Rick Stopfer served as Irving's mayor from 2017 to May 2026. He didn't seek reelection this year because he maxed out his term limits.
Al Zapanta won the race to take over the mayorship. The baton was passed from Stopfer to Zapanta May 13.
KERA's Andy Lusk spoke with Stopfer during his last week in office.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Andy Lusk: What are you proudest of as your mayoral term comes to an end?
Rick Stopfer: When you're a mayor, you're kind of the figurehead, but realistically, it takes at least five people on the council to move things forward, and it takes a city management that's willing to work with you, and it takes people who are willing to vote for the bond packages so you can actually do the work.
What I'm most proud of is that we do work together and we don't have those challenges that a lot of other places have.
We have a completely diverse city. The city is amazingly diverse, over 200 houses of worship. So, you really have to accept and understand and be engaged in all those to really get to the people, to really get their buy-in for what you're doing and to really understand what they want and what they need as far as their world that they live in.
I'm proud of the working relationship that we all have as a community. When you think about it, we're the 88th or 90th largest city in the country, the 12th largest in Texas, and we all get along pretty darn well.
Lusk: David Pfaff described the DART deal as your "crowning achievement." Would you agree with that?
Stopfer: I've been very engaged with DART over the years. I was involved with the last pullout election. And so for me, the challenges come that we built a great system, but we really don't have the ridership we need. So, how do we build that ridership and how do get the best return for our investment?
Today, more than any time, people are concerned with how their dollars are spent. We feel very comfortable that you can find almost where every penny that comes in for a tax and how it's spent in the City of Irving. We're very transparent on how our dollars are spent.
We feel that we've come to an opportunity where we'll have some dollars that we can spend and we can hire people to work with us.
I'm actually going to stay on the DART Board, so I'll be engaged with that one. But once we get through the legislature, we'll actually end up with another seat. So, we'll have the opportunity to have two people on there.
Lusk: Where do you see Irving maybe five years from now or even 50 years from now, knowing that right now some things are expensive and it's hard to grow?
Stopfer: I think you see even a brighter and better Irving in 50 years than you see here today because a lot of the city is older and so it's ripe for redevelopment.
With our location and with what we have to offer as far as Texas, we're in a sweet spot. We're in the area where people want to live, so if people want to live here, then they're going to build and they're going to grow their businesses.
Lusk: I do want to talk about challenges that you faced during your tenure, maybe some of the harder parts of being mayor over the last decade.
Stopfer: I would say the biggest challenges we ran through was the time of COVID. I mean, we had about a year and a half there where everything changed. People lost their jobs. They couldn't pay their bills. People needed food. It was a different time. And people were seeing from a window their loved ones pass.
So, I'd say that was probably the most challenging time, was to try to keep everybody somewhat as close to a semblance of an average day as you could. And amazingly, amazingly, amazingly, our people stepped up, our restaurants stepped up, our nonprofits stepped up. I mean, we would have food drives, and people would come, and we would start at eight in the morning and at seven at night, people were still picking up food.
I mean, it was a different time, but it really in some ways brought us all together because people became more compassionate.
Lusk: So, you're staying on the DART Board. Is this retirement otherwise?
Stopfer: Well, there's still things that I'll do with certain nonprofits that I've worked with that I will continue to be engaged with. There's still some of the school activities that I'm excited about continuing to be in engaged with, so I'll still be involved in the community, it just won't be at this level.
Got a tip? Email Andy Lusk at alusk@kera.org.
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