Bayou Icon: Mayor Dave Norris

THE UNCOMMON LIVES, CAREERS, AND SINCERITY OF LOUISIANA’S LONGEST SERVING MAYOR

article by Michael Devault and photography by Brad Arender

By 1942, West Monroe had grown to little more than a trading outpost for the rural farmers, timber producers and livestock owners along the western side of the Ouachita River. Connected to its larger “twin” city of Monroe by bridges at Bridge Street and Mill Street, major commerce took place across the river.

For anything other than the most rudimentary healthcare, residents of the western side of the parish had to travel to the hospital in downtown Monroe, St. Francis. They shopped for clothes along DeSiard Street – in Monroe. Farming implements were procured from dealers on the east bank. The community lacked a high school, and those students who attended high school went to Ouachita Parish High School, where from the windows they could see their homes, fields, and what little made up the community.

This is the world into which Dave Noel Norris was born, early on a hot August day. His father and mother had made their home in West Monroe, where they already had one son, William Wiley Norris III. Here, Dave would grow into a young man as his town began taking the first steps to the modern era. In those days, they’d just opened West Monroe High School, and Dave was among some of the earliest students. It was during high school he took his first steps towards what would become one of four full-time careers.

“I liked music, and so several friends and I started a band. We called it the Scarlets,” he says. The Scarlets played rock music, including their signature song, “Scarlet Ribbons,” at dances and other venues throughout high school. The Scarlets never really took off, but that’s not to say the band failed to leave a lasting legacy.

Dave was a singer in the band. Their keyboardist, a young girl named Biddy Dupree, had caught his eye. The two had met in English class, and when the Scarlets came together, Biddy was a natural fit. A gifted piano player, Biddy had been the pianist at their family’s church, McGuire Methodist, since she was twelve. Dave admired her talent and her dedication to playing. It’s a dedication that’s followed her for her whole life.

“She is totally devoted to playing,” Dave says of his wife. “I marvel at her commitment to it, because she’s been doing it so long.”
Like so much more in the Norris family, once Biddy started playing the piano, she simply didn’t stop, a pattern that would repeat itself throughout both their lives together and apart. For it seems that any time a Norris picks up a career path, they stick with it, even when new career opportunities come along.

Dave graduated from West Monroe High in 1960. He entered Northeast Louisiana State College later that year, and by 1963 he earned his Bachelor of the Arts in Government. An MBA followed from Louisiana Tech just two years later. He was offered and accepted a tenure-track professorship at NLSC in 1968. By 1974, he had earned his Doctorate of Business Administration from Mississippi State University, where he studied Economics. A career in academia seemed in the cards.

“I kind of had the goal of becoming a college professor, when I was working on my MBA,” Dave says. “I thought academic life would be a lot of fun, and it was.”

Dave enjoyed the life of a college professor on campus, working with students, helping them find their way. Balancing the work of a musician – the Norris family hadn’t given up playing music together, after all – and a college professor, was challenging. Adding young children to the mix made it more so. But theirs was a good life, and it was a life that afforded them the opportunity to continue doing thing the things they loved.

Between teaching assignments, Dave and Biddy toured with their new band, a gospel group called the Pacemakers. (“It was before the medical device was invented,” Dave notes.) The Pacemakers performed 10 shows in Nashville and recorded four albums.
Louisiana political reporter Bob Mann was one of Dave’s students in the late 1970s. He recalls being impressed by his professor’s vibrant mind and commitment to helping his students learn complicated concepts that often ran contrary to their own beliefs or even logic. Economics, after all, is a complex science. More importantly, Bob was there at a critical time in Dave’s career.

“He was running for mayor at the time. I was intrigued by having a professor, who was in the middle of a semester, running for mayor,” Bob says. Though he soon completed his studies at NLU – the school had since changed its name – Bob and Dave would soon again cross paths. “Little did I know that just a few years later, I’d be the reporter for the News-Star assigned to cover West Monroe City Hall and would get to know him much better.”

THAT WAS THE ELECTION OF 1978. For years, Dave’s brother had been engaged in politics, rising eventually to a judge in West Monroe. Bill Norris recognized something in his college professor brother, and he kept pushing him to go into politics.

“My brother was really instrumental. He’d been in politics for years, and he kept pushing me to run,” Dave says. To add additional pressure, Bill suggested that college professors “never do anything in the real world,” and Dave should do something more. There was only one problem for Dave. “I loved teaching so much, I really didn’t want to run. But I liked government, took classes, and it was my bachelor’s degree. So I decided to run.”

