Saluting Texas Lone Stars: The Lone Star section spotlights and recognizes powerful figures across Texas’ public sector landscape. This week’s Lone Star profile is Gerard Hudspeth, the mayor of the city of Denton.
My public career highlights and education:
I was born and raised here in Denton. So, all things here in Denton. There’s only one high school: Denton High School. Then, I went to North Central Texas College as a junior college student in 1991. I later graduated from the University of North Texas.
I was first elected successfully in 2017, but I ran a couple of times before that. We have two-year terms, so I served until 2019. Then I left early in 2019 to run for mayor, which is a different cycle. I ran again in 2020, when I was elected as mayor. Since, I was then reelected in 2022 and 2024.
What I like best about public service:
The opportunity to help people navigate the constraints, bureaucracy, all those things that come with governments, right? It’s hard and can be counterintuitive, so I like helping people navigate that. The best part of it is getting people to a reasonable end or getting to an answer faster.
I am also always a big advocate for non-profits. I like working with non-profits and helping lift those up that that serve our community. There are gaps in every community, and those nonprofits play a critical role in helping the mayor. Nonprofits help the city serve everyone in our community well. And so, I’m always a big advocate for nonprofits that help serve in areas that maybe the city can’t reach or doesn’t have the funds to reach. Sometimes someone, just out of the goodness of their heart, enhances our city, and I like to champion that work.
The best advice I’ve ever received:
The best advice I received from a council member — hands down — was for my wife to watch the meetings. At first, I said: why would she ever do that? The answer is that it prevents a disconnect. I spend 8 hours every other week in these meetings. That could be a large gap in our communication. And maintaining communication allows me to be able to serve as long as I have. So that kind of continuity is the greatest advice I’ve gotten.
In addition to that, from a council perspective, it’s really about — and I’m not always great at this — but trying to work with new people. You’re working with six or seven people that you didn’t pick, and so you must learn quickly how to foster a good relationship or move towards an end. Even if you’re on the three side of four, how to move past that goal and on to the next item. I’m not always good at that, so that’s a work in progress, but it’s a life goal.
Something people should know about my division of government:
I want people to understand that there’s no perfect answer. But then we can collaborate on what’s reasonable or what works best. Two examples of that:
One, if people prefer plastic or paper bags at the grocery store. Often, people will say paper’s better for the environment, but it also uses more water than plastic. So, from a natural resource standpoint, certainly it breaks down faster, but it uses more natural resources to get to that end. Where’s the balance there, right?
And another is here in the city of Denton, when we build our roads, our new streets have the manhole cover set just below the surface. So, there’s essentially a built-in pothole for every brand-new street. Someone once asked me about that, and so I talked to my staff. The answer was because the street’s going to wear down, and it’ll be even eventually. So, we can either make the manhole even on a brand-new road and it eventually turns into a bump. Or, we can have a little dip, and once it wears down, it’ll be even. But the utopia is not out there. So, do you want a bump or a dip?
And so, the more I can do to help people to understand that there’s not a perfect answer, the better we’ll be.
Current project or initiative I’m working on:
There’s a couple. We have our first master plan community coming online. We’ve been working up two entitlements for about 6,000 acres in total, located at Hunter Ranch and Cole Ranch. That’s really big, and it’s a first for our city. The master planned communities will help from a first-time homebuyer perspective, because you have people in homes built in the 1970s, -80s, -90s that may opt to buy a new home. That opens up older homes for first-time homebuyers, which is good.
From an economic development standpoint, we’re advancing in the AI space. We have a company that is in town that has an AI data center. We also have a company that provides A/C for the data center. There’s been lots of that kind of data center-centric business and economic development. Because we have municipal electricity, we’ve attracted some of those businesses. So that’s been exciting to work through those processes and make sure we’re serving well, and at the same time benefiting the taxpayers.
One thing people may not know about me:
I’m a huge heavy metal fan; I love it. I have a friend that plays drums for Korn. I know the bass player for Disturbed. I’m a big Slipknot fan. Powerman 5000, Rob Zombie, Deftones — Pantera. My favorite Pantera album is The Great Southern Trend Killtrend. Now, I’m older, but I wouldn’t pass on a mosh pit when I was younger.
