Lubbock City Council District 4 covers portions of South Lubbock, largely between Slide Road and University Avenue.
In March, current District 4 representative Brayden Rose announced his resignation for personal and familial reasons.
Rose took office in May 2024. Whoever is elected to take his position will serve out the remainder of his term and a regularly scheduled election will take place in 2028.
Early voting in the Lubbock City Council District 4 Special Election runs June 15-23 and Election Day is June 27.
The race to determine Rose’s replacement has five candidates: Gary Boren, Stephanie Ferran, Tim Green, Bill Curnow, and Boyd Goodloe.
KTTZ reached out to each of the candidates and did not receive a response from Stephanie Ferran before publication.
You can find interviews with the other District 4 candidates here.
Tim Green is the owner of a homebuilding business in Lubbock and a former firefighter.
The following transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Samantha Larned: Sitting down with Tim Green, candidate for Lubbock City Council District 4. Thank you so much for joining us.
Tim Green: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Samantha Larned: To start off with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Tim Green: Of course, my name's Tim Green, and I'm running for City Council District 4. Early voting is starting Monday, the 15th, and I have been a lifelong resident of Lubbock. I went to Coronado High School, so I'm a Coronado Mustang. I went to Texas Tech, I walked on the track team at Texas Tech and earned a scholarship and laddered in track and field at Tech, so I bleed red and black. I got on the Lubbock Fire Department my junior year at Tech, so I was 20 years old, 20-21, and so when I went back to school after getting on the fire department, I went back to Lubbock Christian University, and finished up there, and got my degree from Lubbock Christian. So, two really good schools in Lubbock, Texas, that I had the pleasure of attending, and after, so after school, after I graduated, I continued to be a firefighter for 15 years, and I retired early in 2002 but I was also building homes. I started a home building company from the ground up in 1991 and I've now built over a thousand homes in Lubbock and the surrounding community, and so been a businessman all of my life, you know, firefighter and businessman, and this is a new twist on my life, a new challenge, so to speak, is getting into public service.
SL: What motivated you to run for District 4?
TG: I believe that the city council needs people from the growth industry, with real-world experience. And so they don't need career politicians, I think that's true with any government, but the city, I think the government was intended to run from people that weren't professional politicians. And what that does is it brings in fresh perspectives from outside and new innovative ideas, and so I feel like I can deliver those.
I think it's really important that we have someone on the council from my industry or some industry related to the growth in Lubbock. Growth is a very big, big part of what our city government is in charge of, and so I believe that somebody from our industry needs to be in the seat at the city council to have those new, fresh ideas, and just those ideas of which way to grow and what to do, and that kind of thing.
SL: Growth is something that we talk about a lot, but talking about something and responding to it are two very different things. Where are you seeing the biggest impacts of this growth? And what do you think the city should be doing to respond and prepare for it?
TG: Infrastructure. We've got to get ahead of the growth. When you're behind growth, it's going to cost the citizens and the taxpayers a lot more money. And I know exactly where the growth is going, because I deal in it every single day with the developers, with bankers, with everybody that's involved in the growth business. I'm involved with all of them. And so I know exactly which way it's going, what to do, and how to get ahead of it.
I'll give you an example of when we get behind. We didn't have a road bond for 14 years. We got way behind in roads. Now Upland Avenue is costing us four times per mile what Milwaukee cost us in 2007, 2008. In 2007-2008, it was a joint venture with the city and the developers, George McMahan and Ron Betenbough had a big, big part of that, and so that's how to do it right. We've seen that. Upland should have been done in 2012, 2015, somewhere in that line, and we're just so far behind that it's just costing us so much money.
SL: So you talked about those road bonds that we've had in the past couple of years, those are intended for more of the large-scale projects, while road maintenance is meant to come out of the regular city budget. What are your thoughts, or what's your approach to handling street issues?
TG: You know, the budget's tight, so we have $14 million allocated per year for road maintenance, that's not very much when you consider we are a city of 145 square miles. That is a very, very large footprint, and we like it that way. That's why we live here. We like the expansiveness in the low density, but it gets complicated because we have to service so many roads, we have to service a lot of sewer and water and all infrastructure, and that gets costly because per mile per square mile, we have a certain amount of people, and you know, in, let's say, Dallas or Atlanta or Houston, or whatever, they're two to three times as dense as Lubbock is. And so per capita they can afford a lot more because the expansiveness isn't there like it is in Lubbock, so you know the solution to this is not raising taxes for the taxpayers or the homeowners, it's to bring in more revenue.