Recognizing that running for mayor could mean challenging three-term West Monroe Mayor Bert Hatten, Dave went straight to City Hall and asked to sit down with the mayor. Bert had known the Norris family for decades, and he took the meeting.
“Dave told me prior to the end of my third term he was going to run, if I didn’t,” Bert recalls. “I assured him I had no intention of running for a fourth term. So he ran.”

He faced a member of the board of aldermen for the election. A young, professional family man, a minister, a college professor and a member of a prominent family, Candidate Dave Norris proved a formidable opponent and an effective campaigner. He was elected handily, and he took office July 1, 1978.

He would not face a serious opponent for mayor for 8 consecutive elections and was elected unchallenged in the majority of them. Over forty years as mayor, Dave has created something of a legacy for himself and for the city he’s served.

For his first terms in office, Dave was a devout reformer. He streamlined and modernized city operations, hiring new professionals to fill roles necessary in a modern city. He also doggedly pursued shoring up the city’s finances, which included the passage of a two-cent sales tax to bolster the city’s general fund. To be successful, Dave recognized he’d need help, and that help would have to be of a significant caliber to accomplish his goals.

“I’m the proudest of the quality of people who work for the city,” Dave says. “We have had exceptional people for some time, but each year, it seems their dedication and cooperation grows. I think we’ve brought together some of the highest performing public servants of any city of any size, and I’d put our people and their skills up against anybody’s. They are truly top notch.”
With the workforce in place to serve the population and a sales tax to support revenues, Dave next set about growing the city’s economy. For a city with a new sales tax, that meant attracting retail. A missed opportunity in the early 1980s gave Dave a vision to follow. He explains.

“When they built Pecanland Mall in Monroe in 1984, there was no suitable site in West Monroe,” Dave says. “I knew then that we needed a site along I-20 that would be able to compete.”

Under Mayor Hatten, West Monroe had worked with the Corps of Engineers, the state, and federal agencies to reclaim an old gravel pit. The work had been ongoing for years, but Dave redoubled efforts. Within just a few years, the site was the home of the West Monroe Industrial Park and a new retail development zone.

It took twenty years to conceive, fund, design, build and then open the Ike Hamilton Expo Center in the area, and within a year, two hotels had opened, as well as retail and dining establishments. A major developer approached the city with plans to build a destination shopping and residential community. By 2007, Dave’s vision of a mixed-use retail facility to rival the mall was about to become a reality.

In a hopeful photo published in The Ouachita Citizen, Dave stands with a city employee, surveying the empty field. The city was weeks, maybe a few months, from announcing the development’s anchor tenants and breaking ground. That’s when the bottom fell out of the economy, dealing a death blow to the development.

Mary Ann Moon was president of the West Monroe-West Ouachita Chamber of Commerce at the time. She recalls Dave’s desire to put a retail development on the site as “truly visionary,” and she remembers how quickly he moved to continue to protect the site, reserving it for the correct tenants when, eventually, the economy recovered.

“It’s an unrealized vision, but here’s the thing,” Mary Ann tells BayouLife. “That’s what they need there. And with Ruston doing the incredible things they are, to have that connector right there, on the interstate, it’s vital. Everything in the region is growing that direction, and it has to happen there, on that site, and he knows that.”

Economic development aside, Dave wasn’t finished growing professionally yet. He was an established musician and music minister with a solid recording career behind him. He was a tenured professor at a major regional university. And he was mayor of one of the fastest growing communities in northeast Louisiana. That meant it was time to add one more iron to the fire.
The opportunity presented itself in 1980, when Dave met the new general manager of KTVE, West Monroe’s television station and NBC affiliate. The manager approached Dave for ideas about how the station could better serve its audience and grow viewership. Dave knew just the way: he suggested a morning show to compete with Jack and June on KNOE, and he even recommended an innovative new format – make it a nice morning chat in a living room rather than two anchors at a desk.

Station brass were impressed. When they asked him if he knew someone who could host such a show, he informed them he didn’t. They refused to let go of the idea, and just a few months later, the general manager approached Dave with a novel idea: Dave should host.

C.J. Sartor was the morning news anchor at the time, and she recalls the morning show’s early days as exciting and entertaining. More importantly, she remembers Dave, who she says was a natural for television. Many mornings, she served as a substitute co-host with Dave.

“He’s not one of those guys who wants you to defer to him or let him take up all the air in the room when you’re on screen,” she says, noting the male-dominated world of television was rife with anchors who insisted on deference from female counterparts. “Dave wasn’t like that. He was very generous with space, very respectful with me as a professional in television. I really enjoyed working with him. I really did.”

