In Error-Riddled Letter, 17-Term Grapevine Mayor Defends His Intelligence

The drama you needed today.

After 49 years in office, many people are saying Grapevine Mayor William D. Tate is having his Biden moment after a passive-aggressive, error-filled message he sent to the school board president was leaked.

Grapevine’s mayor and the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD board are locked in a fight over closing two struggling schools that many families have already fled. Mayor William D. Tate says he never threatened the board president, but his own email says he “tried to intimidate” her, fueling accusations of interference and misinformation.

The two sides exchanged sharply worded letters, before Tate sent the following email to Shannon Braun, President of GCISD’s Board of Trustees.

In the letter, Mayor Tate pushed back on what he inferred to be a claim by Braun that Colleyville residents were smarter than those in Grapevine. However, the letter itself contained more than 20 grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors.

At the beginning of the meeting I was concerned, as well as most of my council about the make up of the citizens committee. As you know I don’t think citizen committees are the best source of making the kind of planning decisions this committee has been asked to accomplish. Then in the meeting when I pointed out the committee consisted of 9 Colleyville citizens and only 2 from Grapevine, your response was: we tried to pick the smartest people from the district. I doubt you even realize saying it. It set me off, because you verified what we have always known, and that is Colleyville thinks they are smarter than Grapevine, and we are tired of hearing that. I have determined that legally it is not possible to ever divide the district because under state law, each new district has to have at least 8,000 average daily attendance. I have not looked at single member districts yet.

I had received a lot of information from citizens and some was accurate and some knot. I was hoping to educate myself on what the alternatives where and what the financial position of the district actually is. I think it was mistake to give four tax decreases in a row when teacher salaries were increasing. I plan to stay out of the public debate on the merits if I can. It want be easy without personally getting hurt. I want the district to be the one that has to convenience the public that you have no choice but to close Dove. It is an emotional issue and the storm clouds are gathering.

My two main concerns that I will argue to continue to argue in public is that the citizen committee is unfair and unpalatable to Grapevine residents. This will undermine you throughout. Second, if you close a school, you can not solve your problem and create a new one for the city. Silverlake and Cannon do not have the capacity to absorb 200 new students each, unless they can be bused. The traffic already in the morning and afternoon effects the residential neighborhoods. So you must plan with the city because the sidewalks and thoroughfares are in the wrong place. I am know for sure how much water and sewer capacity we have in both areas.

In our meeting I tried all approaches, I listen, I tried to reason, I tried to offend you and I tried to intimidate you to get your attention. All failed. I am not going to try and give any more advise. You will have to sell the school closing on your own.

The disastrous letter provided to Current Revolt:

For some reason, the Mayor is using a Verizon email account for this–very lol.

Amazing.

However, it is good to see that infrastructure is top of mind.

It’s the thought that counts.

Then comes the mic drop.

While researching this story, we found that even his campaign’s signature statement contains an error.

GCISD, along with neighboring Southlake ISD, were some of the first schools in Texas to fight back against the CRT machine. Sources we spoke to told us a group of local conservatives approached Tate in 2021 to try and get him to join their cause against the now-banned CRT ideology. Tate declined to take a side.

The schools set to close appear to be filled with illegal aliens, according to our sources. Of course, we’ll never know if that’s accurate, because the same government that spies on American citizens says it’s illegal to ask if someone is an illegal alien before handing them the benefits of our tax dollars to attend our schools.

The Grapevine City Council has backed Tate, and the Colleyville City Council has remained neutral. As always, we will continue to monitor the situation.