A confident fighter, Wendy Davis enters a new chapter in her political life: state senator

Twelve years ago, a Fort Worth City Council candidate named Wendy Davis started her first political race with a bang.

She alleged that she had been turned down for a job at a downtown law firm because she opposed a plan to turn a park field near the Fort Worth Zoo into a parking lot.

The firm, Kelly Hart & Hallman, did legal work for the Fort Worth Zoological Association and for the Bass family, who are among the zoo’s biggest supporters. At age 33, Davis had attacked one of Fort Worth’s most-beloved institutions, along with a couple of bastions of the business establishment.

Even then, in her first political fight, she was supremely confident.

"I have the intelligence to understand issues on a detailed level and the sense of fairness to do what’s right," she said at the time.

She lost that first race, but it’s been her only loss at a ballot box. She won the council seat in 1999.

In the years since then, Davis has made a habit of picking fights with the boys clubs: land developers, police and firefighters associations, gas-drilling companies, even the Star-Telegram. Some of them she has turned into allies. Some of them still don’t like her.

Now she’s headed to the Texas Senate, another clubby institution, after beating Republican incumbent Kim Brimer. The stakes are higher than ever. And Davis is still confident.

Single mom

Vicki Bargas, president of the Worth Heights Neighborhood Association and a longtime friend, said Davis’ roots make her different from other politicians.

"She has a lot of empathy for people that are perhaps not as well off or don’t have the opportunity that others do — she’s been there, she knows how difficult it can be," Bargas said.

Davis’ parents were divorced when she was young, and her mother worked low-wage jobs to support four children. Davis herself went to work at the age of 14, according to her campaign biography.

She graduated from Richland High School in 1981 and got married instead of going to college. She was divorced a short time later and found herself supporting an infant daughter while attending Tarrant County College.

She transferred to Texas Christian University, where she met her second husband, Jeff Davis, who had served on the Fort Worth City Council in the 1970s. Jeff Davis was on the board of Stage West, where Wendy Davis’ father worked.

After graduating first in her class at TCU, Wendy Davis went to Harvard Law School. She and Jeff Davis divorced in 2003.

During law school, Davis worked summers at Kelly Hart & Hallman, and, after graduating, she landed a prestigious job as a law clerk for a federal judge in Dallas.

But she was turned down for a full-time job at Kelly Hart. Davis said early in her first campaign that she thought it was because of her outspoken opposition to the zoo’s parking plan. Her implication was that the firm was trying to silence one of the zoo’s critics rather than debate the issue.

In a recent interview, Davis said she brought up the issue with the firm in 1996 to make a point that the city needed more "process," her watchword for getting input from neighborhoods on big decisions.

"I would articulate it a little more carefully today," she said.

In that first campaign, Davis faced Cathy Hirt, Lee Saldivar and Jenny Phillipson. She made it into a runoff against Hirt, but lost by 90 votes. One of the keys was turnout in Ryan Place, the neighborhood where Hirt lived.

Davis later sued the Star-Telegram and former Publisher Richard L. Connor, alleging that the paper ran a series of "false and defamatory" articles to keep the zoo issue alive, including an editorial that ran the day of the runoff. A Dallas district judge threw out the suit on free-speech grounds, and Davis never got to prove those allegations in court.

Davis, now the CEO of Republic Title’s Fort Worth office, said last week that she learned a lot from her first campaign, including the need to "walk the path."

"I thought I could just announce to all these people that I was a caring, thoughtful person, and they’d believe me," she said.

"There’s value in sitting back and reflecting on your own shortcomings."

'Wendy never forgot us’

For the next couple of years, Davis went to work with the neighborhood association where she lived, Mistletoe Heights. She had just finished a term as president of the neighborhood association when she ran for City Council again in 1999.

Davis was in a three-way race against David Minor and Dan Roberts. This time, though, she had the backing of several well-organized neighborhood associations. She got 50.8 percent of the vote overall, but 65 percent in the precinct that includes Mistletoe Heights, and 60 percent in the precinct that includes Ryan Place.

Bargas remembers Davis coming to a meeting in Worth Heights during her 1999 campaign.

"My mother stood up and said, 'One of you is going to be our City Council representative. All I ask is that you not forget Worth Heights,’ " she said. "Wendy never forgot us."

A couple of years later, a developer came up with plans to revitalize the old Town Center Mall on Seminary Drive. The new project, La Gran Plaza de Fort Worth, would have a big impact on Worth Heights and other nearby neighborhoods. Bargas and other residents were soon negotiating details like the height of signs with a millionaire land developer from Los Angeles.

"She always made sure the neighborhood was OK with whatever they were doing," Bargas said.

There was a lot of concern in the business community — particularly among land developers — when Davis was elected to the council. Her district included downtown, the Cultural District and the Hospital District. Many of those developers wound up pleasantly surprised.

"She wasn’t afraid to stand up to some really powerful people," said Phillip Poole, an architect and developer who has worked on numerous projects in Davis’ district. But, "For the most part, you could always go to her."

Davis mastered the arcane details of tax districts, road-funding agreements and other bureaucratic tools used to promote inner-city development. She also had an eye for the big picture, including urban design and architecture.

