The Mayor Warned About 'These People.' So We Called Him.

More than 244,000 times, and counting, a video has played of a small-town mayor saying he's tired of watching the towns around the lake "get taken down by these people that are nothing but fearmongers." The clip runs about eleven seconds. The comment section under it is a war. Strangers from across the country are in there arguing about data centers, the President, the left, the right, and whether the man on the screen is a king or a communist. It's a fun scroll. It also has almost nothing to do with what the mayor was actually talking about.

I've spent this year reporting on Tool, Seven Points, and Trinidad. Those are three of the towns around this lake, and all three have had public fights over holding their leadership accountable. So when a mayor on Cedar Creek Lake says he's tired of watching the towns around here get taken down by "these people," the clip is hard for me to scroll past.

On Tuesday, June 23, 2026, Gun Barrel City Mayor Brian Crull said his piece during the public comment period. He didn't walk down to the citizens' podium to do it. He spoke from the dais, from his seat as mayor, with his nameplate in front of him, while he was the one running the meeting. He told the room he'd "speak as a resident," and then he spoke for about six minutes. The line that left the building and went around the country was this one: "I am tired of watching some of these towns around here get taken down by these people that are nothing but fearmongers. They have no substance."

Here's the part the clip doesn't carry. It wasn't posted by a stranger. It was posted by Amaris Faith, the opponent Crull defeated in May and the same critic he named that night, in a Facebook group she runs, framed as a question: "What towns around here is he talking about?" When commenters said the clip lacked context, she posted the full council video so people could watch the whole thing for themselves.

What He Actually Said

The clip is short, and it traveled a long way from the room it happened in. The real moment was local, specific, and pointed, and it's worth slowing down on.

Crull didn't toss the remark off. He named a private citizen who wasn't in the room and spent several minutes on her, questioning her honesty, her motives, and her conduct in other states. He said critics like her "seem to hide all the time behind a keyboard." He went after the animal-ordinance petition. He invoked a former legal name his critic no longer uses, a woman who now goes by Amaris Faith and who has said publicly that she changed her name more than 20 years ago for religious reasons. I'm not going to republish that name, because doing so would only finish the job he started from the dais. He closed with, "sometimes you gotta meet fire with fire."

Citizens get three minutes at a Gun Barrel City meeting. The mayor took about six, from his own seat, with the official timer nowhere in sight. That's the part residents keep coming back to. Civil rights advocate CJ Grisham, who has shown up in plenty of these fights, laid out the open-meetings argument in the thread. He didn't mince words:

Mayor, you are NOT allowed to speak during "public comments." You are not the public when you are on the dais. We are. There is case law on this. Government Code Sec. 551.007, Public Testimony, is very clear and unambiguous that "A governmental body shall allow each member of the public who desires to address the body regarding an item on an agenda for an open meeting of the body to address the body regarding the item at the meeting before or during the body's consideration of the item." You'll notice that the law does not say "each geographic resident under the governing body's authority." So, the question then becomes, "what is a member of the public?" Well, "When 'member of the public' is used in conjunction with an identified or identifiable group (or groups)—as it is here with 'governmental body'—its meaning is contextually modified to mean a person who does not belong to the identified group." Austin Bulldog v. Leffingwell, 490 S.W.3d 240, 246 (Tex. App. - Austin 2016). Hence, "the phrase 'member of the public' is often used to differentiate between ordinary citizens and the government that was created by and is comprised of those citizens." Id. at 247. For example, in Stratta v. Roe, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that Mr. Stratta could not speak during public comments because he was a member of the groundwater conservation district board that he wanted to address. The Court held that because "Stratta is a BVGCD Board member...[h]e thus is not a 'member of the public' when he attends a BVGCD meeting" even though he signed up to speak in his personal capacity. Stratta v. Roe, 961 F.3d 340, 363 (5th Cir 2020). As the person officiating, obviously we can't stop you from being a clown and doing whatever you want until next election. But, you've garnered my attention. Congratulations. Additionally, you violated your own rules even speaking for more than double the time allotted for public comments. You're a hypocrite.

CJ Grisham, June 2026

Another commenter, Roger Joiner, put the fix plainly: if Crull wanted to speak as a citizen, he should have handed the gavel to the mayor pro tem and stepped down to the podium like everyone else.

There's a real counterargument, and it belongs here. One commenter pointed out that an elected official doesn't lose his free-speech rights and is "also one of the people." Fair enough. The open question isn't whether the mayor can have an opinion. It's whether he can take the public's comment time, from the chair, while he's the one running the meeting. That's a fair question, and it's the kind that gets lost the moment a local meeting turns into a national shouting match.

