This type of election was rare outside the Dallas suburb of more than 100,000 people. Other North Texas cities, such as Allen, Dallas, Plano, Garland and Denton, had the same council-manager system of government, yet allowed voters to elect their mayors directly. As Omar told council members in 2011, the Texas Municipal League reported that only 6% of Texas cities weren’t doing it that way.
None of those cities, except Richardson, was in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“Everything about it felt wrong,” says Omar, who’s in his early 50s. “First, the act of making a decision to select the mayor, who is the face of the city, behind closed doors gave the city a feeling that literal backroom deals were being made. True or not, it was a sentiment I heard often. Second, residents were all but electing council members they thought would pick their preferred person to be mayor, versus electing a council member based on their individual positions or experience.
“This stood out in a nondemocratic way, and that was not helpful to our image.”
Omar made a campaign promise during his second run for council in 2011: He would fight to give voters the power to select their mayor.
Omar pushed for a charter amendment in late January 2012 to allow for direct mayoral elections and proposed placing it on the May 2012 ballot for voters to decide. He argued that voters deserved to vote for a council member based on their priorities, not on who they plan to select as mayor. He called the charter amendment a minor tweak to the language and offered his council seat as a sacrifice to create the mayor's seat. “Some of the people voted for me and voted against me based on who I thought I was going to select as mayor,” he told council members.
Mayor Pro Tem Laura Maczka, who later faced a very different battle with the Department of Justice, shut down Omar’s efforts to get the charter amendment. “The way I view us is as a board of trustees,” Maczka said at the meeting. “I think that at the level of the board of trustees, most corporations, most boards elect their chairman from within.”
Other council members agreed with her. They thought the old system was fine and didn’t think there was enough time to implement a new one. Newly elected council member Scott Dunn warned that dysfunction could follow if voters were allowed to elect their mayor.
“You look at the surrounding cities that do have a direct-elect mayor,” Dunn said at the time. “And I’m glad that I live in Richardson.”
Richardson voters disagreed and successfully petitioned to put the charter amendment on the November 2012 ballot. More than 70% voted to allow for direct mayoral elections.
Omar and Maczka ran for mayor in May 2013. It was the hometown girl vs. the upstart political outsider, who faced pushback because of his religion and the fact that he was twice divorced and single and had only lived in Richardson for a short time.
Twelve years would pass before he would finally secure the mayoral seat to become the first mayor of Muslim faith in North Texas and also the first of Palestinian and Iranian descent.
“It was a different time in our world,” Omar says of his 2013 mayoral run. “A lot more fear and uncertainty and a lot more concern for people of another faith, particularly the Muslim faith. There was just so much that people didn’t know or weren’t comfortable with, and that made being a political official and running for office difficult.”
The Outsider
In a 2013 profile, D Magazine hailed Omar as “an outsider” taking on “Richardson’s old guard.” With his head cleanly shaven and slightly smiling, Omar looked like a CEO from the cover of D CEO Magazine. But he didn’t look like an outsider in his pinstripe dark blue blazer, light blue button-down shirt and red tie.By that point, Omar had only lived in Richardson for about five years after moving there because his children were attending schools there. He also attended a mosque there.
Omar was born in Milwaukee in 1972 and grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Omar’s father, a Palestinian Sunni, was a professor at what is now known as Texas State Technical College. His mother, an Iranian Shi’ite, was a hostess who introduced people to their family’s Middle Eastern culture and crossed what Omar calls a culture chasm, in part due to the Iran hostage crisis in the late 1970s, when a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage.
“It was a very difficult and consuming time period for our country, so it was not an easy task or a nothing effort to make yourself be approachable and open-minded,” Omar says. “My mom just did this amazing job making people love her by way of food, music and dance.”
Omar’s former school teacher, Lupita Muniz, still recalls Omar and his mother as charismatic, positive and a “great force” in his life.
“Amir is a shining example of what we wanted to instill in our kids and make sure that they knew that they could change their environment,” Muniz says. “That is what we promoted.”
Omar’s mother died of cancer in 1988 at the age of 47, shortly before his senior year of high school. The mayor credits her for instilling a desire to connect with his constituents and make them feel comfortable and heard.
In the 2013 magazine profile, Omar recalled a threat he had received from a prominent figure in Richardson who belonged to the “old guard,” also known as the Richardson Coalition. With its endorsement, this well-financed group of city leaders had a 14-election winning streak for council candidates. It had supported him during his council runs in 2009 and 2011, but things had changed.
“I was told bluntly that if I pushed for a direct election of the mayor, I would no longer have their support,” Omar recalls. “For a political person and someone who is mindful of the powerbrokers, that is the kind of thing that creates a chilling effect. But I told them at the time that my goal was never to be reelected forever. My goal was to make the biggest difference. It comes from the fact that I lost my mom at a fairly young age. It left multiple impressions on me for years to come, and many cases till this day.
“Life is short,” he says. ”It ends when we oftentimes don’t want it to or expect it to. We have limited opportunity to make a difference. It was far more important for me to do what I thought was the right thing to do, things that would make a difference for decades.”
