The Families For Irving (FFI) PAC is not even five years old, yet it is already one of Irving’s most talked-about political institutions.

Political Director James Bell recently sat down with The Dallas Express to explain the organization and its members’ vision. Bell said the group’s founders wanted it to be “the NRA of making Irving an attractive place for families that want to relocate to the city.”

What does this mean? In practice, this worked out to three platform planks: (1) “having protective [public] policies in place that prevent the sexualization attempts of young children,” (2) “we believe in zoning for single-family neighborhoods over apartment complexes… and to head towards 50 owner occupancy,” and (3) “school choice.”

Child Protection Policies

FFI was born from an effort to pursue what ended up becoming the first plank of their agenda. Bell explained that the group started “around the time of the COVID lockdowns” when some local mothers discovered that library staff were putting “sexually explicit materials in the children’s sections of the library.”

Bell said this set into motion a grassroots effort to decouple the Irving Public Library’s procurement process from those established by the American Library Association, which had “been pushing for this.” Eventually, the parents won on this matter.
However, libraries are not the only institutions where FFI has made progress.

Home Zoning

Bell noted that the trend toward apartments has reversed since the PAC started. “Irving has gone from 37 to 38.6 percent” owner occupancy. However, he recognizes that it could be many years before Irving achieves the levels of home ownership FFI wants to see in Irving.

Bell preemptively hit back at the notion that apartments are good for tax revenue. Although he did not cite any figure specifically, many analysts such as Dr. David Anderson, PhD have argued that “the short version is YES — large multifamily residential complexes in Chapel Hill were, even way back in 2009, gold mines for the town budget,” when analyzing the effects of apartments on city budgets in other states such as North Carolina.

Bell, a CFP, finds this to be short-sighted. He said members of FFI looked into apartments and found major costs to city services, as well. “We discovered that the overwhelming majority of 911 calls… were coming from apartments.” He said that many of these calls involved issues ranging from drug deals to domestic violence.

On this point, he concluded, “When you run the numbers with a more discerning eye, you quickly discover that… if you rezone what was a neighborhood into an apartment complex area, there’s a short uptick in tax revenue for the city, but the long-term effects of that are negative.”

School Choice

“The reason that school choice is very important is that when you’re looking to attract young families, one of the main things that a young family is going to consider is the quality of the schools in the neighborhood.”

Bell noted that the options for private schooling in the area are limited by the fact that the most desirable private schools all have long waiting lists. However, he said that one of the councilmen FFI had supported, Mark Cronenwett (Place 5), “is sort of in a late-stage process of working with a charter school system called Basis, and they are a STEM school… that is trying to find a place in Irving.”

BASIS’s website describes the educational system as “RAISING THE STANDARDS OF STUDENT LEARNING [caps in original] to the highest international levels.”

It also says, “You may know that BASIS Charter Schools prides itself on its STEM-infused, college preparatory, K–12 tuition-free curriculum [bolding in original]. World-class academic excellence is what drives BASIS, and your student will be challenged to conquer high level concepts.”

Even though Bell admitted that the city council does not have direct control over education, he said a city councilman helps as a facilitator and that the council can help attract educational institutions by handling zoning issues.

Casinos

There are many things FFI does not get involved in, including state and federal races and casinos.

Again, Bell employed an NRA analogy. While FFI did not change its platform during the three weeks that the gaming rezoning battle raged before the city council, the CFP said that it was like how many candidates supported by the NRA are also pro-life, even though the gun organization does not take a position on abortion.

However, the casino issue is “far from dead,” he said.

When asked if he thinks the current city council race could determine whether the casino issue comes back, Bell replied, “Yes,” adding, “The city council race is very likely to determine when it comes back.”

He buttressed this point by noting that casino representatives have intimated at city meetings on a potential casino project that the Sands might not move forward with the destination resort project unless it also gets approval for casino gaming.

Stepping momentarily away from his political directorship, Bell noted that the candidates supported by FFI are also anti-casino. He said each believes the battle with the Las Vegas Sands casino developer will likely continue after the next city council members are chosen.

Bell’s beliefs are reflected by prior reporting from The Dallas Express.

DX reported that FFI-backed candidate Sergio Porres is running on a platform critical of casino development in the city. The other FFI-backed candidates include incumbent Councilman John Bloch (Place 1) and Place 7 candidate Adam Muller. 

Early voting in the Irving City Council race runs from April 22 to 29, and Election Day is May 3.