Mansfield ought to honor Steve Noonkester as it renames the public safety and court building

One of the worst places you can ever be is in the middle of a name-change dispute, especially when it involves names of people considered to be heroes.

But let me jump into one sticky mess.

In Dallas this past spring, there was a huge blunder by the city when it invited citizens to vote on renaming Industrial Boulevard, which runs along what one day will be a revitalized Trinity River project.

Citizens overwhelmingly voted to name the street in honor of the late United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, but city officials were expecting a name that would speak to the street’s location rather than an individual’s name.

After much rancor, the Dallas City Council voted to rename Industrial "Riverfront Boulevard," with some council members suggesting that another street could be named for Chavez.

When members of the Hispanic community accepted the possibility of an alternative, they decided that Ross Avenue would be perfect because of its relationship to the Latino community that has grown up around it. The problem is, Ross is named for two pioneering brothers, and there is always resistance to replacing one person’s name with another.

While I think it would be more appropriate for the Chavez moniker to be added to a street not already named for a person, I’ll stay out of the Dallas fight.

But I will join the one brewing in Mansfield, which recently adopted a policy allowing the naming of city-owned buildings for people, with the proviso that a person so honored would have to be dead for a year before such action could be taken.

The policy was passed after a group of residents began a drive to have the Mansfield Public Safety and Municipal Court Building named for the late Public Safety Director Steve Noonkester, who died last year.

City Councilman Mike Leyman wants to name the building for a fallen Mansfield motorcycle officer, Danny Cordes, who died 22 years ago after being struck by a dislodged cargo trailer. Cordes apparently is the only Mansfield police officer to die in the line of duty.

Noonkester’s name is not eligible for consideration until November, the one-year anniversary of his untimely death due to complications from aneurysm surgery. Cordes’ name obviously can be voted on at any time.

Leyman brought up the issue at the Monday City Council meeting, calling for a public hearing on the matter, but did not get the necessary two other votes to have it placed on the agenda, according to Belinda Willis, the city’s public information officer. So, the issue is still there, likely to be debated at least through November.

For what it’s worth, if the city is going to rename the building at all, it most definitely should be for Noonkester, a man who leaves behind a dynamic legacy — one that I’ve been an eyewitness to over the years.

That is not to take anything away from Cordes, still revered by those in the department and a hero to many. But Noonkester’s impact on the city and its public safety institutions in particular are much greater in comparison. Noonkester, who was instrumental in bringing the city’s fire and police departments together under one banner of public safety, was also a highly regarded and very innovative prison warden.

In the days when he was police chief running a jail and prison that housed out-of-state inmates, he had the reputation of overseeing one of the least violent institutions in the country, one where inmates respected him and the guards because Noonkester and his staff gave respect to the prisoners.

On one of my visits there, a prisoner from Oklahoma told me that he literally had to be hogtied and dragged onto the bus to be brought to Texas. But he was so impressed with how the Mansfield facility was run, he said, officials would have to hogtie him to take him back to Oklahoma.

At a time when prisons around the state and the U.S. were plagued with gang violence, often centered around racial divisions, I recall reporting that in the Mansfield prison, "blacks and whites, Bloods and Crips gang members, and Christians and Muslims actually get along."

In fact, during a Juneteenth celebration in 1998, I watched black gang members and black children taking turns trying to force a member of the Aryan Brotherhood (with ties to the Ku Klux Klan) into the water of a carnival-like dunking booth. The white supremacist had volunteered for the role.

And just last year Noonkester took a public stand against the then-mayor of the city, who was attempting to pass an ordinance to make it tougher on sex offenders to live in the city.

Calling it a "feel-good ordinance," the chief told me then that he had plenty of data from experts around the country that prove such laws do not prevent sex offenses but instead tend to drive offenders underground, making it more difficult to keep an eye on them.

Noting that some of the so-called "sex offenders" in the city had discharged their sentences more than 20 years ago, Noonkester said, "There comes a time when people have paid their debt to society."

From my vantage point, the man whose name should honorably grace that city-owned building in Mansfield is the late Public Safety Director Steve Noonkester.