And that's another thing, I’m expert at bringing in revenue. I have a lot of fresh ideas. New things that maybe have never been tried before, but that can bring in new revenue, or invest in more things that are working. I'd love to have George Strait every weekend. That's a perfect example of bringing in outside revenue.
If we're just putting our checks from our checking account to our savings account, we're not making any money. We've got to bring in outside revenue, manufacturing, industrial, technology, retail, all kinds of outside groups and industries that are looking at us. We've got to get them in here. Growth, and new revenue cures almost every single problem that we could ever imagine and mention in here.
SL: What are your thoughts on bringing those businesses and industries into Lubbock?
TG: I'm going to be behind LEDA and Market Lubbock, and those entities for helping bring in the new revenue. Now, I'm not for big tax abatements, don't get me wrong, and also I don't want the new industries coming in that compete with our existing businesses, and they get a tax break, and our existing businesses don't. That's not fair. I don't agree with picking winners and losers. And a lot of that LEDA money, which people don't know, abatements and incentives go to local businesses to refab and to build a new manufacturing building, or to whatever they're going to do, because that adds jobs too.
But I'll go back to roads. The infrastructure that we build, I’ll use this because it's in my district, so when we built Quaker – it stopped at 82nd for a long, long time – we built seven lanes all the way out to now, what is now Loop 88. Think of all those businesses, all that retail, and everything along that. We had to plant those seeds many, many years ago. Now we've got the fruit from those seeds that we planted, and the H-E-B, the Walmart, all that retail around there brings in huge amounts of revenue in property taxes and in sales tax,. All of that new revenue lowers the burden for our homeowners and our current taxpayers, and that's exactly what I'm going to push to accomplish. I'm going to keep pushing and pushing hard to get this new revenue to come in to take the burden off of our current citizens.
SL: So you talked about the tax rate, talked a little bit about roads and infrastructure. Are there any other priority issues that you've heard from District 4 residents as you've been campaigning?
TG: Well, I've knocked on around 8,000 doors so far. I've talked to approximately 2,000 people. The theme is some people get worried about things that they've heard, and sometimes they don't have the correct information. So what I would say is a lot of the theme is misinformation. And so, the City of Lubbock, we need a much better job of transparency. We've got to let the citizens know exactly what's going on and why, because it's frustrating if you see something – and social media has really messed this up, and we all know that – that there's so much misinformation out there, it's harder and harder to get the real information out. So if we can figure out how to be a little more transparent or get the message out with the big decisions that we make, that's one of the biggest, I think, issues.
I would say the most of the 2,000 people that I've talked to are pretty happy about the direction of Lubbock. And you know some of them are not, and that's understandable, you know, they have have frustrations, and but most of them are small frustrations that you know could be taken care of fairly easily, and so they just need to know, you know, who the right person to contact is at the city, and things like that. That's where I hear most frustration. They'll say, I've contacted this department, or I've done this, and I never heard back. We can't let that happen. We've got this to have the citizens be able to get an answer, whether they're the answer that they get is they lack or not, at least they have an answer.
SL: So not only the transparency of it, but also the communication itself.
TG: The communication. Yeah, yeah.
SL: You're talking about bringing more industries into Lubbock. One industry, which has been very interested in West Texas recently, is data centers, and that's a big concern for many West Texans. We have seen data center proposals come to Lubbock. Those proposals were in districts one and two, but a facility like that would affect the whole city. Have you thought about what you would require from a developer with a data center project?
TG: Yes, absolutely. This campaign just happens to coincide with big AI data center talk, and because more and more data centers are looking at Lubbock. So I've done a tremendous amount of studying and research on AI data centers. So, to say that – and I know you're not asking me – but to say that I'm for or against data centers, that's an irresponsible answer, because we don't have all the facts. Every data center, and this is very important, every data center is different.