So I Called

I want to give credit where it's due, because this is where the story turns.

I asked the front desk for the city manager. The woman I reached did more to help me get to her mayor than almost any city I've ever called. She gave me his voicemail line and his email and told me plainly that staff doesn't manage his calendar. I left a voicemail, introduced myself as one of the "you people" he'd talked about the night before, and said that if he wasn't talking about me, I'd love for him to clarify.

He called back the same morning. We talked for 55 minutes, on the record.

That matters. This is a mayor who told me, in his own words, "I don't call everybody back. I'm not a keyboard person. I either meet in person or I talk over the phone." Plenty of officials go quiet the second they learn I'm the one calling. Hubbard did. After a stretch of open, cordial conversations with the city there, its attorney directed staff to stop sitting for interviews, and the line went dead. That's a story for another day, and it's coming. Crull did the opposite. He picked up, he talked, and before we hung up he invited me to City Hall, invited me to a regional mayors' group he helped start, and asked me to send him this article.

The Mayor in His Own Words

Some of what he told me is to his credit, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Crull serves without pay. He works a full-time job at a facility in Dallas, gets up at 3:30 in the morning, and gets back to handle his city duties in the afternoon "for free, by the way, as a volunteer position." He described the city the same way by phone that he did from the dais: "We are a mayor weak, council strong. I am basically just the face and the voice of the city. I don't have a vote." He's proud of a regional coalition he started with Randy Teague from Mabank. "I have guys calling me from all over the state of Texas asking me to come speak," he told me, "how do I get this started, because they're all dealing with some of this stuff too."

He also told me he uses no social media and has no Facebook account. I'll be honest about where I land on that, because I think it cuts against him, not for him. I'd rather see a public official on social media than off it. Done right, with a clear understanding of the risks like accidental walking quorums and the city's own policies, a mayor's page is one of the best tools he has to meet residents where they already are. A mayor who stays off the platform where his whole city is already talking isn't rising above the noise. He's just missing the conversation. I appreciate the officials who show up and engage at the same level as the people they serve.

There's one project he was genuinely excited to tell me about. He's building a personal advisory board, separate from the city, that he's calling "Moving You Forward." He described it as a set of podcasts on his own site, built around people he trusts. Dr. Carla Russo, he said, will handle a wellness and fitness component. His pastor, Sean Paschal of First Baptist Church in Gun Barrel, will lead a spiritual component alongside other faith leaders in the area. There's a business component too. There's also a civics piece, someone whose only job is to explain small government to residents in plain language: what planning and zoning actually does, what a plat is, what a board of adjustment is and why the city has one. "The only thing I know to do at this point," he told me, "is to educate and get as much positive information out there any way I can to help my constituents and my citizens understand better what's good and what's bad." I don't have to agree with how he handled the dais to think a mayor who wants residents to understand planning and zoning is onto something worth watching.

Taken Out of Context

Crull told me the viral line was "taken out of context." What he meant, he said, was mayors reaching out to one another for help, plus "the 2 or 3 percent of the malcontents who have nothing to offer the city." He says he's usually much more positive than that clip makes him look.

So let me lay his words and his own tape side by side. The words in the clip are real. They're on the recording, and the clip didn't invent them. On the part that matters, though, his next-morning framing doesn't match what the tape shows. A general comment about a mayors' coalition and a few malcontents isn't what happened in that room. What happened was a sustained, personal callout of one named individual, delivered from the chair, with a former name attached to it. The phrase was real. So was the context he says it came from. The honest place to disagree is on whether the podium moment was appropriate, not on whether the callout was personal. It was.

The Names in the Thread

The clip didn't just travel to strangers. It pulled in a recognizable roster of Texas accountability voices, and they didn't stay quiet.

CJ Grisham was one of them. Jennifer Lynn Combs weighed in. Trinidad resident and community advocate Jon Baker wrote that a mayor "calling out someone personally and launching personal attacks is not leadership." Winston "Otto the Watchdog" Noles of the Watchdog News Network and the activist Kolton Krottinger got tagged into it, and Krottinger said he might just make the trip out to Gun Barrel City.

