Who is Tray Payne? Meet your new Lubbock mayor

Tray Payne is the mayor of Lubbock. He took office just a few weeks ago after handily winning the mayoral election on May 7 with more than two-thirds of the vote in a field of five. He chaired his first City Council meeting in late May. But who is Tray Payne, and what are his first priorities as Lubbock’s new chief executive? We sat down with him this past week to find out.

Background and family life

“I’m a small-town kid. I grew up in the big city of Post,” Payne said in an interview with the Avalanche-Journal. “I’m a very, very family-oriented guy. I’ve got two older brothers and a younger sister, and we have a very, very big family.” Payne said he has 28 great-aunts and uncles.

Payne has been married to his wife Heidi for 22 years, and together they have four daughters, two of whom are attending Texas Tech and the other two are in junior high.

“Most of my spare time is spent with my family,” Payne said.

Payne explained he is a man of faith, placing his identity in his Christian beliefs.

“My Christian faith is my base. It’s my firm foundation, and so everything kind of flows from that,” Payne said.

Payne attended Texas Tech and graduated in 1996 with an accounting degree before heading to Oklahoma City University to obtain a law degree. He graduated from OCU in 2000 and returned to Lubbock shortly afterward to start a family. He is now a practicing attorney in town.

“When I graduated with my accounting degree, I went to work for a local accounting firm doing auditing, and I was there just a short period of time before I decided to go to law school,” Payne said. “I came back to Lubbock in 2000 with my wife, and we were married in August of 2000 and found out she was pregnant in September of 2000, so my oldest daughter came along shortly after.”

Payne said he worked his way through college to pay tuition, which resulted in a number of jobs that round out his resume, in addition to the accounting and law experience.

“I had a lot of jobs,” Payne said. “I worked at the post office downtown branch here. I worked at the Lone Star Oyster Bar for a long period of time, the Whistling Dixie old barbeque place. I mean, I had a lot of jobs, sold suits at the mall. I did whatever I could to put myself through school,” Payne said, including oilfield work in the summers.

The first few days in office

Payne gaveled in his first City Council meeting as mayor May 24 after being sworn in just a week earlier. The council took steps toward advancing much-needed street repairs, familiarized themselves with recent progress on a new unified development code, and approved and denied zoning requests. On the dais, new Councilwoman Christy Martinez-Garcia likened that first meeting to riding a bicycle with training wheels.

“Having gone through that process now makes me feel a lot more comfortable,” Payne said. “As Ms. Martinez-Garcia said, we’re all on training wheels right now, and as we take those training wheels off and get a little bit more familiar with things, I think it’s going to make it a lot better.”

Outside of the council chambers, Payne has been plenty busy adjusting to his new role.

“My favorite part so far, last week I just started going down the floors (at Citizens Tower) and using my keycard and opening up doors and just knocking on some people’s doors and saying, ‘Hey, my name is Tray. I work here. I’m new,’” Payne said. “Just meeting the people that work here. We focus a lot on department heads and the people that are higher-ups, but getting to know the people that are just like you and I — this is their job, this is their livelihood, and knowing what their cares and concerns are is really important to me.”

Besides meeting the staff, Payne has also been devoting time to getting to know the other folks on the dais and enhancing his knowledge of city government and policy.

“I think we’re going to have a good team,” Payne said. “I think the people that we have here are completely invested and want 100 percent of what’s best for not only their districts, but for Lubbock.”

“I think we’re going to work well together because I think everybody has the same goal in mind,” Payne said. “Let’s do what’s best. We’re not always going to agree, I think we know that. If we had 100 percent agreement all the time, I don’t think that’s always what’s best for the city. You know, sometimes you have to have some disagreement. But I believe we will work lock in step to do what’s best for Lubbock.”

“Policy wise, getting a firm foundation, I feel like we're a little bit on shifting sand right now because there’s a lot that’s coming upon us that we’ve got to learn how policy works in some ways,” Payne added.

Payne’s policy priorities

“We’re coming up on the budget, and there’s a lot of issues that we want to try to push out this summer before the budget season hits, one of those being the streets and roads bond package, another being a UDC, or the Uniform Development Code, trying to see if we can kind of get that moving forward,” Payne said. “I think that helps our city as a whole to be more uniform and development and codification of some of those issues.”

The streets and roads issue was one of Payne’s top campaigning points during election season after a bond package including several road widening and repair projects failed in a November 2021 election. At its last meeting, the City Council agreed to form a Citizens Advisory Committee to look at how to reconfigure the package to better suit voters' wishes.

“If we can get that advisory council put together in June and give them enough time to look at what was done, to see if we still approve some of those (street projects), but maybe in a different form or mechanism to get it to the people to let them vote, I really think that’s going to be important for us as we continue to grow,” Payne said. “We have a huge need, but it’s got to be presented to the people in an acceptable fashion where they can get on board and really want to push it through.”

Another major priority for Payne is public safety. He said he’s already looking at ways to help improve the city’s safety and take care of its first responders.

“We have to look at pay for our first responders. (The city) made a commitment to be competitive across the board as far back as 2006, and to recruit, train and retain good first responders, we’ve got to maintain that competitiveness in the city,” Payne said. “That’s not always pay — and pay’s a big issue and we have to look at that — but we also have to make sure that we’re being a city that’s welcoming to our first responders … and backing them and giving them the tools, the communications and all the things necessary to be really efficient at their job, because public safety is job No. 1 for the local government.”

Part of improving public safety, Payne said, is getting the citizens to buy into what the city is doing to improve it, like switching to a community policing model that brought three police substations to different areas of Lubbock.

“In the community policing model that we’ve been and we’re trying to move to with the patrol divisions, if the people haven’t bought into that completely — and they haven’t — it's up to … the community (to) come out and be involved, but that takes time,” Payne said. “You’re not going to get people to (adapt to) how we’ve been policing and the model just in a year or even two years. It’s going to be a long-term plan, and so along with that community policing model, we’ve also got to be more active.”

Government efficiency is Payne’s final talking point, stressing the importance of using time and resources wisely to serve citizens most effectively.

“We’ve got to be more efficient with staff time,” Payne said, noting that efficiency will correlate to a government that better serves its taxpayers.

“We can look to see how we can become more efficient as a government, being the government of ‘yes,’ trying to help people,” Payne said. “Whether it’s a carport that they need a variance on, or whether it’s a developer, we need to do what we can to be a city of ‘yes’ and not the city of ‘no.’”

“I think it's important that we all understand we want what’s best for Lubbock,” Payne said. “And at the end of the day, if we're doing our very best then, you know, that’s all we can do.”

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Get to know new Lubbock mayor Tray Payne