By J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The legend of Margaret Mills was being told even before she left her post.

She was the steel magnolia, the lady with Southern manners and the flinty resolve who would not let an ailing downtown die.

She was the one who talked the Junior League and skeptical donors into renovating the dank hull of a downtown movie house into the Waco Hippodrome, then rolled up sleeves and went to work herself, scraping away pigeon droppings.

As executive director of Downtown Waco Inc., she was the one who would publicly rebuke a mayor pro-tem for writing off downtown as nearly “brain-dead” and beyond hope. In her 19 years at Downtown Waco Inc., she saw the tide turn as upscale restaurants and shops, millions of dollars in public improvements and thousands of jobs came to downtown and the Brazos River corridor.

“If the resurrection of downtown Waco could be compared to The Little Engine That Could, then the chief engineer would likely be Margaret Mills,” the Tribune-Herald editorialized in 2001.

Last summer the cracks began to appear in that legend, and now it lies in pieces. Mills quietly stepped down from her position last July after admitting that she had taken “liberties” with Downtown Waco Inc. checks.

By September, word on the financial scandal was out, and city officials cut off funding, dealing a death blow to the organization. Since then, she has shunned public appearances. Mills, 66, has resigned her chairmanship of the Texas Medal for the Arts and an economic development consulting job.

Mills has left those who believed in her leadership to wrestle with hard questions. How could someone with such devotion to her cause betray it by stealing from the very organization she worked to build up?

“I would say she deserves the credit for the success that was realized, and for whatever scandal is being reported,” said Mark Boyd, vice president of Downtown Waco Inc.’s board.

“Because of her success, we trusted her,” he said. “There wasn’t any reason not to. I still believe she had passion for downtown. We enjoyed what I still consider enormous success under her leadership. You can’t take away what good was done.”

Mills is a Waco native who graduated from Waco High School in 1958 and Baylor University in 1963. Out of college, she married Coke Mills Jr., then a promising young attorney with political ties to Democratic Congressman Bob Poage.

The Millses would remain at the center of McLennan County Democratic Party politics for years. Margaret Mills also has been involved with statewide arts organizations for years and once served as temporary headmistress for St. Paul’s Episcopal School.

But Mills’ persona as a hard-charging civic leader emerged in the 1980s when she spearheaded the Junior League’s $2 million renovation of the Waco Theatre on Austin Avenue, now the Hippodrome.

Austin Avenue, once the throbbing heart of Waco, had fallen into deep decline after a failed experiment in turning it into a pedestrian mall.

“That’s when the men were taking care of things,” said LaNelle McNamara, who served as mayor and city councilwoman in the 1980s. “That’s why we had that mall, which was so pitiful. The main street of town was closed. You had big planter boxes people could hide behind. There was no good lighting. The trees they planted died because they weren’t watered. It just became an eyesore. People were scared to go downtown.”

From 1980 to 1987, Mills led the charge to renovate the flea-infested theater, built in 1913, despite much skepticism that the public would ever return to such a blighted area. Mills and her colleagues proved the conventional wisdom wrong, Mayor Virginia DuPuy said.

“That’s when the community started having a new picture of what downtown could be,” she said. “The Hippodrome was the initiative that rekindled interest in downtown and hope in downtown. There were those who felt like there just wasn’t any way she could do it. She just didn’t give up. There were other people working with her on it, but she was just almost like a bulldog about it. . . . That tenacity is what led to much of the development of downtown.”

Mills was hired to do an economic development study for Downtown Waco Inc. in 1987, around the same time that Austin Avenue was opened up and the Hippodrome opened.

“Margaret Mills’ tenure at Downtown Waco Inc. promises to be the hottest thing to hit the central business district since the Cox building’s fire,” the Tribune-Herald wrote in July 1987.

She took the helm of Downtown Waco Inc. in 1988 and transformed the 30-year-old institution from a downtown merchants association into an economic development organization. That year, she persuaded the city of Waco to start a public improvement district in which downtown property owners would pay an extra tax to fund landscaping, security and sanitation expenses.

That year, she quarreled publicly with Mayor Pro-Tem Sam Jack McGlasson after he compared downtown to a dying patient and suggested the city should stop trying to revive it. Several years later, before his death, McGlasson would happily recant, noting the progress downtown had made.

Ten years later, Downtown Waco Inc. would take on a contract with the city of Waco to market the Brazos River corridor. By last year, Downtown Waco Inc. was receiving more than $386,000 a year from the city.

During Mills’ tenure, the Waco Veterans Affairs Regional Office moved downtown, investors renovated old warehouses into the upscale RiverSquare Center and turned others into loft apartments and offices. The public sector has contributed river trails, a new Lake Brazos Dam and millions of dollars in streets and sidewalks downtown. Property values downtown have doubled.

In time, Mills became a symbol of the effort to restore downtown to its former glory.

“Margaret Mills was sort of the alter ego for downtown Waco,” said Mike Morrison, who served as councilman and mayor in the 1990s. “When you thought of one you thought of the other.”

But in recent years, Mills has often been at odds with city of Waco leaders. Mills has advocated two different projects for a new publicly subsidized upscale hotel on the Brazos River, but the city council would not commit to either. In the past two years City Manager Larry Groth has left Mills out of negotiations for two major downtown projects: Renovation of the Waco Hilton and the $60 million development around Heritage Square.

DuPuy said Mills had an “enormous talent” for marketing downtown and for articulating her vision. But her determination and single-minded focus could sometimes cause her to clash with those who had other visions of downtown’s future.

“Sometimes your greatest gift can be your greatest weakness,” she said.

Still, even those who were not fans of Margaret Mills had to be taken by surprise by the allegations of massive fraud, DuPuy said.

“I don’t think anyone in the city could have guessed what was going on,” she said. “People may have been angry at her, annoyed at her, even hurt, but nobody suspected that.”

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

757-5752