Ronnie Ragland:  

Life My photos: Yellow motorcyle is my Ducati 900 Super Sport, tops out at 160 mph and pulls wheelies in all six gears, and vehicle is a Chrysler 300 Hemi. Born in Dallas in 1949. Attended DISD K-12, graduating from SOC '67. BS Degree in Political Science Pre-Law '73, North Texas U. & Masters Public Administration '75, completed all course work except Thesis. Served as Vice President & President of North Texas University Public Administration Alumni Association '74 & '75. Public Service Career as Assistant City Manager &/or City Manager in following Cities: Garland; Addision; Coppell; College Station; Flower Mound; North Richland Hills; Carrollton; Lancaster. Served as President of the Urban Management Assistants City Management Association of North Texas. Married to Wendy Jane Miller, Duluth, Minnesota, since 1978. Two sons, Zachary James age 27, & Jeremy David age 25. Honor Students in APA Classes, graduated from Richland High School, North Richland Hills, Tarrant County. Members of Heartland Fellowship in Los Colinas. I retired in 2004 following a 25 plus years in City Management, and started and own a Home Based Business where I am a Recruiter/Trainer/Benefits Specialist with a 20 year old company, AmeriPlan Corporation, who owns a $25 Million Dollar Debt Free Headquarters in Plano, TX (we paid cash for it in 1992) and we have over 70,000 Successful Home Based Business Owners in our company today. I like being my own Boss, working from the comfort of my home office, working my own schedule, taking off whenever I please, and wearing my pull overs and shorts and tennis to work every day. College I attended East Texas State U. 1 yr to be with HS friends (Danny Castleberry, Frank Block, Curtis Starnes,etc. BA North Texas U (party college) '73, roomed with Randy Clark & Albert Trijullio; completed all my course work toward a Masters in Public Administration, NTU '75, was elected as Vice President '74 & President '75 of Graduate Class. I completed all course work but did not complete the Thesis. I took course work at North Lake CC to get my Real Estate Licence, '82. Career I have over 25 years plus in the City Management business where I have been a community leader in several cities in Texas. I specialized in managing rapidly growing cities in the DFW Metro Plex. If you want to follow my career path all you need to do is check my Facebook page where I have listed all of the cities where I have worked. I won an Honorary Hatton W. Summers Scholar from the MPA Administration at NTU to pay for a 9 month Internship to work in a City Managers Office. I selected the City of Garland because it was one of the largest full service cities in Dallas County, and they had great leadership and were on the cutting edge of implementing state-of-the-art technology. We had a city-wide computer system with email before any one had come up with the name email. I helped implement what up until then was a private sector program, called "Zero Based Budgetting", and we received international recognition for being the first city ot implement it from the Inernational City Managers Association. I wrote Garlands first Emergency Operations Plan, created their first Emergency Operating Center, and trained all of the Departments on its use. I also wrote a grant that paid for the implementation of an Emergency Warning System city wide. I trained a group of Ham Radio users to become Weather Spotters and assigned each of them a place all across the city to watch for the formation of toranados. Trained Weather Spoters can see the development of a toranado nearly 45 minutes before it develops into a full blown toranado. After serving my Internship the City of Garland hired me as a full-time Administrative Assitant in the City Managers Office. After Garland I became the Assistant City Manager of the Town of Addison. This is where I began to implement innovative and state-of-the-art policies and programs. Addison was orginally Master Planned to be a small airplane air port surrounded by Office-Warehouses for North Dallas. I had a different vision for Addison. I complelely revised the Master Land Use Plan to turn Addison into an Upper Class Downtown with a modern Airport. With these changes in the Master Plan the prices of land in Addison began to quadruple over night. We went from a two land asphalt road with only 4 mom and pop restaurants to a six lane divided thoroughfare with Streetscape, from only 200 piper cub sized planes, to over 1,000 modern jets, from tin barn type hangers, to modern brick Office Hangers, to a Town with Hotels and over 100 upper scale restaurants, in less than five years. In Addison I wrote the first city-wide Master Streetscape Plan that included landscaping both medians and each side of our main streets, and street hardware including modern traffic signals, street lights, street signage, seating and modern designed bus stops, and underground electicity getting rid of all of the telephone poles and overhead line. Other suburbs began to implement partial street scape plans after they saw what a difference it made in beautifying the city. In Addison I revised the Master Land Use Plan to include upper scale residential areas that attracted top dollar homes. Almost 80% of the residents in Addison already lived in Apartment Houses. Several of these apartment were real estate investments from out to town and they were letting their properties deteriorate. I wrote the first piece of legislation in the State of Texas, which was supported by the Dallas Apartment Association and by the Mayor of Dallas who just happened to own several apartment complexes in Addison, called the "Anti-Neglect Law", that applied to all building, and forced all properties to be continually maintained to the same level as the "Buliding Codes" that they were built under. This eliminated deterioration, forced those properties that had been neglected to restore their properties to like new quality, and prevented blight and vancant building to be left to deteriorate. I wrote an "Economic and Fiscal Impact Model" to analyze each zoing change request to see what impact the change would have on the tax base for the ISD, County, and City, before it was approved. I used the Impact Model to do a "Build Out Economic and Fiscal Impact Forecast" to show how the newly revised Land Use Master Plan would have a far better financial impact on the Town than the old Master Plan. I sold that model to a consultant in Austin, and he is still using it today to do Fiscal and Economic Impact studies on various cities. One of the biggest challenges I handled at Addison was when the Toll Road Authority of Texas rolled out their construction plans to extend the North Dallas Toll Road through Addison and on up toward Plano. Their plan showed that they were planning to build "over passes" at most of our major cross streets. Overpasses have very detrimental affects on the properties adjancent to them. We had every upper s...Expand for more