From the outside looking in, Plano is doing great.

There are shining high rises along the toll road, a hot property in Legacy West and the prospect of booming growth all around.

Here's the problem: This is still a place where people came to get away from shining high rises and hot properties and the prospect of booming growth.

Get inside Plano and you find a city that is politically paralyzed, torn in a deep and ugly way between the past and the future — with no clear direction of where it will go and the possibility that opportunities will pass it by.

Ron Kelley, the city’s mayor pro tem, would rather discuss just about anything other than the nasty political struggle hurting his city. Still, he patiently answers question after question about the fight threatening to tear Plano apart — even as neighboring cities lick their chops over economic opportunities that might come their way courtesy of Plano's troubles.

Real change is at stake. Take the much-delayed Envision Oak Point project, designed to improve eastern pockets of the U.S. 75 corridor. The plan would build on some of Plano's best assets, for instance, the Oak Point Nature Preserve and the city event center, while lifting up struggling businesses and crafting a plan for undeveloped land.

The mixed-use and residential investment would be a spark for an area badly in need of one, but the increased number of rental units the plan would bring has angered opponents of apartment growth.

But in Plano the fear of leaving a suburban past behind to embrace an urban future has created such deep political turmoil that it threatens moving forward in any direction.

This isn’t Plano’s problem alone. With 80 people a day moving into Collin County, it's a battle that will come to all of the region's boomburbs — from Frisco to Allen to Prosper. Bad luck for Plano, as Dallas' largest northern suburb, it just happens to be first in line thanks to its relatively early economic success. The bogeyman of increased density, with its accomplices — gridlocked traffic and stressed-out infrastructure — has infuriated many residents.

And just mention the word apartments in some places in Plano and you'll feel the tension — and unspoken implications, including suggestions of racism.

Rush-hour traffic backs up on the northbound Dallas North Tollway near Legacy Drive in Plano. (Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer)

Plenty of Plano residents understand an urban future is inevitable and believe the city can have the best of both the suburban and urban lifestyles. But a politically powerful portion would like to turn back the clock.

Kelley, 55, is the man in the middle. He isn’t an automatic vote for those pushing for faster urbanization or for those who would like to remain suburban. Kelley joined the council in 2015 with concerns from taxes to traffic. But he's come to believe that Plano is an incredibly well-run city.

He has lived in Plano for more than two decades. He is deeply conservative. He leads Prestonwood Baptist Church's endowment foundation. Those credentials would seem to give Kelley's point of view standing.

But even Kelley has plenty of critics to the right who'd like to run him and other council members out of town. The loudest of them, led by the uber-conservative group Plano Future, often resort to misinformation and personal attacks.

Scare tactics around urbanization swamp local social media; citizens make nasty comments at council meetings. Mayor Harry LaRosiliere — a leader in urbanizing Plano — has become a flashpoint and is often aggressively targeted with racially tinged comments. Recently, a photo on his Facebook page with his two daughters drew a comment that likened him to Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, even though LaRosiliere is a Republican and Price is a Democrat. The only commonality the comment seemed to point to is that both men are black.

While citizens often cross the line, LaRosiliere hasn't helped matters by arguing with some residents to the point that they feel city government is against them.

In Kelley's mind, all of this is destructive to Plano. "I think everyone needs to take a step back and realize that our city is different today — so is the whole North Texas area — but we are still a great city," he says.

Kelley's right. Density is a fair debate. But the debate can't become uncivil to the point of missing the point. Reasonable people can disagree and still come to reasonable compromises.

But reason is in short supply in Plano these days.

The suburb made national headlines recently for all the wrong reasons — City Council member Tom Harrison's "ban Islam" Facebook post. This kind of thinking isn't limited to Harrison.

Some anti-apartment voices not only fear the number of newcomers but also worry that people moving to Plano are not conservative. "It bothers me when I hear people say, 'We don't want those people from there coming here,'" Kelley says. "I think that's un-American; that's not what Texas is about."

Plano Mayor Pro Tem Ron Kelley (City of Plano)

Given everything that's right in Plano, it's pitiful that folks can’t come together. But the two factions splitting Plano show no signs of that, and Kelley worries that things will get worse before they get better. There is a real possibility the controversies will scare off businesses looking to relocate, as well as quality candidates considering public office.

Kelley has the right idea: Make every decision based on what's best for Plano and how that decision will look 20 years from now.

His heart goes out to still-sleepy suburbs like Celina, just north of the exploding U.S. 380 corridor. He recalls driving through its downtown during a little covered-meal gathering: "I said to my wife, 'Look at those people; they have no idea what's going to hit them.' As that place gets big, they too will go through what we are."

Then Kelley ended on a note that dominated the entire interview: "We just need to stop fighting with one another."

If only it were that easy.