Papillion's Steady Hand: David Black Reflects on a 17-year Mayorship

David Black voted against himself.

In 2009, when the Papillion City Council elected its own president, Black cast his ballot for someone else. He didn’t think he was ready. Three months later, the mayor resigned under a cloud of scandal, and Black, now council president by default, stepped into the chair he had tried to avoid.

He has been there ever since.

Seventeen years later, Black is preparing to hand off a city that looks almost nothing like the one he inherited. Under his watch, Papillion grew from a single-source residential tax base into a regional economic hub, landing Nebraska’s first Facebook, Google and Amazon data centers, absorbing La Vista’s fire department, growing its police force fivefold and earning repeated national recognition as one of the best small cities in the country, all while maintaining the lowest property tax levy in the Omaha metro.

Black has done it while holding down a full-time career as senior vice president of commercial lending at Pinnacle Bank, a dual role he describes less as a conflict than as

an advantage.

His governing philosophy fits in two

phrases: manage growth, preserve community. Every major decision passes through a single filter, a mental image of Papillion Days, the city’s annual celebration, with residents lining the old downtown streets and the American flag hanging overhead.

“If you’re hurting it,” he says of that picture, “we better sit down and have a conversation.”

He sat down with the Midlands Business Journal at Papillion City Hall. 

Q&A

MBJ: You described yourself as a reluctant leader. You voted against your own nomination as council president, and three months later you were the mayor. When you realized you were going to be sitting in that big chair, what did you think needed to happen first for you to be successful?

DB: The very first thing was to send a message of stability, because people and organizations hate change, and that’s a big change. The first step of crisis management is you’ve got to bring stability and confidence.

MBJ: One of the things you had to do when you stepped into this role was to restore trust in the government of Papillion. That requires very specific decisions. What is one thing you did early on that, looking back, mattered the most in turning that page?

DB: I didn’t run from the issues. Shortly after I took office, we had a civil service cheating scandal in the fire department, senior employees helping recruits. A lot of jurisdictions would have swept it under the rug. We dealt with it publicly. Later that year, we had embezzlement at our golf course. We stood up and dealt with that, too. By publicly and very clearly dealing with those issues, it sent a message that integrity matters.

MBJ: You have simultaneously run this city while working as a senior vice president at a commercial bank. Mayors are either career politicians or full-time executives. You’ve been both at once, and not only that, Papillion has repeatedly earned the Government Finance Officers Association Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting. How has that banker’s eye changed the way you’ve governed, and has running a government changed the way you think about banking?

DB: One day, sitting in my office, I realized the parks department is a big landscape company. It has income and expense, customers and vendors. That’s what I do all day at the bank. Public works is a big construction company. I started thinking of every department as a small business, and that’s when government made sense. The city as a whole is like Procter & Gamble, a whole bunch of unrelated businesses under one umbrella. That’s actually why we started sending annual reports to our residents.

Where it’s also helped is I can be a translator between developers and the city. If you know the objectives of both parties, you can come to a reasonable resolution. 

MBJ: Papillion landed Nebraska’s first Google data center, 275 acres that broke ground in 2019, and it’s continually expanded since. For a city that prides itself on its small-town feel, that’s a significant statement about what this city is becoming. How did that deal come together, and what did it mean for how you thought about the city’s economic identity?

DB: Actually, Facebook was the first, then Google, and in the middle of that we had Amazon. So we’re playing a role nationally and globally with all three.

We told them up front: you’re not coming in here to take advantage of us. If you are, go somewhere else. There was a moment in the Facebook negotiations where they wanted zoning regulations frozen in time, in perpetuity. It was going to be a make-or-break moment. Our planning director, Mark Stursma, whose degree is in conflict resolution, asked them why they wanted those regulations frozen. It turned out they had been taken advantage of by other communities. Once we learned that, we agreed we would never pass regulations targeting them or their industry. A level of trust was built, and they started plugging into the community. They’ve built roads and infrastructure we couldn’t have afforded. Growth has to work for both sides.

MBJ: The Papillion Police Department has quintupled, going from 10 officers to 55. And yet you’ve maintained the lowest property tax levy in the metro. How do you manage both?

DB: Growth has funded the growth. When I took office, Papillion was mostly single-family residential. Through our growth cycle, we started collecting sales tax we didn’t have before. Commercial and industrial development also pays property taxes. Sales tax now exceeds property tax. As that revenue has grown, we’ve been able to drop the levy.

MBJ: In 2014, you absorbed La Vista’s volunteer fire department. That’s a significant intergovernmental deal. What did that mean for both communities?

DB: Mayor Douglas Kindig called me because his response times were going up and he was afraid of being the mayor where the fire department didn’t show up in time and somebody got killed. I said I’m not afraid of adding another party as long as it doesn’t change what we’ve built. It’s like two people dancing and a third joins. As long as we can keep dancing. It saved La Vista $1.5 million to $2 million over starting its own department. We now have four stations, and Mayor Kindig and I were invited to present on the model at a national conference in Nashville.

MBJ: As Papillion has grown into a suburban hub, the city has leaned into its butterfly identity, the water tower, murals, community benches, a butterfly garden inside Veterans Memorial Park. Most cities chasing growth go for a more corporate image. What made Papillion go the other direction?

DB: The butterfly has been part of Papillion’s identity for decades. I think there was an attempt two or three mayors ago to change it, and somebody was almost recalled over that. Because people are emotionally tied to it, I figured I’m not going to change that. That is our soul. Don’t change it. Let’s lean into it.

MBJ: Veterans Memorial Park has become one of Papillion’s signature civic spaces. What’s the personal story behind your commitment to building it the way it was built?

DB: The Papillion Garden Club, and I joke it’s three old ladies with no money, came and said they wanted to put a flower garden in an ugly corner of Halleck Park. That grew incrementally. The Junior Women’s Club added a flagpole. The American Legion funded all of the flagpoles after raising money through steak fries (fundraisers) in about six months. Woodmen of the World donated all the flags. The honor wall panels were designed so that as soon as one fills up, the next goes up, and it always looks finished. Small incremental civic organizations wanting to give back in the way they can, but the whole time we’ve had the big vision. If nothing else is ever done, it still looks appropriate.

MBJ: After 17 years, what do you know now that you wish you had known when you started, and what do you want the next mayor of Papillion to understand going in that they probably don’t?

DB: I wish I would have appreciated earlier the talent we have and how passionate people are. If an employee grew up in a small town, the mission is intuitive. They’ve lived it, they know it and they don’t want to lose it. I think we could have done a lot more if I would have understood that earlier and leveraged it.