulsey was elected for a third time in 2021.
Hulsey said the division on the council is led by Mayor Pro-Tem Tanya Morrow because she was in support of the prior mayor and wants to see Hulsey replaced.
Morrow said she’s had a number of issues with Hulsey recently, but when they served together previously, there were none.
Now, City Council meeting attendees would be hard-pressed to find a meeting without some bickering on the dais. Morrow’s goal, she said, is to see the combative nature of council resolved with a city administrator, who would provide a buffer between the mayor and council.
“It goes back a ways, but over the last year, year and a half, we’re finding out more and more that the current mayor is trying to run the city on his own,” council member Doug Horak said. “And he really doesn’t want to get everybody involved. He wants to make all the decisions.”
In a handwritten note obtained by the Star-Telegram through a public records request, a previous city employee warned whoever filled his position to watch out for Hulsey. Everyone else is great, the employee said.
“I wish you luck in this job,” the note said. “I left it because I had an offer for something better and because the mayor is an awful person to everyone. I wish you patience beyond measure.”
No power or information to make decisions
Morrow said Hulsey is not fulfilling City Council members’ requests to place items on the agenda and is controlling the agendas for the Parks and Recreation Board, despite his role as a citizen in regard to the parks board.
“He changed their agendas so they can talk about a park, but they can take no actions,” said Horak, whose wife is on the board. “So he’s relegated them to simply being an event coordinator. The only thing they can actually discuss and decide, vote, act on spending money is the Easter egg hunt, July 4, Memorial Day celebration, Christmas in the Park. It’s just an event.”
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Hulsey said he includes council members’ requests on agendas, even if it’s not always the very next meeting.
“Someone has to manage that agenda,” Hulsey said. “Are we going to have an eight-hour meeting or going to have a four-hour meeting? And if it goes on the agenda, whether I like it or not, it deserves time to properly address and debate, and so I manage it.”
Multiple council members said in council meetings and to the Star-Telegram that they don’t get the necessary information ahead of time to make decisions.
“I really think, in his mind, the City Council reports to him,” Horak said. “We’ve tried to tell him multiple times that he actually reports to the City Council, and that’s what we’re there for, is to ask him questions and get information. … It’s gotten to the point with him, he’s told his staff not to even speak to the City Council, and if we request information, they are simply to direct us to ask the mayor.”
What happens, Morrow said, is council members usually don’t have enough information to make decisions on agenda items, and they end up tabling the item to give city staff time to find the answers to their questions.
“We used to get emails for every board meeting that was happening.” Morrow said. “Now we have to just watch ourselves and show up ourselves to find out about it. We could email, ask questions and get a lot of information back. Now, and, this is just what I’ve been told, is that the mayor’s like, ‘I’ll handle it,’ and then we never, I never get information.”
As the longest-serving member on the council, Morrow said she’s the only one who knows how easy getting questions answered used to be.
Hulsey said he honors the Texas Local Government Code when he puts together agendas. The agenda is “not for that City Council so much, it’s for the people.”
“That’s why … on most all of our agenda items, you’ll see these attachments, these PDFs,” Hulsey said. “There’s no law that requires that, I have it put in there. Here’s what we’re talking about. Here’s the project, here’s this contract, here’s whatever it is. This is what we’re going to decide on.”
At the Sept. 15 meeting, the council discussed a proposed flyover bridge from Texas 170 to Intermodal Parkway. The bridge would be a joint project between TxDOT, Tarrant County and the city. Hulsey put a proposition in front of the council that he said was “not highly complementary” of TxDOT. To get more information ahead of the meeting, council member Chris Caruthers met with TxDOT representatives, North Central Texas Council of Governments personnel and Tarrant County Commissioner Manny Ramirez.
Caruthers presented an alternative proposition to the mayor’s “so that we can be cooperative with our partners,” he said at the meeting.
Hulsey told Caruthers to “cease and desist” meeting with outside governmental agencies in regard to city business. As long as council members note that they are not representing the city, they are allowed to meet with whoever they choose about city business.
After about 45 minutes of discussing the flyover bridge and hearing from City Engineer Michael Anderson about its effects on residents and traffic, Horak said having such discussions are necessary to make decisions and that should they take place before a resolution comes in front of council.
“We had some good dialogue back and forth with Mike Anderson’s expertise on this,” Horak said at the meeting. “This is what council needs to hear rather than just getting a piece of paper. We need to have some back and forth dialogue to better understand all the ramifications of these type of items.”
The council decided to table that item and revisit it when more information was made available to them.
Could a city administrator solve the disputes?
Morrow said she thinks having a city administrator would solve many of the council’s issues.
Through scraping the Texas Municipal League’s records, Morrow found 18 cities in Texas are of comparable population size to Haslet’s and have the same form of government. All have a city administrator.
“I think it’s the answer to have that buffer for the council and the mayor to work together again,” Morrow said.
According to the job description, the city administrator would answer to the City Council, organize all municipal activities and be responsible “for the proper administration of all affairs of the City of Haslet.” That person will serve as the “Chief Administrative Officer” of the city.
“This has to be somebody that is not passive, because it’s going to be, I would say, on the front end, it’s probably going to be a difficult work environment,” Horak said. “Because I just don’t see the mayor willing to share everything that he does. So, yeah, it’s not going to be a pleasant work environment.”
Hulsey said this position is “not recognized by law” because it is not one of the positions mentioned in the local government code.
“It says that the City Council can prescribe other duties to other officers that are not prescribed already in that code,” Hulsey said.
Haslet City Attorney Jeremy Page said in a memorandum to the mayor and City Council that the city administrator’s role would be legally invalid if it interfered with the duties assigned to the mayor.
The City Council originally approved the reinstatement of the city administrator position in August. In the following two meetings, Hulsey told the council of his objections and brought the item back for reconsideration twice. In October, City Council voted for a final time to begin the search for a city administrator. Once the search committee finds an applicant it wants to hire, the person can be appointed with a majority vote from the council.
“As I recall, Mayor Hulsey vacated his term last time he was elected before it was over because a city administrator was appointed, so it is disturbing to me that his plan seems to destroy the staff that has been built to ensure the city operations are run according to Council’s direction,” a previous city administrator wrote in an email regarding her resignation obtained by the Star-Telegram.
Hulsey said, this time, he is not leaving if the council hires a city administrator.
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