The Richardson Coalition dropped its support of Omar. Instead, it supported Maczka in Richardson’s first direct election mayoral race, who, according to reports, was initially supposed to take over as mayor if the charter hadn’t been changed. A hometown woman and Texas A&M grad, Maczka was described as “a real All-American, Girl Next Door, Texas Lady,” who baked cookies "every Monday for her husband of 24 years and their three sons,” according to a 2013 political advertisement. She was the establishment.
Though Omar was attracting more donors, Mackzka had the endorsement of every sitting council member. She campaigned on a buzzy “no new apartments” promise to appeal to the upper-middle-class homeowners in town. But she would break that campaign promise after she met Mark Jordan, an apartment developer seeking council approval to develop property along U.S. 75. Eventually, the two began a romance, and he showered her with gifts.
Maczka received nearly 71% of the approximately 14,000 ballots cast for mayor in May 2013. She became not only the second woman to serve as Richardson's mayor but also the first to be elected by popular vote. She ran unopposed in 2015, but declined to take the oath of office for several reasons, including her job with the developer behind a controversial mixed-use development, a project she had supported as mayor.
Three years later, Maczka would become the first Richardson mayor ever to face a federal indictment for bribery, tax and wire fraud after her relationship with Jordan was exposed.
Talking Over Coffee
Earlier this year, Omar met with voters over coffee to discuss their concerns. He’d been meeting with voters for several months at various local coffee shops to determine whether he should seek the mayor's office. He says he wanted to make sure he had something to offer and decided to follow his mother’s example of connecting with people.Omar began hosting coffee meetings and ice cream socials to speak directly with prospective voters and their families. He estimates that he has held 400 coffee meetings, and about 50 to 80 people would show up for the ice cream socials on Sundays to ask him questions.
This time, in 2025, Omar was married, unlike during previous campaigns. He met his third wife, actress and model Alika Ray, in 2019 via an online dating site. He says she knew he was politically active and still married him three years later.
Ray says she had never dated someone like Omar before, but she was looking for someone who was proactive, willing to meet with people — even those who disagreed with him — and engage in discussion. She knew politics could again be in his future.
“That is the energy that makes him a great man, father and a mayor,” she says. “He is full of persistence, passion and occasional debate. He is such an amazing person who is too nice for politics, yet means so well. That is why I’m protective of him.”
Richardson had also gotten more diverse, with a large Asian population and a large portion of the estimated 275,000 Arab Americans in Dallas County.
Regardless of the voter’s background, Omar began noticing that people felt that Richardson deserved better, on top of a recurring theme of being ignored. “I was hearing over and over again that elected officials weren’t listening to the neighborhoods,” he says. “There was a constant frustration over the lack of progress in certain parts of our city.”
Elected officials in Richardson who did not listen to their constituents could be traced back to Maczka, who pushed unwanted multifamily zoning changes for Jordan in exchange for more than $92,000 in cash, checks and home renovations, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office Eastern District of Texas in 2022.
According to reports, in 2019, Maczka and Jordan’s defense attorneys argued that the couple “were motivated by love and affection” to take a dozen trips to exotic locations. Both faced 25 years in prison but were sentenced in 2022 to six years each for bribery and tax fraud.
While Maczka dealt with legal issues, Omar built trust with Richardson residents after losing the 2013 election. He became president of his neighborhood association for a couple of years. He brought back his “Tree the Town” initiative, which aimed to plant 50,000 trees. He says he used his own money to plant trees for people who lost mature trees in the 2019 tornado that damaged or destroyed 671 properties in Richardson.
“It was devastating to those impacted and not only destroyed many homes but tore apart the beautiful tree canopy in those neighborhoods,” Omar says. “It was the feeling that I wanted to do something once the flood of support was done helping that led me to bring back Tree the Town and begin planting free trees for those homeowners who desired them. These trees were overwhelmingly planted by just myself and my son, Anson, as the pandemic made it impossible to do larger volunteer events.
“We planted nearly all trees in front yards where they could impact the greatest number of people and bring a tiny amount of hope and joy to those who lost so much.”
Using the master’s degree in business administration he earned in 2013 from the University of Texas at Dallas, Omar began working in the water conservation sector for more than a decade before he decided to challenge the incumbent mayor — Bob Dubey — earlier this year.
A former council member, Dubey was a one-term mayor elected after Mayor Paul Voelker, also a former council member, decided not to seek reelection in 2023. Omar felt Voelker had represented Richardson well and didn’t feel the need to run for office. When Voelker chose not to seek reelection in 2023, Omar was more than happy to support “someone I felt would do a good job.”
But again, things changed.
“That person didn’t win,” Omar says. “I began watching much more closely while also starting to have one-on-one coffees to understand how people felt about our city and their hopes for what the future might look like.”
Omar was ready to run in 2025 but wasn’t the only one ready to challenge Dubey. Richardson native and business owner Alan North also filed to run. North had been behind the 2012 petition to change the charter to allow for a directly elected mayor.
