The majority of Dallas City Council members skip meetings called by colleagues seeking to speed up city manager’s search

The meeting called by three city council members Monday morning conflicted with a committee meeting on the search in the afternoon.

Author: Rachel Snyder

DALLAS — A majority of the Dallas City Council didn’t show up for a meeting called by three of their colleagues who are seeking to speed up the city manager search.

Dallas city council members Paula Blackmon, Gay Donnell Willis, and Jaynie Schultz called the special city council meeting Monday morning after they said last week that they wanted to speed up the search after the timeline for making an offer passed the initially proposed one of this fall.

Only Blackmon, Willis, Schultz, Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Adam Bazaldua, and city council member Omar Narvaez attended the Monday morning meeting, though – not enough for a quorum.

“It was our goal to bring the body together and be able to discuss this very important hire for the CEO of the ninth largest city in America and move the process forward. There have been some concerns about the lagging process and the timeline that we just received that had three and a half months added to it,” Willis said.

She said they hoped to bring three candidates to the council for interviews.

“The special called meeting scheduled for this morning to interview candidates and officially hire a city manager failed to make a quorum. As city council members, our first responsibility is to show up when called,” Bazaldua said in a statement. ‘Over the past few weeks, much has been said about processes and procedures, yet when a meeting is scheduled, not enough members attend to move forward. This neglect disregards the responsibilities entrusted to us by the city charter and undermines the process of our government.”

Monday’s meeting conflicted with a city council ad hoc committee on administrative affairs meeting focused on the city manager search at 1 p.m. Monday.

The afternoon meeting happened mostly in executive session — and afterward, Chair Tennell Atkins did not acknowledge criticism from the five councilmembers who attended the special called meeting earlier in the day.

“I was not here; I will not comment,” Atkins repeated when pressed by reporters before walking away.

He would not say why he did not attend the morning meeting, which appeared to be properly called in accordance with the city charter.  Atkins said his ad hoc committee on administrative affairs will meet to interview candidates virtually on December 23 — but he declined to say which candidates or how many they would invite for interview.

The meetings come after some city council members last week said they were concerned about the number of city manager candidates the city received and wished they could have seen more resumes from among the 50 applicants before the four semifinalists were released last month.

“I was very disappointed to see only four brought forward. It’s not what we expected when you proposed and it, looking at them, it seems like it should have been a larger pool,” said Dallas city council member Cara Mendelsohn last week. “Jumping ahead to four is a shortcut.”

The four semifinalists released Nov. 18 were current interim city manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert; William Johnson, who’s an assistant city manager in Fort Worth; Mark Washington, city manager in Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Zachary Williams, a county manager in Georgia.

On Dec. 17 Tolbert was endorsed by the Dallas Fire Association and the Black Fire Fighters Association of Dallas.

“Over the past seven months, Ms. Tolbert has led with clarity, transparency, and an unwavering commitment to public safety and the well-being of Dallas residents,” Dallas Fire Fighters Assoc. said in a statement.

Baker Tilly, the firm conducting the city manager search for the city, said the city received 50 applicants. Among the concerns Art Davis with Baker Tilley said they’d received from applicants was about the results of the passage of Dallas city charter amendments in November. Among the most controversial of those were two ballot propositions that passed backed by Dallas HERO, including one that requires the city to hire 900 more police officers and allocate half of the city’s new revenue to improving police and fire pensions and another that makes it easier for residents to sue the city.

In addition to the work of overseeing the city’s nearly $5 billion budget, police and fire department and more, the next city manager will have to hire a new police chief to replace Eddie Garcia, who retired from law enforcement earlier this year to take a city administration role in Austin. Garcia followed former Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax to Austin. Broadnax and Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson had a sometimes strained relationship before Broadnax moved to become Austin’s city manager earlier this year.