So that is my position. I'm not for, and I'm not against data centers. But here's my answer: to be for a data center, it's got to meet extremely high standards on noise level, air quality, light pollution, those types of things, and what it will do to the environment surrounding the data center itself. We need to know what about the animals around it? You know, what about the prairie dogs? What's it gonna do to them? You know, we don't need any more of those, but I'm not an advocate for eliminating them, you know.
SL: But if we force them out of the empty lot, because now there's a data center, where are they gonna go?
TG: That’s right, where are they gonna go? Yeah. But of the utmost importance is the protection of the citizens of Lubbock. They've got to give us these answers prior to being approved. And II'll get into water and electricity in a minute, because those are the two biggies, but some of the things that people kind of know about is the noise and their air quality and light pollution. So the water, there's so much misinformation. Oh, even four or five years ago, they, the data centers used to use a lot of water, and maybe some of them still can, but any data center that we're going to look at has to be a closed-loop system. Air-cooled closed-loop system, that's the only way it'll even get past the front door. The other thing is the stress on the electrical grid. We can't have any amount of stress on our electrical grid that causes pain or causes increase to our residents or anybody affected. So, if we have a cold spell, and we're doing rolling blackouts, or whatever, they've got to have a contract where they're the first ones to go down, you know, or whatever it is.
There's got to be a lot of safety features that are in their proposal before I'm going to look at it. And I'm actually developing a questionnaire on data centers. If I'm fortunate enough to be in the city council seat, then I'll have a 30, 40, 50 question analysis questionnaire for any proposal that's coming about. And again, going back to the several thousand people that I've talked to, a lot of those mentioned this concern, and I give them this same answer, which I think helps alleviate some of the fear.
SL: We talked earlier about tax rates and about the costs of running a city. Budgets are coming up pretty quick here. Have you thought about what you would prioritize for budget proposals if you were to be elected?
TG: Safety is always number one. Being a firefighter, being a first responder, safety is always the first thing on my mind. That's, I think, my job as a city council member is to make sure my citizens that I represent and citizens across Lubbock are safe. We have a fantastic fire department. Our fire department has an ISO rating of one, which, by the way, helps our insurance rates, so that's a good thing. Less than 2% of all fire departments in America have a rating of one, so we have, again, one of the best fire departments in the United States.
Police Department. Our crime rate is too high. It has been coming down the last two years. I think we've seen a drop, 12% per year the last two years. Chief Herman is doing a fantastic job. He's come in two and a half years, I think, ago. He's done a really good job of working with what he's got. Again, I think we're a little under manned on the police department. We have 454 police officers. At any given time, there's only about 25 to 30 on duty, driving around Lubbock. Again, this is where our 145 miles square miles works against us. We need more police officers, and funding that is going to be tough, and I'll go back to my finding new forms of revenue. The growth, the revenue, that all is going to help with trying to find more police officers. That's what I will not sacrifice.
The other thing is, there's always efficiencies, and I'll have to dig deeper into the budget and into the departments, but I'm sure there's efficiencies that I can find as a private businessman that I've had to do, I've constantly had to find those types of efficiencies. And there are some, you know, too much overtime, something like that, if everybody in the department is always working overtime, we need to hire another person. Overtime is not the best solution to work; it's being staffed properly.
SL: As we're coming up on the end here, do you have any further thoughts? Anything you want to share about the campaign, the process that you've been through, anything like that.
TG: You know, being from the private sector, the campaigning and politics is a very different world. I'm starting to get used to it. Sometimes people don't care about the facts, they just want to be affirmed in their beliefs, which is okay. I mean, but I base my decisions based on facts, and in studying and my past experience, and things like that. Sometimes the campaign world is you have catch phrases, and you have gimmicks, and things like that, which I'm just not going to play that part. But like I said, not being a professional politician, I just look at it as more of a job interview. I think I'll be great at this job, so I would love for you to hire me. In this case, I'd love for you to elect me.
I think this election is about fresh ideas, innovative thoughts, creative and innovative ideas, and stepping into the future with the best possible chance for success, and not looking backwards. I think we have two choices, or three, or four, or five, and looking forward and moving forward is going to be, I believe, the best choice for Lubbock.
SL: Tim Green, running for Lubbock City Council District Four. Thank you so much for taking the time.
TG: Thank you, Samantha, for having me.
You can find KTTZ's interviews with other candidates in the special election here.
Early voting runs June 15-23 and Election Day is June 27.