Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax, under fire over his response to criticism of the city’s beleaguered construction permitting process, could face disciplinary action or be fired during a hastily called council meeting.
Mayor Eric Johnson and three council members have separately asked that the closed session meeting take place on Wednesday, which is typically a day of staff briefings. The mayor’s memo sent Friday says the purpose of the special called meeting is to “discuss and evaluate the performance and employment of City Manager T.C. Broadnax.”
If the council comes to an agreement in executive session, the 15-member body could return to open session and adjourn or vote to fire the city’s top executive.
Johnson said in a statement Friday that he believes Broadnax should be fired.
“Several of my duly elected colleagues on the Dallas City Council have made it clear in recent days that they also believe it is time for a change,” the mayor said. “We are ready to move forward and discuss how best to build for the future of our great city and its amazing people, and that is why I have placed the item on the City Council’s agenda for next week.”
Broadnax said in a statement Friday he was proud of his record in Dallas and that he intends to continue working to improve the lives of residents.
”Periodic performance review is critical to me and all city employees to demonstrate progress and ensure transparency for our residents, taxpayers, and stakeholders,” he said.
He was at a Texas City Management Association conference at a Hyatt Regency resort and spa in Cedar Creek, near Austin. According to the association’s website, the theme for this year’s conference is “Seeing the Forest for the Trees.”
Council members Gay Donnell Willis, Paula Blackmon and Cara Mendelsohn were the other elected officials calling for the review.
“It’s the council’s job to hold our direct reports accountable. That’s our role,” said Donnell Willis. “There’s been a lot of frustration on council and with our residents with regard to this role. It’s right to move quickly rather than let this linger. So it’s time to bring this forward so we’re going to have a discussion about this Wednesday.”
Mendelsohn said “significant performance issues” led to her electing to sign onto the memo. She and Blackmon cited problems with city offices that oversee housing, transportation, public works, information technology and building permitting among areas of concern.
“There’s no intellectual honesty to say, ‘Hey, we can do a better job,’” said Blackmon, who was appointed earlier this year by Johnson as the head of a work group to find solutions to monthslong delays in issuing permits. “There’s just gaslighting and deflection.”
She said she wants more accountability and more positive results to reoccurring city problems.
“I feel that he has failed in that area,” Blackmon said.
But four council members — Carolyn King Arnold, Jaime Resendez, Omar Narvaez and Paul Ridley — told The Dallas Morning News that they believe Broadnax should keep his job, saying they feel that while the permitting office is the biggest blemish on his Dallas resume, progress is being made. Narvaez and Ridley noted the performance review process for Broadnax began June 3 and an executive session to discuss his evaluation is already set for June 23.
Arnold said she believes firing Broadnax “is not in the best interest of this city.” She cited the city manager’s office preparing the upcoming budget and a need for stability as Dallas continues to tackle systemic issues.
“But we’re also coming up on campaign season, so this is an opportunity for folks to get out front and center for headlines,” she said, referring to elections next year where all 14 seats on the council and the mayor’s position will be up for grabs. “I’m hoping and praying that clearer and more mature minds will be able to step up. And I’m going to ask the public to support us as we try to build a better, stronger Dallas.”
Mendelsohn said “significant performance issues” led to her electing to sign onto the memo. She and Blackmon cited problems with city offices that oversee housing, transportation, public works, information technology and building permitting among areas of concern.
“There’s no intellectual honesty to say, ‘Hey, we can do a better job,’” said Blackmon, who was appointed earlier this year by Johnson as the head of a work group to find solutions to monthslong delays in issuing permits. “There’s just gaslighting and deflection.”
She said she wants more accountability and more positive results to reoccurring city problems.
“I feel that he has failed in that area,” Blackmon said.
Broadnax, 53, oversees the day-to-day operations of the ninth largest city in the country, with around 13,000 employees and more than 40 departments. The city’s budget has ballooned from around $3.1 billion when he arrived in 2017 to nearly $4.4 billion this year, largely buoyed by federal coronavirus relief money.
He began to face waning support on the council after a meeting last month where he pledged to fix the commercial and residential building permitting system, but staunchly defended past efforts to do so.
City staffers promised many issues would be fixed within nine months. But a frustrated Broadnax indicated he believed the city’s elected leaders, developers and the media were amplifying the problems. He chalked up the criticism over the slow pace of the city’s permitting office to bad press.
At the May 18 meeting, Broadnax appeared to dismiss the consequences of the slow permitting process, disputing an estimate by Linda McMahon, who leads the North Texas commercial real estate advocacy group The Real Estate Council, that $31 million of tax revenue is lost for every three months of permitting delays by the city.
His almost six-year tenure has been hampered by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and he appears to have lost support from the mayor and some council members who feel he did not act urgently enough to fix long-running city issues, some of which predated his arrival in 2017.
Broadnax has been under pressure to improve basic city services such as the 911 emergency call system, where residents encounter frequent delays, and the pickup of trash and recycling. In 2020, tensions between the city manager and some elected officials were so high that he had to fend off attempts from Mayor Eric Johnson to cut his more than $400,000 salary.
On his watch, Dallas officials created citywide plans that had never existed before on topics like housing, transportation and economic development. But audits and other reviews of city departments routinely uncovered little to no specific plans to address such pressing issues as road repairs, data security and affordable housing.
His time on the job started with early success in crafting a $1.05 billion bond package meant to fix city infrastructure such as crumbling streets, creating city offices dedicated to tackling homelessness, transportation and animal services, and helping navigate the city through a police and fire pension system crisis.
More recently, Broadnax admitted to not taking early warnings seriously that an IT employee had deleted millions of police files. He said the gravity of the issue didn’t dawn on him until months later, when the Dallas County District Attorney’s office got wind that evidence could be missing from criminal cases.
In February, Johnson stepped into the permitting controversy and formed the independent workgroup to come up with ways to streamline the city’s building permitting process amid continued complaints. Builders wait an average of four months to get a commercial building permit.
At the May 18 City Council meeting, the co-chairs of the permitting workgroup, council member Blackmon and consultant Macey Davis, asked for a public update on plans to address the permitting problem.
“We outstrip every city in this metroplex with the number of permits that come into our system,” Broadnax told the council, saying he’d been pushing for changes to the permitting system since he became city manager. “I know our people are working hard. They’ll continue to work hard.”
Johnson pushed back against notions that the city’s permitting office issues were overblown and questioned what motivation people would have to exaggerate the problem.
“There’s a danger to morale to not give people enough credit in government for the hard work that they do,” he said. “But there’s also a danger to the taxpayers and the folks that we represent when we don’t sufficiently hold people accountable and ask them to perform at the level that our residents and our business community demand.”
Days later at a meeting with The News’ editorial board, Broadnax fine tuned his message: “There is no disconnect from my perspective,” he said, adding of permit processing: “We need to do it better consistently.”
But he defended his low-key style, saying, “I typically don’t use the word ‘crisis’ if everything is solvable,” he said. “There’s much more conversation happening with the media and other people than me.”
“Nobody’s blind,” he said. “I’m the city manager. I get it.”
Retiring U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, didn’t mince words about the drama in her hometown as she weighed into the debate.
“I am well aware of the dissatisfaction from business owners in the Fair Park and South Dallas communities who feel that the city does not hear their voices,” the congresswoman said. “Let me be clear: unresponsiveness from our city manager is unacceptable.”
Staff writer Sharon Grigsby contributed to this report.
