Armstrong: Dallas got duped, and it’s our fault

“Find a fool, bump his head!” This was my grandma’s response to me the first time I ran to her about getting duped by a guy selling iPads at a gas station. The perceived “iPad” was actually a box of rocks in an iPad package, and as a broke college student I couldn’t be more furious at my grandma’s nonchalant response, but it taught me a valuable lesson.
Dallas has a history of expecting to get a shiny new thing but instead getting a box of rocks, and we’re to blame. In fact, we’ll continue this cycle until we do something about it. The situation around T.C. Broadnax, our former city manager, and his migration from Dallas to Austin is another case of Dallas getting duped.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, here’s a high-level recap.
In December 2016, the Dallas City Council unanimously voted Broadnax in as our city manager. I remember the council being impressed by his intentionality and plan to shape things up at City Hall.
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At first, everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. He brought with him a can-do attitude, five new assistant directors and a firm expectation for staff to perform or be shown the door — an expectation often missing from municipal government.
Even better, for once our city’s top two officials seemed to have a perfect balance. Mayor Mike Rawlings brought a clear vision with an ability to get people to follow. Broadnax brought an aggressive “can-do” attitude about the business and basics — an attitude that we hadn’t recently seen in that seat.
By 2019, the vision left and the dynamics around the horseshoe changed, especially the balance between the mayor and city manager. The excellence that was promised by Broadnax was stomped out by a battle of egos, and the city suffered.
Big wins like the racial equity audit, transportation plan and comprehensive housing plan were all overshadowed by permit delays, a decline of basic city services and major data losses without communication to council. By 2022, the writing was on the wall that Broadnax was on his way out the door, eventually.
Now, Broadnax has left his post in Dallas for the same seat in Austin. How he left caused a stir, as it should.
In what seems to be a carefully crafted exit strategy, Broadnax convinced a few council members to convince other council members to sign off on a memo requesting a resignation, citing unresolved tension between him and the mayor. The request for resignation triggered a $400,000-plus severance and, a few weeks later, Dallas learned that Broadnax was a finalist for the job of Austin city manager, and later awarded that post. Broadnax got a golden parachute that lands him in a golden chair, and Dallas got a box of rocks.
It’s a finesse that seems to more than flirt with the ethics line, and possibly worse. If council members who signed the memo coordinated their actions with a “walking quorum,” they may have violated the Open Meetings Act. There’s also a possibility that Broadnax had already secured the golden chair in Austin and figured out a plan to cash in on his way out. Maybe he felt as if he was owed that for his reputational losses over the past three years. The way I see it, he saw a fool and bumped its head and now Dallas has a box of rocks for the price tag of $423,264.
The Dallas Morning News editorial board has called for an investigation, and Mayor Eric Johnson has asked the city attorney to look into the matter.
There’s nothing wrong with calling for an investigation, but while we’re investigating if lines of ethics were crossed, let’s also do an assessment on how we got duped. The assessment could be a roadmap for the first few things our new city manager should focus on fixing.
Instead of wasting time and more taxpayer resources attempting to find illegality in a case where there’s a slight chance it exists, we should focus on creating more efficiencies in how we do business at City Hall, and hiring a leader different from what we’ve had before. Inefficiencies at city hall are a leading cause as to why developers are running north, and companies too.
We can sit with our tails tucked about being duped, or we can learn from this situation. How many boxes of rocks do we have to collect before we realize the problem is us? The bigger story here is how sloppily City Hall operates, not the people who take advantage of it.
Council should take this box of rocks and build on it to assure our next city manager is exactly what our city needs and what our residents deserve. As someone who does business with the city and has paid for its ineffectiveness, emotionally and financially, here are a few qualities that I’m looking for:
Someone who knows how to run a company and has a successful track record of doing so.
Dallas has a strong city manager form of government, which means that the person who takes that seat will be the CEO of a $4.6 billion organization. While cities are municipalities and considered public entities, our City Hall should be run like a corporation and by someone with experience to do so.
Someone who can develop an equitable vision for southern Dallas.
While the north of the city is landlocked, southern Dallas is the key to our city’s future. We must be aggressive about building that area of the city in an equitable way with those who are already doing the work.
Processes, processes, processes.
The new city manager must be able to create a plan in the first 100 days for how to streamline processes for basic city services and especially real estate projects, where time is money. Currently, it takes the greater part of three months to get a lien subordination out the door at City Hall, and an additional three months for development agreements to be crafted.
A master at collective collaboration.
If we want to be competitive, we must realize that we can’t solve our issues alone because our issues are intersectoral. For example, housing and homelessness is as much an issue for Dallas ISD and the Dallas Commission on Disabilities as it is for the Dallas Housing Authority.
Someone who will leave the ivory tower and be personable with their real bosses, the residents of Dallas.
The last lesson that Broadnax taught us is that our own inefficiencies make us vulnerable to being duped even by those we’ve hired to run and lead our city. Let’s be smart in our next hire.
CORRECTION, June 10, 5:00pm: A previous version of this essay misstated the law that prohibits walking quorums. That is the Open Meetings Act.
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