Category: Paris Texas

On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, the City of Paris council members voted to demand rental properties in the historical districts to pay “registration” fees. On all rental properties? Even above ground-floor apartments and condos being recommended as a way to have more people living in the downtown area?   

The city grants – gives – taxpayer’s dollars to downtown owners who will improve the appearance of their buildings, but charges regulation, restrictions and fees for others to improve their property. Why?

Think about the thinking: Creating more regulations, restrictions, and fees on rental properties is the way to (a) create more affordable housing and to improve Paris; or (b) hope higher rents will keep the (wink) undesirable “low income” folks out of the neighborhood?

Will increasing rental fees win the war against blight, decay, and rot in the area’s older neighborhoods?

Let’s face it: Large areas of Paris are a disgrace; ugly to the eye and an insult to humanity. Especially, when the city allowed the property to decline to a point where it needs repairs.

We’re not against equally applied standards – or fines – to prevent litter, junk in front yards, weeds, maintenance neglect, etc., but restrictions, regulations and fees to tell owners what they must do?

“…com’on, man!”

Three short weeks before, the Paris Texas Chamber had suggested the city be prohibited, by ordinance or Charter change, from adopting or enforcing regulations that requires an owner of a vacant residential or commercial property to obtain a permit to do repairs to their property, (a) if it is necessary to protect public safety; or (b) to prevent further damage to the building.

So the city’’s guiding hands did the very opposite of what needs doing.

The city has planners and other sellers of services who find regulations, restrictions and fees successful ways to use the taxpayer’s money. Somehow, those ways seem to benefit them, seldom the community. Everyone knows the examples:

  • Incentives to builders for 5 little-bitty $200,000 affordable homes (1150 to 1250 sq. ft.); a million dollar guarantee

  • Approving really tiny (750 to 800 sq. ft.) homes in established older neighborhoods or in retail and commercially zoned areas

  • giving incentives to apartment complex purchasers or builders; and

  • Using an estimated $7-million to build a street for a residential development with a small retail or commercial area thrown into the mix.

None of those things, nada, are doing anything to improve the older existing, ignored for years, city discriminated against neighborhoods.

But $7 to $8 million, not counting the other incentives, used wisely, could – the catch here, of course, is being “used wisely”.

Millions of dollars to builders and a few wealthy corporations, but Paris will not purchase in bulk-at-a-discount building fix-up, paint-up, and clean-up materials to provide families willing to use sweat equity to repair or improve their home in an older neighborhood?

Why not?

As the Paris Chamber previously stated: There are only two reasons to penalize the improvement of property: Greed for fees or stupidity.

Paris does both, often at the same time, and calls it progress.

 

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               The Heart of the City

 

Paris Texas is a quiet, sorta’ sleepy, strangely unsettled town, nestled in Lamar County, an area that once was a part of Miller County, Arkansas. Today, parts of the city’s heart have stopped beating. Historically, the downtown area was the heart of the city, pumping economic blood from city limits to city limits. But it’s likely that the central economic muscle will never return. 

There has been by-pass surgery of sorts, but to survive, Paris needs a new heart or a vast new miracle to get it working again.

In NE Texas, Paris is a clean air area. When folks in the Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex want a breathe of the unpolluted stuff they can visit Paris. They can purify their lungs with some deep breaths and admire the local Eiffel Tower, the Red River Valley Veterans Memorial, visit the Lamar County Historical Museum or John Chisum’s grave site or drive around and look at all the litter – or all of it not hidden in the weeds.

 

Other people, unless they have relatives here, who wander in or deliberately visit Paris, never fully quite understand why they do so –– Especially, after July 4th and on into the middle of September. Rain clouds drift along the Red River, and then off into the Land of the Razorbacks. Every year, the heat encourage locals to do strange things as they enjoy 100-degree temperatures that feel more like 111.

Saying people in Paris sweat is truly superfluous. And some don’t wait for summer to do it.

 Visitors wandering around in the heart of the city . . . .

. . . . worry about spontaneous combustion.

Some locals believe that started the Great Fire of 1916, which burned almost half the town.

Strangely, a lot of people who live and work in North Dallas, Plano, and other bedroom cities thrown together in northern areas of the metroplex, have never seen parts of an old town. So, when they wander into and around Paris, an old town, where most areas show it, Paris terrifies them.

 

Paris is blessed with numerous assets and, because of them, numerous opportunities. Maybe so many that our leadership can’t make a decision on what to do or how to do it, which keeps Paris from saving itself. It keeps looking for someone or something to do it.

The Paris Texas Chamber could … but the leadership refuses to ask HOW.

It’s a shame.

Because those assets remain unused; the opportunities are wasted.

Think not?

Then, please explain how – in 50-years or less – Paris went from the largest city in a 100-mile circle of NE Texas and SE Oklahoma, one of economic prominence and prosperity, the North Star of Texas, to the ugly, junky, weedy, litter-covered, population-losing, boarded up, tax-wasting, self-deluded mess we’re in today?

 

Name one Paris decision over the last 25-30-or so years that has made a significant difference in population, appearance, better-paying jobs, family incomes, community attitudes, etc. – anything beyond a stopgap measure or some project that had a limited impact?

You can, dear reader, get angry – cuss and be disgusted – but IF you’ll drive around Paris, inside the Loop you’ll see a community reeking with 3rd world results.

So, how can you honestly believe that Paris got to the shape it’s in by making intelligent decisions for community and economic improvement over the last 25-30-or so years?

Neither can we.

 

return to   Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce