Introduction
Beth Van Duyne (born 1970 or 1971) is an American politician from the state of Texas. She served as mayor of Irving, Texas, from 2011 through 2017. She is a member of the Republican Party.
Early and personal life
Van Duyne was born in upstate New York. In 1986, her family moved to Irving, Texas. She graduated from Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, and Cornell University.
Van Duyne met her husband, Chris "Casey" Wallach, while they attended Cornell. They have two children, and lived in Las Colinas. They co-owned a marketing and communications firm that they ran out of their house. They divorced in 2012.
Political career
Van Duyne became unhappy with Herbert Gears, the Irving City Council member representing her, over how he handled a zoning case in her neighborhood. She ran against Gears in the 2004 election, and won. Gears was elected mayor in 2005. Van Duyne stepped down from the council in 2010, and ran for mayor against Gears in the 2011 election, and won. She defeated Gears in a rematch in the 2014 election.
In 2015, following an article by Breitbart News that made a false allegation that a court in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex followed sharia law, Van Duyne pushed for a vote on a resolution in the Irving City Council that expressed support of a bill in the Texas Legislature seeking to ban sharia law. Also in 2015, when Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim boy, was arrested for bringing a homemade clock, which teachers thought was a bomb, to school, Van Duyne defended the school and the Irving Police Department for their actions. She was named as a co-defendant in a defamation lawsuit initiated by Mohamed's father.Van Duyne was dismissed from the suit,and the entire suit was eventually dismissed.
In February 2017, Van Duyne announced she would not seek a third term as mayor. In May 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Van Duyne as a regional administrator for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), overseeing Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
Following Kenny Marchant's August 2019 announcement that he would not run for reelection to the United States House of Representatives, Van Duyne announced her resignation from HUD so that she could run in the 2020 elections to succeed Marchant in representing Texas's 24th congressional district.