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Alumni wrangle with boom on an urban frontier town

Perhaps Frisco, Texas, should be the University’s adopted city. Of the approximate 200 alumni who now call the northeast Texas town home, more than a few of them, including the school superintendent, city manager and fire chief, held the reins	Mack Borchardt (student ’68-’70), fire chief of Frisco, may be a country boy at heart, but he feels right at home amidst the city’s growth and, of course, with one of his shiny fire engines.
as their city was branded the “Fastest Growing in Texas.”

With a growth rate of more than 400 percent over the past decade, Frisco grew from a population of a mere 6,000–smaller than Commerce–to an astounding 61,000.

Now a magnet for shoppers, sports fans and young professionals, Frisco is nursing its growing pains with the expansion of roads and highways, the passage of a $478 million school bond proposal and the construction of an impressive convention center/ hotel complex.

And let’s not forget about the projects upon which the dust has already settled: the opening of the $200 million Stonebriar Centre shopping mall,
the construction of Collin County Community College’s Preston Ridge Campus and the first pitch of the Frisco RoughRiders.

More recently, those in search of trendy home furnishings were delighted by the news that Swedish-based IKEA has selected Frisco as the premiere place to locate its second Texas store.

Thanks to the A&M-Commerce graduates named below—and doubtless many more—Frisco should be in good hands as it stampedes toward its projected population of 146,000 by the year 2010.

George Purefoy
(MP MPA ’78)

In 1987, when George Purefoy took the city manager position in Frisco, he had high hopes. Some may have thought it a little strange that he had such big aspirations for a town of only 5,000. But, as George predicted, location was indeed the key.

“Some things came to us just because of where we are,” George says modestly when asked about the key to his success as city manager. The most difficult task through the years, he says, has been expanding the city’s infrastructure to keep up with the growth, rather than attracting businesses.

Modest as he may be, George fast-forwarded the city’s growth in 1996 when he convinced a developer to choose Frisco as the spot to locate its $200 million Stonebriar Centre shopping mall. It was quite a feat, given the fact that next-door neighbor Plano, with a population of 175,000, was also wooing the developer. George still remembers the day he made the pitch. “It was our moment to win or lose the thing,” he said in an article in The Dallas Morning News. “We put our best deal on the table. We knew this was a deal we couldn’t afford to lose.”

Since Stonebriar Centre opened in 2000, more than 4 million square feet of retail space has evolved around it, causing sales tax receipts to quadruple. The Morning News article quoted Bernard Weinstein, director of the Center of Economic Development at the University of North Texas, as saying, “The Stonebriar mall has been the catalyst for an incredible amount of economic development in Frisco. It’s become the largest concentration of retail anywhere in the state of Texas, and maybe anywhere in the country outside of New York.”

George came to ETSU to pursue a master’s of public administration following his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Arlington. He enjoyed the increased interaction with his professors and gave the program high marks. “We really enjoyed Com-

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