On April 2, 2025, the UT-Dallas Student Government hosted a debate of Richardson mayoral candidates, moderated by Dr. John Gooch. Mayor Bob Dubey and former Councilmember Amir Omar participated. It was announced that Alan North "did not get back to us in terms of attending this debate." That's something that Alan North has denied. "I RSVP'd yes to their April 2 debate, sent Aidan Boyd three emails, with 2 different e-mail addresses, called, left voicemails—silence."
This forum had a great format, helped by the fact that there were only two candidates on stage. A candidate was given one minute to answer a question, then they went back and forth for several more minutes rebutting each other. That allowed for the candidates to thoroughly cover each question and each other's arguments. You should watch the whole debate yourself on Instagram. Here, I'll only highlight exchanges that drew out the sharpest differences in their approaches to governance.
Dubey: "The city works off the premise of trying to keep a tax ratio with corporate businesses at around 60% and the citizens or residential at 40%...Overall, we're right on track and ahead of time for that to continue."
Omar: "In this latest budget, [the City Manager said they] were concerned about office buildings in Richardson [which] are expected to drop 10% year over year for the next few years...Unlike what was said earlier about all the wonderful things we're doing in terms of bringing companies here, we are actually net losing companies."
Dubey: "City Manager Don Magner and I meet with multiple companies every single month. We have a lunch that is our economic development lunch."
Omar: "What the mayor spoke about is actually right. He is doing those things. He's meeting on a regular basis. When they do a group meeting with the companies, he's showing up to the lunch...There's a difference, in my opinion, between being a proactive mayor that is going to go and meet one-on-one with every single one of these major employers, versus waiting for everyone to come to me for a lunch, right? It's just a difference in approach. It's a ceremonial approach versus a proactive Mayor approach."
Dubey: "We have a Comprehensive Plan. It's Envision Richardson. We work very, very hard with all the community's input. And there were multiple town halls for that. There were multiple meetings all over to have input. It spanned over months and months to get input. So we do get the input, and the vision changed."
Omar: "All the things he said about Envision Richardson are absolutely correct...That's why when those same residents showed up to the Council meeting and said, Can we please stick with our plan?, it was even more disappointing for them. It's why they didn't feel like they were being listened to any longer."
Dubey: "For the record, each of those plans are reviewed on an annual basis."
Omar: "If there's an annual review of every one of these study areas, then it's confusing to me, why, on a couple of these occasions, you've said things like the vision is lost or the vision is blurry. You either know what the vision is because you're reviewing it every year and you're making sure that everyone on the team knows what it is, or you don't and the vision is lost. So my impression is that our Council doesn't necessarily, every year, review every one of these studies."
Dubey: "As far as us just flying around by the seat of our pants, I would tell you that I'm very proud of the work that this Council has done, and what Mr. Omar is indicating is that all seven of us on this Council haven't had a clue of what we do."
Omar: "A lot of these were 4-3 votes. So this attitude of, you know, the team being together, that's just not accurate. There were Councilmembers that listened to the information, that heard the residents and the small businesses, and they decided to actually stick with the plan, because they didn't want to abandon those people who had already invested in Richardson."
Dubey: "When I got on Council, everyone on the Council said, No more drive-through restaurants. You can't have drive-through restaurants. That's not what the citizens want. COVID hit. Every developer came into the Council and said, You have to have drive-through restaurants, or their people aren't going to go."
Omar: "What you heard the mayor say was that the residents said they don't want restaurants with drive-throughs anymore. And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of developers came forward and said, All anyone wants is drive-throughs. He listened to the developer versus listening to the residents."
Dubey: "As far as activities, the Arapaho Station is going to be the new biggest, greatest thing, and we're going to have an opportunity to really make that into an entertainment district, and that's what we're hoping to do."
Omar: "Speaking of the Arapaho Station, which is the next big bright thing for us, and I hope to be mayor, so that I can help us actually get the full value of what we're going to do at Arapaho Station. But decision one has already been made about Arapaho Station. Decision one was to allow a salvage car lot to be the entry to Richardson at Greenville Avenue and Arapaho...We make decisions that are partly on the plan and then partly not on the plan. And then we ask ourselves, well, how come there aren't a bunch of businesses coming here? Maybe we need 3,000 more apartments like we granted at City Line. Why did we do that? That was zoned to include that same entertainment that you just heard about, and instead, we just gave in to the developer and said, I guess no one's doing entertainment anymore, so let's just do 3,000 more apartments."
Dubey: "We have a great partnership with DART. They are also helping complete those trails that run along with it, with our guidance and our help. So those are things that we've already done and we will continue to do. And I'm very pleased to say that they're very active. I mentioned the linear park down by the DART. So that's, you know, another thing."
