AMARILLO, Texas — Amarillo Mayor Cole Stanley says his top two priorities heading into 2025 are infrastructure and public safety.
The panhandle city, like many others, is facing retention and hiring issues within the police and fire departments. At one point, the mayor said the departments were losing employees at a rate of 10% annually.
But city leaders did something about it and he expects the success that followed to continue in 2025.
“We’ve put $10,000 for each individual sworn officer in both police and fire, as a pay increase here in this last budget. And we’ve seen a 20% increase now in retention,” Mayor Stanley told us proudly on Inside Texas Politics.
Stanley says there are usually 75 or so candidates applying for the police academy. But the last academy saw more than 200 applicants.
One issue the Republican doesn’t expect to go away in 2025 is the fight over an abortion travel ban throughout the city.
Last November, voters overwhelmingly rejected a travel ban that would have, in essence, made it illegal to use Amarillo’s highways and streets to obtain an out-of-state abortion.
The mayor says the measure failed for two main reasons: residents considered it governmental overreach and questions about how the law would be enforced.
“Interstate travel and interstate commerce and the private right-of-action trying to regulate some of those things you really need to be publicly enforcing,” he explained.
Mayor Stanley also doesn’t think President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan would impact Amarillo as much as other cities.
While panhandle farms, particularly the cattle industry, rely on migrants, Stanley argues that the vast majority of them working in his city are there legally.
“I would say that most of the impact that we’re going to feel won’t be in our farm, and ranch, and our ag. What you’re going to see is the impact in those larger cities,” argued the Mayor.