MIDLAND – Amid uncertain times, Midland Mayor Patrick Payton is trying to make sense of the situation and push forward.
That’s not always as easy at it sounds, however.
“You feel nauseous all the time,” Payton recently told The Texas Tribune. “But I am certain every mayor is going through this.”
“Payton, 52, is a man who normally radiates positivity, a former pastor who leans heavily on his faith,” the story said. “When he ran for the job last fall, part of his platform was about encouraging the people of this remote west Texas oil town, the heart of the state’s energy-production region, to think more highly of themselves and their city, to value what they did aboveground as much as the work they did below.”
However, the Mayor has been tested over the past several months by the COVID-19 outbreak as well as the oil-price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia that sent West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark crude, plummeting from about $53 a barrel to as low as $20 in roughly a month’s time.
“It was like a switch flipped,” Payton recalled. When he went to bed March 8, Midland was in the midst of an oil boom that had transformed this city of about 173,000. Its population had increased 29 percent, one of the fastest growth rates in the country, according to the Census Bureau. The next morning, things were in free fall.
“We woke up to the industry shutting down, and that’s not exaggeration,” Payton said. Workers began lining up for unemployment, and long lines of cars formed at the West Texas Food Bank. The economy was tanking in ways unseen for decades. “The old phrase of ‘on our knees’ would be an understatement,” he said.
Then the worldwide pandemic began to impact the community on top of the collapse in the local economy that already had local residents in the unemployment line.
“At any other time in our nation’s history … when there have been economic collapses, you could at least go to the gym and work out. You could go to your favorite restaurant and sit with your friends and enjoy a drink. You could do those things. Now you can’t,” Payton said. “There is no outlet. … There is no place to even reconnect with humanity.”
As the uncertain and uncharted times continue throughout the community, nation and world, Payton reminisces back to his 21 years as a pastor when he helped countless families through the darkest of times.
“When I used to do funerals, especially of young children or something like that, I would always just take the rest of the day off and just try to decompress from the tragedy,” he said. “This is the same feeling. It’s the same emotion.”