That’s the message Mayor Eric Johnson sent Monday morning to City Manager T.C. Broadnax about the mess that the city’s construction-permitting office has become — an operation so broken that it increasingly threatens Dallas’ economic future.
In his own effort to get the job done, Johnson has appointed City Council member Paula Blackmon to get to the bottom of what’s wrong in the development services department.
Responsibility for this office, like all the day-to-day operations in the city, squarely rests with Broadnax. Yet for almost two years, he and his team have been unable to fix its myriad shortcomings, most significantly the ability to issue permits in a timely manner.
“I’ve had enough,” Johnson said when he revealed his plans to me over the weekend. “This isn’t putting a person on Jupiter. This is something other cities do well. Just look up the tollway.”
As surrounding North Texas boomtowns notch big wins, Dallas keeps fumbling the ball with its Byzantine operation. Our permitting office has become the single biggest impediment to growing both economic development and the city’s tax base.
Even before the pandemic, the operation was no model of efficiency. Then, when COVID-19 pushed staff to remote work — and onto a new online system no one was trained to use — the wheels came completely off.
The ensuing delays have tempted companies initially keen on a Dallas address to look elsewhere. They’ve left developers vowing never to take another chance on our city. Businesses and homeowners wanting to do even basic work are at their wits’ end.
For every three months of permitting delays, more than $31 million is lost in the overall economy, including $9 million in lost revenue for the city, according to the Dallas-based Real Estate Council.
Johnson’s move, outlined in an email sent to his colleagues and the city manager Monday morning, feels like a significant moment in the relationship between Broadnax and the City Council.
Under our city manager system of government, day-to-day management of Dallas City Hall is Broadnax’s job. The Mayor’s Working Group on Permitting inserts Blackmon directly into that mix.
The working group will research solutions, monitor progress, hold staff accountable, break down silos in city government and return to the City Council with any action that needs its approval.
Broadnax told me Monday that his team will work with the Blackmon-led group, “but this won’t change what we are already doing — trying to resolve as many of these problems as possible, including those that have lasted through multiple administrations.”
Citing a soon-to-be-released efficiency study that the City Council greenlighted in April, Broadnax said he doesn’t shy away from enlisting outside professional help to analyze and come up with best-in-class ideas. He expects the upcoming study will offer a good road map of recommendations that he can take to council and seek needed resources.
“At the end of the day, the responsibility rests with me as the city manager to resolve this problem, and I will resolve it,” he said during our interview at City Hall.
Johnson and various City Council members — both in public and in private — have made clear to Broadnax since 2020 that the dysfunction in the permitting office had to stop. The city manager told me he’s heard those calls for action, as well as the voices of builders and residents, loud and clear.
But working on the problem and solving the problem are two entirely different things. If Broadnax didn’t want his board of directors butting in, he needed to get better fixes in place months ago — not just find ways to keep the department on life support.
When I asked Johnson how concerned he is about wading into Broadnax’s domain, he said, “You know what I’m more worried about than that? Losing more business to Frisco and the other suburbs that do this stuff so much better than us.”
Blackmon is a great choice for this fix-it mission. She has deep experience from permitting-office work she did as a member of former Mayor Tom Leppert’s office. Blackmon is also a bulldog — she will put the right people in the room, drill as deep as necessary and not stop until she solves the problem.
She did just that late last year as she drove Johnson’s ethics reform package to unanimous approval by the City Council.
Blackmon told me Saturday that she’s glad Johnson has jumped on the permitting problems and asked her to help. “It’s really disappointing that our administration has not seen the urgency,” she said. “Maybe they have, but they haven’t conveyed that.”
The solution starts with being “honest and truthful with what the problem is,” she said. “I’m just disappointed with what’s happened and not happened so far from management.”
Johnson told me Blackmon not only knows the players both inside and outside City Hall, “she’s not mesmerized by the bureaucracy like I worry others are.”
The mayor’s email outlining Blackmon’s role noted that, while people like Will Mundinger, a local industry expert brought in to help fix permitting problems last year, are working hard, “we have not seen the operational and systemic change that is needed, and problems have persisted.”
Johnson began to focus on the permitting bottleneck in 2020. He compared the approach he’s taken to how a symphony conductor uses his baton — smooth and gentle at some points and bold and dramatic at others.
Abiding by our city manager form of government, Johnson made clear that a fix was necessary. In the many months that he and council members have pressed for fixes, they also have never denied any of the budget or resource items that Broadnax sought for this issue.
Now Johnson said it’s time to use his director’s baton more dramatically as he and Blackmon step into Broadnax’s turf.
“I didn’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to take this from the city manager,’” Johnson said. “We’ve done everything we can do as a council from a policy standpoint.”
In just the last few months, Johnson said, he’s received a cascade of hundreds of complaints from discouraged developers and ordinary citizens who can’t get their projects off the ground.
Johnson said it’s time he did more than try to explain that permitting is under the purview of Broadnax and promise constituents that “the city manager is working on it.”
Like Johnson, Blackmon has heard the desperation not just in the voices of big-project developers but also from those trying to do nonprofit work, to build parks or school campuses or even to expand their home enough to accommodate office workspace.
Blackmon told me she expects to focus on policy, budget, communication and procedures — especially the bureaucratic red tape strangling the system. “I’m not going to let manufactured problems of any sort stand in the way of us fixing this,” she told me.
Blackmon’s right-hand in this work will be Dallas consultant Macey Small Davis, whose experience includes serving as executive vice president of government affairs for the Real Estate Council.
Davis was part of the working group that made recommendations for permitting improvements during Leppert’s term. In recent years, Blackmon told me, some of those were dismantled.
Mundinger, who came on board in August, has made some progress. The online permitting system is getting an overhaul, and a strategy is in place to get some of the whopping 33 department vacancies filled.
In a Feb. 1 memo from Broadnax on organizational changes, he established a Project Development/Delivery Division to “coordinate activities between Development Services and other departments that impact development and redevelopment efforts.”
My reporting on the permitting office problem indicates a real solution won’t just unclog the pipes but replace them as necessary — and figure out whether they even lead to the right spots.
Johnson and Blackmon know their move pushes the boundaries of how things normally are done at Dallas City Hall. But they aren’t afraid of the hot seat — or of being held accountable.
“I’ll deal with whatever I have to deal with regarding boundaries, but we’ve got to get this fixed,” Johnson told me. “We can’t allow it to continue, so we’re stepping in.”