During a meeting about the redevelopment of the Montgomery Ward building on West Seventh Street, Davis listened to a pitch, then sketched the idea on a napkin, Poole recalled.

"You don’t think of an attorney getting the spatial ideas," he said.

Davis pulled a lot of the developers into her network of neighborhood leaders, inviting them to get-togethers over Mexican food and beer.

Her zeal sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. Two of the causes she championed — fixing the city pension fund and protecting neighborhoods from the effects of gas drilling — won her some implacable enemies.

The pension fund has historically been controlled by the police and firefighters associations, who in turn have long and deep connections to Brimer, other local politicians and to Republican political consultant Bryan Eppstein, who managed Brimer’s campaign against Davis.

In 2006, an audit showed that some police officers and firefighters had been racking up extra overtime as a way to pad their pensions once they retire. That contributed to a shortfall between what the pension was collecting from employees and what it was expected to pay out. At one point the gap was $410 million.

A committee of council members and business leaders spent months studying ways to fix the pension. Davis and other business leaders said the city should simply remove overtime from the pension calculations. She also suggested getting rid of subsidized health insurance for retirees.

The officers and firefighters — who have memories like elephants — gritted their teeth at the site of a well-heeled lawyer attacking them for what amount to a few thousand extra dollars a year.

Ready to fight

Natural gas drilling started to push into Fort Worth neighborhoods around the same time, and it put Davis at odds with both the gas companies and Mayor Mike Moncrief.

Davis and other council members were concerned that some neighborhoods were getting lower offers for their mineral rights, particularly minority neighborhoods.

Moncrief and city lawyers repeatedly said there was nothing the city could do, since the city can’t offer legal advice to individuals.

Davis and her council aide, Kristi Wiseman, started compiling a list of lease offers in different neighborhoods and sharing it with anyone who asked.

In Worth Heights, Davis went even further. Fort Worth Energy had offered what some residents believed was a low-ball contract. Davis convened a public meeting at a church, complete with a Spanish translator, to make sure residents understood the details.

Then she went through the contract, clause by clause, and publicly questioned company President Dub Stocker. Some of the provisions, such as a clause that allowed the company to deduct the cost of transporting the gas, would have cost the residents a good chunk of their royalties.

Stocker dropped some of the provisions on the spot.

What was surprising was that Davis and Stocker were friends. Their daughters even went to school together.

Ten months later, Davis called another meeting to discuss the "Trinity Trees" gas-drilling site. Davis has just announced her intention to run for the Texas Senate, and about 400 people, many of them from Davis’ home-turf neighborhoods, turned out.

Chesapeake Energy wanted to clear-cut 2.5 acres of trees next to the Trinity River hike and bike trail to drill for gas under the Union Pacific Rail Yard and the Colonial Country Club. The neighborhoods were up in arms.

Davis pushed the idea of moving the site onto the rail yard. She also threw out the idea of creating more regulations on urban drilling.

Tom Price, a senior vice president at Chesapeake, protested that the company had been negotiating with the railroad for more than a year.

"How long is enough?" Price said of the discussions.

Davis shot back, "Enough is to have a discussion where community concerns are on the table."

The crowd roared.

Davis and the Trinity Trees supporters made a similar pitch during the next City Council meeting. Once again, she called for changes in the city drilling ordinance.

That earned her a public rebuke from Moncrief: "I take exception to anyone saying we have not been proactive in dealing with the issue of drilling in this city," the mayor said.

Eventually, Chesapeake agreed to shrink the size of the drilling pad by nearly 50 percent and plant more trees. And the city formed a task force that rewrote the drilling ordinance.

Davis defended those fights, saying "We only empower the opposition when we shrink from saying what’s right."

At the same time, she said, "I actually don’t like mixing it up."

What a lot of people didn’t see was the fence-building she did after the battles, at least with some of her opponents. Dub Stocker later contributed $2,500 to her Senate campaign. Bernie Scheffler, who ran against Davis in 2007, wound up being communications manager for her Senate campaign.

But those fights were still fresh on many minds when Davis started her campaign.

Deliver the deals

Brimer, a 20-year incumbent, had long-standing ties to the police and firefighters association, as did Moncrief. The firefighters contributed hundreds of hours of volunteer labor. Moncrief appeared in campaign mailers.

Chesapeake and other energy companies gave Brimer thousands of dollars, as did two political action committees supported by the Basses.

On the other side, Davis tapped her own network: land developers, lawyers and neighborhood leaders.

On Election Day, even Davis’ confidence was shaky. When the first returns were announced just after 7 p.m., "I felt my first moment of doubt," she said Thursday.

How Davis will adapt to the clubby Senate is open to debate.

The chamber runs on personal relationships and prides itself on bipartisanship. Davis will be hundreds of miles from her constituents, which will make it harder to raise a crowd when she wants to make a point, and her sharp debating style might be counterproductive.

"It’s a totally different playing field down there," said Jim Bradbury, a lawyer and neighborhood activist who has worked with Davis for years. On the other hand, "She’s got that side, the dexterity to deliver deals."

Bargas said, "I don’t think she’s the type of person that will lose touch."

Davis remains as confident as ever.

"It will take some time to learn how to be effective," she said. "But I will."