When she was asked to run for Wilmer City Council, Sheila Petta had no interest. She had other matters that demanded her time.
That was several years ago. Today, Petta intends to run for a third time as the head of the small Dallas County community that just celebrated becoming the American manufacturing home of Trina Solar, a global energy company creating more than 1,000 jobs through a $200 million investment.
“I wasn’t even interested,” Petta said of running for council. “One of the gentlemen here in the City of Wilmer kept on and kept on, wanting me to get onto [the] city council. Until my husband said that he didn’t care, I did not accept it. I have been in office since.”
Petta was elected in November 2020 and re-elected in May 2022.
“I was on Planning and Zoning before I was on council,” she said. “I had to take a year off because of my husband. We thought that he was going to be able to have the operation, and I knew it was going to take a while to get him up and going, and I wanted to be able to take care of him.”
Petta’s husband, Frank, is in kidney failure and receives outpatient dialysis three times a week.
“When the doctors told us that there was nothing that could be done, I decided that I wanted to be back on council,” she said. “So, I picked up the paperwork, brought it home, and filled it all out. When it got to the position I wanted, I put down ‘council.'”
But by the time she returned those documents to the city secretary, Petta had made a different decision.
“I asked her if I could go back over it, and when I got to the part where I had put ‘council,’ I marked through that and put ‘mayor,'” she said. “I’ve been in that office ever since.”
With a population of about 7,000, Wilmer is a Type A general law city with a council-manager form of government. Its mayor and council members are elected at large on staggered two-year terms by plurality vote.
“We want to go home rule,” Petta said. “I’m going to have to take that to my citizens and see if that’s what they want to do. We would write our own charter, so that is what we are working toward.”
Under Texas law, cities with populations of more than 5,000 have the power to adopt their own charters following elections, granting them the right to self-government. If Wilmer residents choose to live in a home-rule city, Petta said she will continue to lead with the same approach.
“I have lived in Wilmer for 25 years, but I’ve been around here all my life. I’ve seen Wilmer grow, I’ve seen Hutchins grow, and I’ve seen Lancaster grow. We have a great community. Retail and residential is what I work for. We are a very small town, and I want us to grow. But I want to keep a little bit of the country. That’s what a lot of people move out here for.”
Petta is a Best Southwest executive committee member. That organization represents Cedar Hill, DeSoto, Duncanville, and Lancaster and maintains associate membership with Ferris, Glenn Heights, Hutchins, Ovilla, Red Oak, and Wilmer to promote economic development in the area.
“We’ve got great developers out there,” Petta said. “I have a good relationship with all of the cities around us here in the southern part of Dallas County.”
A native of Dallas, Petta, 76, calls herself “just an old country girl” with a background that includes “everything else I’ve done back in the day.”
“I worked for Walmart as a support manager,” she said. “I was with Walmart for 20 years. Before that, I was either a car hop or a waitress.”
The Wilmer Economic Development Corporation calls the city “America’s logistics center,” with Fortune 500 companies Proctor & Gamble, Whirlpool, Unilever, Ace Hardware, and Medline coming to Wilmer after Union Pacific chose the community for its global intermodal facility.
“And Trina Solar came to us,” Petta said. “They told us kind of what they wanted and … we had an ideal spot. They have the largest warehouse office — 23 football fields long — and it’s the largest in Texas, from my understanding. We’ve already got other companies wanting to come here to work with them.”
Trina Solar is opening at Tradepoint 45 West, located at 1200 N. Sunrise Rd. The company was founded in China in 1997. Its U.S. regional headquarters are in Silicon Valley and Miami.
