Amir Omar didn’t like that he and his Richardson City Council colleagues were selecting the next mayor of Richardson in 2009 and again in 2011. If he hadn’t won his race for the Place 7 council seat, he would have had no say in who the city’s mayor was. No one outside the council’s closed executive session had cast a vote for mayor in nearly 60 years.
This type of election was rare outside the Dallas suburb of more than 100,000 people. Other North Texas cities, such as Allen, Dallas, Plano, Garland and Denton, had the same council-manager system of government, yet allowed voters to elect their mayors directly. As Omar told council members in 2011, the Texas Municipal League reported that only 6% of Texas cities weren’t doing it that way.
None of those cities, except Richardson, was in the Dallas-Fort Worth area…