Omar didn’t work directly with North in 2012 to collect signatures for the petition, but says he worked behind the scenes to ensure that voters could finally elect their mayor.
“I was publicly an outspoken advocate for it before the election and was incredibly supportive in every way I could, to inform voters why it was a good thing,” Omar says.
“Richardson’s City Council has long been controlled by insider interests that continue to push back against transparency,” North told Community Impact before the 2025 election. Crime rates are rising, and ticket quotas are illegal. ... Water rates and taxes continue to rise, but residents aren’t seeing results from many city projects or in quality of life.”
A novice to governance with no civil track record, North didn’t have near the swell of support as Omar, whom the Richardson Echo called “the right leader for Richardson.”
In an April 17 column, the Echo listed Omar’s civic record, professional experience and collaborative style as reasons. It also mentioned the “Tree the Town” initiative and Omar’s lone council vote for a direct election of the mayor in 2012. “This is a clear demonstration that Omar is willing to put citizen rights over politics,” the Echo wrote.
Even though the incumbent was indeed a member of the old-guard establishment, Omar didn’t have the same difficulty in 2025 that he did over a decade ago. This time, he won.
A New Kind of Future
Omar met with about three dozen constituents in the backyard of a coffee shop near downtown Richardson for his first official Coffee with the Mayor event. A diverse crowd, young and old, sat at picnic tables and outdoor tables and gathered around them this Saturday morning in late June to hear updates and ask questions about their new mayor.Dressed in business casual, Omar struggled with the heat despite the shade, but he soldiered through his updates, doing his best to answer constituents’ questions. It was an impressive turnout, especially given the Islamophobia currently gripping many Republican elected officials. Headlines all year have detailed how multiple state agencies are still investigating the Muslim-planned EPIC City housing development in Collin County, on behalf of Gov. Greg Abbott, for one example. But again, for Omar, 2025 has proven to be unlike years past.
“This election, I found things to be considerably different [than 2013],” Omar says. “The reception during this campaign was very positive overall. Sure, there was some very isolated push back related to religion, but it wasn’t really a factor in this election.”
It also wasn’t a factor for his mostly older white constituents this Saturday morning in June. They listened intently as Omar discussed his concerns for the upcoming budget and how the empty commercial buildings could affect it, since the buildings are only worth more in taxes if occupied. Another financial hit to the city was also on the horizon now that small business owners received $125,000 property tax relief, up from $2,500. Abbott traveled to Denton a week before Omar’s first coffee to sign it into law.
Mayor Pro Tem Ken Hutchenrider credits Omar’s “strong boots-on-the-ground campaign” for securing enough votes to defeat Dubey. “He went to every corner of Richardson and met with people and interacted with different groups and different community members,” Hutchenrider says.
Council member Curtis Dorian stresses that the mayor should unite people. Dorian says he wasn’t fond of news outlets making a big deal out of the fact that Omar was the first Muslim mayor in North Texas. He says he is Richardson’s first openly LGBTQ+ council member, but, like Omar, he didn’t make it the focus of his campaign because he feels his lifestyle is normal and just one part of him.
“The big issue is you've got to be a connector and not a divider,” Dorian says
Watching Omar connect with his constituents is also striking in a time when Palestine, his father’s homeland, has been at the center of arguably the globe’s most divisive conflict. Some estimates state that more than 60,000 Palestinians have died in the two years of fighting in Gaza. Some leading health organizations have said that famine has taken hold of the region while the world watches.
“I have extended family who live in Gaza that have been impacted in monumental ways, and a great deal of our family in Tulkarm [on the West Bank],” Omar says. “Everyone is affected.”
In 2023, Omar and his brother took a trip to the Middle East on the 35th anniversary of their mother’s death. They planned to visit her homeland of Iran, but they “didn’t feel super safe” and decided instead to spend time in Istanbul, a city his mother loved.
During the trip, Omar began considering a run for mayor and knew the sacrifices he would have to make if he did so. He talked with his brother about it and came up with the idea of having conversations with residents, which he did with gusto.
“Both Mom and Dad were built with a sense of desire to make a difference,” Omar says. “Both of them really shared with us quite often to leave a place better than you find it. For me, it all started there.”
Within weeks of returning home, Omar contacted community members from every corner of Richardson with his mayoral goal in mind. Sort of, at least. He wanted to talk with 200 residents. “The question wasn’t ‘would they support me?’” Omar says. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to run just yet. The question was ‘what do they think about things going on in our city?’”
This Saturday morning in June was the first of several Coffee with the Mayor events he plans to host at different times and locations across the city, so more constituents can attend. He firmly believes that a mayor should be accessible, with information that residents can digest and “not only know who he is but also what he is doing to help the city.”
The onetime outsider is now making things work from the inside for anyone willing to join him.
“The simple act of sitting with someone new, listening to their thoughts about our city and sharing my vision just creates a lasting connection,” Omar says. “People want to be heard and they want to understand where you’re coming from. Doing all those coffees helped me understand at a totally different level what residents really wanted from their leaders and for their city.”
