The opposition would like this to be about a single night, a single project, a single vote, because one item, taken alone, is easy to wave away. But the case for returning these offices to the voters was not built in a night. It was built over more than a decade, by many residents, across many decisions. No single item is the grounds for recall. The grounds for recall are the pattern they form.
Consider the pattern on its own terms.
They asked, and the voters answered twice.
In 2015 and again in 2023, residents were asked to fund a commercial airport with their bonds. Twice they declined, the second time by nearly fifty-nine percent. The project advanced regardless, financed through other means. One may favor the airport and still hold that a ballot result is a decision, not a suggestion.
They set the standard, then departed from it.
The city's own approved goals commit it, in writing, to public meetings and to full transparency. Yet a multi-year airline contract was signed with no public meeting, no agenda item, and no disclosure, withheld from residents until the Attorney General of Texas ordered it released.
Then they sued their own residents.
When residents challenged the airport's financing in court here in Collin County, the city did not answer at home. It filed its own case in Travis County, two hundred miles away, in a proceeding that named every McKinney taxpayer. The Attorney General's office reviewed it and sided with the taxpayers.
That is the pattern: elections treated as advisory, records treated as secrets, and residents answered with a lawsuit. Set beside the city's own words and the city's own goals, it raises one question, and it is not whether any rule was broken.
We hold that the answer is its residents. A recall petition removes no one; it returns that question to the people to whom it belongs, to be settled the lawful way, at the polls. We ask only that they be allowed to answer.