Thursday, May 2, 2024
Matt Hutsell is a man with many hats. The longtime Tolar resident is now serving as the town's mayor in addition to being its fire chief.
Small towns on the cusp of big growth can be like an awkward pre-teen: no longer a small child but still in need of parental protection.
Matt Hutsell, in his first term as mayor of Tolar, is, in a sense, the growing town’s protective dad. If you’re a developer with less than honorable intentions, you’d best be on your way.
Hutsell and his colleagues on the City Council — Craig Davis, Place 1; Sally Grimes, Place 2; Chip Foster, Place 3 (and mayor pro tem); Brian Gall, Place 4; and Kevin Fron, Place 5 — are working to accommodate growth that is already occurring, plan for what’s coming, and make sure that new housing developments meet strict standards so that those who choose to live in Tolar don’t regret it.
“(City Administrator) Michelle (Burdette) and all the city workers, they truly run the city,” Hutsell said, “but I can kind of set the course for the ship and try to control our growth and have good growth.”
Hutsell was elected mayor last November, taking the reins from longtime mayor Terry Johnson, who decided not to seek another term. In addition to retiring from public service, Johnson also recently retired from his job with the city of Granbury.
Although new to the mayor role, Hutsell is not new to city service. He served for years as a member of the City Council and as a volunteer firefighter. He still leads the Tolar Volunteer Fire Department as its chief.
Precinct 1 County Commissioner Kevin Andrews, himself a volunteer firefighter who served eight years as fire chief in Lipan, said that Hutsell is “a great guy.”
“He’s always willing to serve and help his community,” Andrews said, adding that Hutsell has a “laser focus” on getting things done.
Hutsell first ran for City Council in 2007 but was unsuccessful.
“I just didn’t like how the council was reacting to the growth,” he said of his reasons for running. “Instead of harnessing the growth and trying to make it what they wanted because it was coming, no matter what, they were just trying to stop it. So, it kind of made me aggravated, which made me run for council.”
Although he didn’t win that first time, Hutsell kept attending City Council meetings and “being involved in things.” When he ran again the following year, he won.
FIREFIGHTER, FAMILY MAN
Hutsell’s parents moved his family to Granbury from Irving in 1990.
His father worked for the city of Dallas employee credit union and commuted to work every day.
“He had a little Mazda pickup that he gave me later on,” Hutsell reminisced. “It had, like, 450,000 miles on it. And it was still running, it just smoked a lot.”
Hutsell graduated from Granbury High School and married his high school sweetheart, Heather. In 1998, they moved to Tolar.
“We moved out here because, at the time, I was a store manager for Chief Auto Parts in Stephenville,” he said. “I had been assistant manager for Chief Auto Parts in Granbury, and I got my own store in Stephenville. Tolar was a nice town in the middle.”
In 1999, Hutsell joined the Tolar VFD. He found that he liked firefighting and responding to emergency calls.
“I started making calls and (doing) training and stuff and was like, man, I like this. This is pretty cool,” he said.
The discovery led to a career switch. Hutsell was hired by the Irving Fire Department in November 2000. The department sent him to training in McKinney. For seven months, he drove from Tolar to McKinney and back home again. The trip each direction was “a solid two hours,” he said.
As a captain with the Irving Fire Department, Hutsell is still commuting, but not every day. He is on duty for a 24-hour shift, then is off for 48 hours. On the days he’s home, he is available to handle issues related to city business.
“Right now, we’re trying to buy some heavy equipment, a skid steer and an excavator,” he said. “So, I’m trying to wrangle all the bids and figure out what’s best to buy, and I’ll present that to the council.”
He and Heather have a daughter, Morgan, 22, and a son, Trevor, who will turn 18 on July 26. Both are following in their dad’s firefighting footsteps.
Morgan started Tolar VFD’s Junior Firefighter program that allows young firefighters in training to go on calls on a limited basis, her dad said. She, too, now works for the Irving Fire Department.
Trevor is part of the Junior Firefighters program and also wants to be a fulltime firefighter, Hutsell said.
Fighting fires in scorching Texas heat is not for the faint of heart.
“The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve learned to pace myself,” Hutsell said, adding that the key, at least when lives are not imperiled, is to be “slow and steady.”
He stated, “Over the course of an entire incident, you’ve learned to pace yourself and share the load. That’s why, when you see firemen loading a hose, there’s 10 guys loading one hose. A bunch of hands make light work. That’s where teamwork comes in.”
During the years he has lived in Tolar, Hutsell has responded to countless calls. He said that one particularly memorable call happened seven or eight years ago and involved a high-water rescue of a teenage girl, a student at Tolar High School.
“The Paluxy (River) was flooding,” Hutsell recalled. “She got washed off the road.”
The girl had extracted herself from the vehicle and both she and the vehicle were “hanging on a fence,” he said.
“We didn’t have a boat because we’re hardly ever going to have water here,” Hutsell said. “But we were able to drive the ladder truck on the road down even with her and use ropes to get down to her, attach them to her, and then bring her back up to the ladder truck.”
He continued, “We just told her to hold on to the fence and the car actually got washed away while we were in the middle of rescuing her.”
Thanks to the Tolar VFD team, the girl returned home safely to her parents.
CITY ON THE CUSP
Tolar city officials are now officially dealing with big-city types of issues, namely, infrastructure.
Engineering is being completed on a new wastewater treatment plant that will double the current capacity. Construction is expected to begin in the next couple of months, Hutsell said. The city’s current WWTP was built almost 50 years ago.
When planning the new sewer plant, Hutsell and the council included funding for an additional groundwater well and a 50,000-gallon ground storage tank.
“That was part of the new part of The Parks of Tolar, which was an expansion of the subdivision,” the mayor said. “They allotted us land for a well and a ground storage tank.”
The city has applied for a grant through the Texas Department of Transportation’s Transportation Alternatives Set-Aide Program to fund shared-use paths for bicyclists and pedestrians, connecting schools to the downtown area. City officials also hope to convince TxDOT to replace two flashing lights on U.S. Highway 377 with regular stop lights to help with growing traffic congestion.
Another issue, in Hutsell’s view, are the city’s streets.
“All of our roads are terrible,” he said.
He stated that he disagreed several years ago when the City Council voted to chip seal “every street in town” at a cost of about $700,000. In his opinion, the council opted to “kick the can down the road” when a more permanent solution was needed.
“Just because I don’t agree with it doesn’t make it wrong,” he acknowledged of the decision the majority of the council felt was best at the time.
The first-term mayor would love to see more retail come to Tolar, especially a grocery store, but he knows that more people will probably have to move there for that to happen. Right now, the town’s population is around 1,000.
Hutsell feels that Tolar is a great place to live and he wants it to stay that way.
“It’s just a great, great town,” he said. “Everybody comes together, like (when we had) the wildfires last year. This time last year, we were burning the world down. The day the Big L Ranch burned, we burned 10,000 acres. We had 100 people at the fire station working. We didn’t ask them. They just showed up and started working, making bags of (eye) drops and stuff for the firefighters, and soon they had built stations out everywhere where we could just stop and grab water.”
He continued, “Everybody’s just close, and they want to help and do the right thing. I couldn’t go anywhere else.”