Omar: "Let's talk about this linear park. It's a good idea. It's a great investment by the city. I think it's thrilling to see it, but it's an example of a place where they had a plan. The plan was to include a park, a linear park, but the plan said, keep it walkable, don't do more automotive uses. And so what we're doing as a city, just in this two years is we're doing parts of the plan, and then we get to brag about those which are good to brag about, the linear park, for example, but then we do something that goes against the plan, like allowing the car dealership to go all the way to Interurban, messing up the walkability."
Dubey: "I know that for a fact, back when you were on the Council, you were the only vote that did not want to make smoking of any type, whether it was hookah or smoking, the only one that didn't want to make it a special use permit. You wanted everyone to be able to do it anytime they want to."
Omar: "Regarding this vote that he's talking about, it was specific to hookah bars. And what happened with that particular vote was a couple of our Councilmembers said, Hey, we think there's too many hookah bars, and so therefore we think that it's important that we reduce the number of hookah bars. And my only objection to it was that I thought it was a weird practice as a Council to just pick one sort of company after the other just based on how many there were. One of the things I said during that Council meeting — and by the way, that Council meeting is recorded thanks to my transparency initiatives in 2009. It was recorded from 2010 on, so you can go watch the Council meeting. One of the things I did real time is I said, Hey, we've got 27 dollar stores. Should we look at dollar stores too? Why would we regulate one business like that without regulating the others? And that was my objection to it. It was on the basis of principle."
Dubey: "I can honestly tell you that we do not say, as it relates to the [salvage] car dealership, how much money is going to be coming in. Number one, money will be coming in, but that land is owned by a person who was a businessman. And if you're going to tell people, businessmen, you can't build on your own property, or you can't have something on your own property, and make them take a beating, then they're going to go north, or they're going to go somewhere else."
Omar: "So I just want to make sure I understand where the line is. What other businesses are we allowing that person to just put there on the corner? Are we just going to approve anything? Are we going to be okay if they would have come with a pawn shop and said they had a pawn shop that they wanted to go there, would we have been okay with that? I should hope not."
Dubey: "We are listening to what the students have said. They come in front of us at the Council. We listen. Just last week, we had a student, a Comet, come and thank us for advancing mobility close to the college. We have heard what the students have said, and we're working hard to keep those pathways open for them."
Omar: "One of the things I haven't talked about, but one of the things that's a part of my campaign, is actually doing listening sessions, sitting down with people, one-on-one, having coffee. There are probably only a handful of times where I ever broke the one-on-one rule, and I think two or three of those were individual meetings with smaller groups of folks from Comets for Better Transit. Why did I spend time with them? Because they knew things that I wasn't quite as aware of as they were."
Dubey: "Housing is an issue, and I think that apartments have the ability to answer some of those issues. This Council currently, and what I believe in, is that we need to go vertical but we want to do it in the TOD neighborhoods."
Omar: "Now in these TODs, one of the important elements, definitely not the only important element, is housing, and the Mayor has spoken about he wants to go vertical. Yet every single one of the apartments that have been approved over the course of these two years have all been limited at that four to five story height. You may ask yourself, is that as tall as an apartment complex can go? Well, it is as tall as an apartment complex can go if you build it cheaply, if you build it with just two-by-fours. And so we have to determine whether or not we think we are a city that should go vertical. And if so, then we should create design standards that say when you build an apartment complex in Richardson, going forward, we want to see something that's built out of concrete and steel that has the ability to actually go vertical."
Dubey: "First of all, we're not going to break the law. State law does not allow us to dictate materials."
Omar: "Please understand I'm not looking to break the law. You can't dictate exterior building materials, but what you can do, and I hope the mayor wants this, is you can do something like form-based zoning that says that the first floor has to be a minimum of 15 feet. The minute you say that the first floor has to be a minimum of 15 feet, they can no longer build with just stick and brick...So there is a difference here in terms of creativity. There is a difference here in terms of the way we try to solve problems. One of us looks at a problem and says, Oh, we have nothing to do with that. We can't do anything about that. We can't tell a business not to put a salvage car lot there, and then you have the other person that says, well, there are ways that you can creatively do that. There are ways that you can creatively, proactively work with these people."
That was more quotes than I thought I would use when I first started writing, but only about 20% of the debate as a whole. There was a lot of good give and take there. Mostly Amir Omar giving, and Bob Dubey taking. I refrained from interspersing my own opinions into the transcript. I didn't feel it necessary. Again, I urge you to watch the whole thing to draw your own conclusions. It probably won't be difficult.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
"No knockout here. Still,
the crowd knows who won most rounds,
when the last bell sounds."
—h/t ChatGPT
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