Days after Dan Pope secured the job as mayor-elect of Lubbock, EverythingLubbock.com sat down with him to find out what his thoughts are on some of the big issues in the city, as well as what he’s excited about for his upcoming term.

Pope won the election with 53 percent of the vote. 

“We are straight to work,” Pope said. “I spent several hours at City Hall yesterday and in fact, I’m headed there right after this interview.”

Pope served on the Lubbock ISD Board of Trustees and currently works with Covenant Medical Center as the Chief Development Officer. 

“I’m generally helping them raise money for the capital campaign that supports the technology and facility upgrades that their doing,” Pope said.

“I’m an hourly employee; I have plenty of time to do that as well as serve as Mayor,” he said.

Pope said the mayor makes $75 a month, and that the staff he and the city council surround themselves with will be important.

“It’s very important that the mayor and council found great staff, including the CEO, the city manager and let them do their job. Our job is very well defined. We need to let them do their job,” he said.

“The city needs to do a few things, and needs to do them well:  we need to protect our neighborhoods with fire and police, we need to have great streets to drive on, we need to maintain the facilities that we have, we need to live within our budget,” Pope said. “We need to provide affordable, reliable, available water and electricity. When it rains, we need to drain our streets.”

Recently, the Lubbock City Council dealt with annexation. We asked Pope how he planned to deal with annexation and growing Lubbock as a whole.

“Let’s maintain what we have,” Pope said. “I think we can do a better job of maintaining what we have. That’s just a matter of prioritizing what needs to be worked on next, laying out a plan, and doing it. It will take multiple years to do that, you explain that to citizens. Generally I think citizens and taxpayers are patient if they know what the plan is.”

“Second we need an annexation plan, we need to be able to tell residents and businesses that are outside the city limits what our plans are,” he said.
 
“We don’t need to be sticking our fingers in a lot of things. That was my big concern about the Uber and Lyft piece. I am a free market, free-sector kind of guy, and I think sometimes government gets in trouble when they reach too far.”
 
Overall, Pope said he’s excited about getting others excited about Lubbock.
 
“I think I’m most excited about getting to promote our city. It’s a great place, we often joke about if you live here long enough to wear out a pair of shoes, you’re probably not going to leave, and it’s just, I get a little worked up about it, it’s a great place to live, it’s a great place to work,” he said.

Pope and newly elected District 4 City Councilman Steve Massengale will be sworn in on Tuesday, May 17. Districts 1 and 2 are headed to a run-off election on June 25.