Through the KTVE morning show, a new side of Dave began to emerge to the community, a side that had been reserved for years to his family and a few close friends. Dave’s secret weapons was what Bob Mann calls “a wicked sense of humor.”

Bob recalls visiting Monroe for a book signing some years after the show began. During the signing at Pecanland Mall, Dave was there. A woman approached and began to gush praise.

“She told him how big a fan of the show she was, and she said, ‘Mayor Norris, I see you every morning in my bedroom!’” Bob recounts. “Without missing a beat, Dave replies, ‘I see you, too, and you need a new bathrobe.’”

That sense of humor also impressed Mary Ann, who encountered it during her first meeting with the mayor in his office at City Hall. At the time, her family was considering moving their warehousing and trucking firm from Monroe to West Monroe. As owner and president of the company, Mary Ann decided to find out what West Monroe could do for the company from the source. She went to the mayor’s office.

“I went through my whole pitch, talking about my family’s company, what we did, why we were considering moving, and the whole time he was just sitting there,” she recalls. “I get to the last bit, and he looks up and says, ‘What in the hell do you know about running a warehousing and trucking company?’ I looked dead at him and said, ‘About as much as you do about running a city!’ And he burst out laughing.”

From that moment on, she and the mayor forged a bond that would see Dixie Bonded Warehouse move from its home on Walnut Street in Monroe into a new facility in West Monroe’s industrial park. Later, as president of the Chamber, she watched Dave operate as an economic developer for the city. “It’s not possible to overstate the impact he’s had,” she says.

“You have to attribute where West Monroe is right now to Bert Hatten and Dave Norris,” she says. “For Dave, the biggest factor to his success is that Dave didn’t come in with an agenda. He wanted West Monroe to grow, to prosper and to become a catalyst for development. He wanted to do well for the community, because it was his home. That’s difficult to find these days.”

Bob agrees. He points out that over the years of their friendship, he frequently recommended Dave pursue higher office. Perhaps running for Congress was the logical next step. Each time, though, Dave dismissed it. Bob thinks he knows why.

“I don’t think he was prepared to make the compromises and pretend to be the far right conservative he’d have to pretend to be to get elected in northeast Louisiana,” Bob says. He adds that, as a Democrat in northeast Louisiana, Dave is a rare success, mostly due to a staunch, fiscal conservativeness that’s served the city well.

Bert also points to Dave’s tenure and the fiscal responsibility with which he’s approached governing. Much of the city’s success, Bert says, has been enabled at least in part by scrupulous financial attention.

“He’s been very successful in raising the revenue to the city’s general fund,” Bert says. “You might question some of his priorities, but he’s done some things that really contribute very well to the image. The general fund revenues are higher than ever, and the city’s debt is very well-managed.”

Some of those accomplishments include the Sparta Reclamation Project, which environmental officials credit with single-handedly reversing depletion of the vital Sparta Aquifer. In addition to building a robust infrastructure – including fully self-funding a new interchange near the Ike – the city built Kiroli Park, one of the region’s major attractions. And the city continues to move forward on redevelopment at the old gravel pit site. Even in the face of failing so close to the finish line in 2008, Dave is still optimistic about the site.

“It’s going to be a huge asset for the city for the future,” Dave says. “I didn’t accomplish that, but I think it’s coming in the very near future.”

In the winter of a forty-year career at the helm of a major regional economic driver, Mayor Dave Norris still looks ever forward, not backwards, at what he believes will be, not what has passed. Mary Ann calls this uncompromising vision for West Monroe one of the city’s greatest assets. Bob agrees.

In a sprawling, heartfelt editorial in the Times-Picayune commemorating Dave’s induction into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame last year, Bob singled out Dave as a friend and the kind of generous mentor that comes around once in a life, if one is lucky. It’s a generosity that comes from sincerity, Mary Ann believes. Bob adds that it’s part of Dave’s spirit that propelled him for forty years.

One by one, the careers he’s assembled have come to a close. He left the morning show in 1990, after ten years on the air. He retired from teaching ten years later. And now, he’ll close the door on the mayor’s office one last time before returning home to his woodworking shop, his grandchildren, his wife and to his music. He has no intention of giving up the music ministry any time soon – something that’s absolutely not hard to believe about a man who’s served his community tirelessly for more than half a century.

“If it’s possible to finish strong, having been mayor of a city for 40 years, I think Dave’s doing it,” Bob says. “He didn’t lose his energy, and he certainly didn’t lose his vision.”