Here's the part worth sitting with. Naming that roster is the exact thing the mayor was warning about. An out-of-area network of government accountability figures, many of whom have never met in person, pointed at one small town over a single clip. If you support Crull, that looks like a coordinated pile-on by people who don't pay Gun Barrel City's sales tax and won't live with what comes next. If you don't support him, it looks like accountability doing what accountability does, showing up wherever a door cracks open.

I don't think that resolves cleanly, and I'm not going to pretend it does. There's one fact that keeps the "outside pile-on" answer from settling it, though. The grievances pulling people in are mostly local, and mostly documented. The animal-ordinance repeal petition carried 207 signatures that the city's own secretary certified as legally sufficient. In that same thread, residents were talking about brown water near the 274 dam, the budget, and the long-stalled Pier 334 project. The outsiders didn't invent any of that. They just pointed at it.

The reaction hasn't stayed with the out-of-town crowd, either. Days later, Chris Bayhi, a Gun Barrel City resident who ran for a council seat and sat on the committee that petitioned to repeal the animal ordinance, posted his own breakdown. He skipped the case law and made Grisham's point from a resident's chair. The mayor, he wrote, "wasn't standing at the podium like the rest of us." He was "holding the gavel, running the meeting, sitting at the dais." His verdict: "That's not a resident. That's the government." Bayhi's bigger worry was for everyone else in town. The mayor "wasn't just talking about us," he wrote, meaning the candidates and the people who signed the petition. "He was talking about YOU." Bayhi gave me his blessing to quote him, and he says he has more coming.

What He Confirmed on the Record

In the middle of defending himself, Crull confirmed real news. Gun Barrel City is losing both its city manager and its economic development director at the same time, with an interim coming in through Strategic Government Resources. That's a lot of turnover at the top of a city this size, and his own council authorized the SGR arrangement on the same June 23 record.

He confirmed he was reelected on May 2 by roughly two to one. He said the 2026 animal ordinance is headed "to the voters in November." That lines up with the city secretary's certification that the repeal petition carried 207 verified signatures and was legally sufficient, the same number the mayor's own staff put on the record, and a more favorable picture for his critics than the one he painted from the dais.

He defended the long-delayed Pier 334 waterfront project hard. He told me the city already has about $58,000 in permit revenue from it in a town with no property tax, blamed tariffs and supply-chain problems for the slow build, and said the developer "held off on construction for an extra six or seven months so we could keep that Big Chief Landing boat ramp open for the summer." Those are his numbers, on a project that's years behind schedule and one I'm digging into separately, against the records.

The Questions Worth Asking

A mayor who criticizes people for hiding behind a keyboard used the one thing he does control, the chair and the gavel, to deliver a personal speech at a critic who wasn't in the room to answer. There's an extra wrinkle. The same night he went after a critic's "keyboard," his council took up a proposed social-media policy for council members, presented by the departing city manager and set for possible adoption in July. A mayor who told me he has "no vote" and is "just the face of the city" took roughly six minutes of the public's comment time from his own seat, with the timer absent, to call a defeated opponent by a name she no longer uses. I'm putting those to him as questions, not accusations, and he asked for the follow-up calls.

Not everyone read the meeting the way the "watchdog" crowd did. After Amaris Faith posted the full video so people could judge for themselves, one commenter watched the whole thing and decided the mayor had done nothing more than "put a keyboard warrior in their place."

I'm one reporter with public records and a phone, and I'm not out to take any town down. What I can do is keep the conversation going, in the open and on the record. So here's where this goes next, and I'd like you in on it.

My next move in Gun Barrel City is Amaris Faith. She's the one the mayor named, and she hasn't had her turn. I'm reaching out to her for an on-record conversation, and that interview will be its own article, in her own words. I've also reached out to Winston "Otto" Noles, and he's agreed to sit down with me for a piece of his own. Both of them have spent years around exactly this kind of fight.

When I loop back to Mayor Crull to close this out, I'm not going to walk in with only my own questions. I've asked Amaris and Otto to send me the ones they most want put to him. If you have concerns you want Mayor Crull to address and you haven't had luck on your own, feel free to send them to me at [email protected]. I'll take the questions that come up the most, from every side, and put them to the mayor directly on our next call. I feel that is where this conversation will start to get a lot more interesting and productive.

To close this out for now, Otto had some words to share on the subject of "taking cities down":

Since the mayor likes putting things on the record, I haven't taken down a single City that didn't deserve it. In fact, I think I get too much credit, I haven't taken down a single City that didn't do it to themselves. If accurate reporting is all that is required to "take you down" then you do in fact need to be taken down.

Winston "Otto" Noles, June 27, 2026