Now that Councilman Brayden Rose has officially checked out, District 4 voters are being treated to a special election circus featuring four guys trying to out-conservative each other. (A fifth candidate, Stephanie Ferran, apparently couldn’t be bothered to respond to the media deadline, which honestly might be the most relatable political strategy yet). The remaining contenders have lined up to tell us exactly how they plan to rescue Lubbock from the twin horrors of crumbling pavement and artificial intelligence, all while promising they definitely won’t raise your taxes—unless they rename them “fees.”
First up is Boyd Goodloe, a rental director and former youth minister who is deeply traumatized by the fact that Lubbock has zero public swimming pools. When he isn’t dreaming of a taxpayer-funded aquatic center, he’s demanding we freeze all AI data center permits until at least 2028 because nothing says “future-proof economy” like a mandatory two-year timeout to think about it. Then there’s Bill Curnow, an information security manager whose primary campaign promise is literally just to shut up and listen. Curnow’s big vision for city infrastructure involves pointing out that our 100-year water plan is already 15 years old, and his idea of a major quality-of-life victory is the local art painted on downtown traffic signal boxes.
If you prefer your candidates with a background in firefighting, you have two flavors. Tim Green, a homebuilder and retired firefighter, wants to bump our police force from 454 officers to 500 and plans to hand a giant, terrifying homework questionnaire to any AI developer looking at West Texas. Meanwhile, Gary Boren—who hasn’t been on the council since 2007—is back to remind everyone that he once helped secure a 100-year water supply and spent five long years single-handedly nagging Paul McCartney into playing a concert here in 2014. Boren hates impact fees, noting that “F-E-E equals T-A-X,” and wants to push for a 150-year water supply, presumably because planning just a century ahead is for quitters.
Naturally, every single candidate gave Lubbock’s understaffed police and fire departments an “A” or “A+++” because suggesting our public safety isn’t absolutely perfect is a quick way to get run out of town on a rail. They are also uniformly terrified that data centers are going to suck the Ogallala Aquifer completely dry, yet they all agree the city’s current roads look like a war zone.
Whether you vote for the guy who promises to listen, the guy with the AI questionnaire, the guy who claims credit for Sir Paul, or the guy crying out for a public pool, those giant potholes on 50th and Indiana aren’t going anywhere anytime soon—but hey, at least those downtown traffic signal boxes look pretty while your alignment gets destroyed, right?
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