Dysfunction in Dickinson: Inside the growing political unrest of a small town near Houston

If you ask one faction, it all started on a cool night in January 2021 when Sean Skipworth drew a ping-pong ball out of a top hat to win a tied election and become the mayor of Dickinson. Or maybe it really began six months later, with the hiring of the city manager. Or, perhaps, both. If you ask the mayor, he wouldn’t be able to pinpoint exactly when it started. Maybe from the moment he stepped into office. Maybe from the day he started making changes that some people didn’t like. But something started not too long after he got elected, something that’s closed its jaws on the town and not let go for the past few years and now threatens to drag everything down with it.

It’s gotten so bad that a private investigator has dubbed the mayor the “Dick in Dickinson,” the mayor has gone on the record accusing his own police department of a coverup, and two of the biggest names in Texas lawyering — Tony Buzbee and Rusty Hardin — are poised to duke it out over a single apartment complex in a town of 20,000 (a perhaps unexpected sequel to the duo’s last bout: Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial). The squabbles have real-world consequences: taxpayers’ time and money, a steady drumbeat of lawsuits and their associated costs, a drag on what the City Hall administration says it is trying to accomplish. An effort to recall the mayor for good. And an alleged incident of police brutality brought a flurry of media attention to the town — an encounter that family members say left a man with a brain bleed and the officer involved free of consequences. Though the threads connecting the issues and the fallout are, at face value, tenuous, those involved can’t help but bring each and every one of them up in almost the same breath. No one can articulate a tangible motive for the other side beyond the gain and loss of power — land, monetary, political. But no one can quite say to what end. At times, the contention bubbles over in city council meetings. After the mayor read the rules of engagement at one meeting in September — no personal attacks, no vulgar or profane language — dozens approached the podium to speak their minds. “It looks like the only new sales tax dollars being generated are from liquor sales consumed by the city manager, paid for by our tax dollars!” one man said.