Dallas’ new city manager is already set up for failure

HELP WANTED. New city manager for Dallas, Texas.

The job: Administer a $5 billion budget. Guide more than 13,000 employees. Ensure streets and parks are built and maintained, drinking water is clean, garbage is collected, public libraries are open, neighborhoods are thriving, building permits are issued, fires are put out and residents stay safe.

Exciting challenges: Steer the city through a $4 billion pension shortfall, a contentious land use plan and the redevelopment of a massive convention center downtown.

Your board of directors: 14 City Council members with different priorities and personalities, led by a mayor who is often absent and struggles to get along when present.

Personal requirements: A backbone of steel and skin of leather.

Expectations: Competence, trustworthiness and, most important, public accountability standards.

Wait. Actually, scratch that last part. Sure, this is a CEO-level job with astronomical expectations. But here in Dallas, for a job that could actually make or break the city, accountability is optional.

Candidates for Dallas city manager might ask the Dallas City Council: What are your priorities for me? How will you measure my success?

They’ll get 15 different answers.

That’s because the council, the city’s elected board of directors, has failed in its fundamental duty to set public, measurable goals for the city manager.

That should be shocking, because no serious company would seek a new top executive without clear metrics for success and agreed-upon priorities for how that person should spend his or her time.

If this City Council doesn’t take up the difficult political work of negotiating and shaping a handful of priorities for its next city manager, it will set itself up for another battle of wills like the one it had with former City Manager T.C. Broadnax.

Broadnax benefited greatly from the council’s failure to set performance goals. Much of his tenure in Dallas was a game of divide and conquer, and he played it well.

We learned just how bad things were when we began looking into how the council had measured the prior city manager’s work over the years.

We wanted to know how Broadnax had performed according to the sort of evaluations high-level executives are accustomed to. We were curious how he had measured up to the goals that were set for him and that he set for himself. We wanted to see the feedback that he might have gotten in a performance review of the type that most of us have experienced. So we asked for the paperwork.

Dear reader, there wasn’t any.

No evaluation forms. No written reports of goals or accomplishments. No scores or ratings.

What the city offered was a 2022 memo explaining how the city manager’s performance evaluation usually goes. The city manager is invited to prepare a report of accomplishments and identify goals for the coming year. A consultant interviews council members individually and summarizes their assessments in a closed session with the full council.

Council members we interviewed said their one-on-one sessions with the consultant focused on general feedback rather than data-driven criteria.

This is what accountability looks like for the person with the top job at City Hall. Never mind that city employees down the ladder have evaluation plans.

In fact, the timing of the city manager’s verbal performance review jumped around year to year. The consultant urged a council committee two years ago to establish a time frame so that the council wouldn’t be rushed and so that the city manager could meaningfully prepare.

As far as we know, that didn’t happen. In fact, Broadnax didn’t even have a performance evaluation in 2023, his last full year in Dallas.

Vague and broad

Is it any wonder that Broadnax chafed at questions from reporters and from his own bosses about his performance? He could move the goal posts as he pleased because the council didn’t put anything on paper about its own expectations.

Outsiders searching the internet for clues about Dallas’ priorities might stumble upon Broadnax’s 29-point “100-day plan” after he quieted an attempt to oust him in 2022, or a webpage titled “2023 City Manager’s Top 25 Goals,” or the Dallas 365 dashboard that “tracks our progress on 35 performance measures.” But council members say those measures are outdated.

Where goals were tracked, they were usually marked incomplete. More often, goals had vague targets. It will surprise residents who are deeply unhappy with city services that in the Dallas 365 dashboard the city is almost entirely “on target.” (The exception, public safety, is listed as “caution” even though the mayor touts this as Dallas’ greatest success.)

The problem, again, is that Dallas isn’t really measuring its city manager against clear and important strategic priorities. Many of the listed city goals are focused on department-level work, not broad strategic goals appropriate to a chief executive. And there are so many of them, they amount to microtargets for lower-level problems.

If everything is important, nothing is.

The good news is that this transition period between city managers gives council members time to commit to a set of priorities and metrics. And they only have to look to the Dallas Independent School District for a template on how to do it right.

A better way

The school district oversees 139,000 students, 20,000 employees and a budget of $1.9 billion.

The DISD superintendent has an enormous challenge in educating a population of low-income students. She must manage a massive public debt and construction program. But she has guideposts for what success looks like, and that comes through her board of directors.

Here’s how DISD does it.

First, the board of trustees establishes a set of goals for itself focused on student outcomes. There are only five goals, but they are tangible and meaningful and have deadlines attached. One is that 56% of third graders meet or exceed state standards for math by June 2025. Another is that 67% of graduates are college, career or military ready by the same year.

Each goal has its own set of three to five progress measures, or benchmarks, that let the school board know whether it’s moving in the right direction and at the right pace, such as whether student achievement in district math and reading tests reaches certain levels by the middle of the school year.

The board also agrees on a set of “constraints.” These are guardrails to ensure Dallas ISD doesn’t sacrifice other important criteria, such as student happiness, in pursuit of its academic targets. For example, 68% of students must respond positively to campus climate surveys by the spring.

All of these goals and metrics are documented on the district’s website and in board policy so that they are easy to find. They are crafted with the superintendent and set the foundation of her evaluation form.

“When you don’t do that work, you just jump from fire to fire,” said school board President Joe Carreón, who explained that the board has a formal committee whose only job is to refine the superintendent’s annual evaluation criteria. The full board votes on the final scoring rubric.

The evaluations of school administrators and teachers are confidential under state law, but the annual appraisal instrument that DISD’s board uses to grade Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde is public.

Sixty percent of her grade hinges on the student outcome goals. The rest of her score is determined by her performance on financial management, minding the “constraints” and stakeholder satisfaction. The school board’s perception of the superintendent accounts for only 4 of 100 possible points.

“We’ve removed ourselves emotionally and personally from it,” Carreón said. “It’s just numbers.”

A contrast of contracts

Elizalde’s contract lays out how big a raise she’s eligible for based on her evaluation score. She can also earn up to $100,000 in bonuses for meeting certain academic targets.

Her contract is 28 pages, plus an amendment. Broadnax’s contract was five pages, with zero mentions of evaluation scores and zero indication of what would constitute a satisfactory performance.

We asked experts in public administration about goal-setting. They reinforced what DISD is preaching.

“If people have too many goals, our brains can’t manage that. Our brains are not multitaskers,” said Deborah Kerr, professor of the practice emerita at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She specializes in performance management and measurement.

It’s easy, when you’re constantly marshaling reams of statistics and reports and presentations, to fall into what scholars call the knowing-doing gap. That’s when you perceive talking about a problem as taking action, making it look like you’re doing something when you’re not, Kerr said.

This has been a recurring trap for Dallas city leaders. How many studies does it take to change a light bulb at City Hall?

This city needs direction, and it’s the council’s duty to provide it.

Leading the leaders

Don’t look to the mayor of Dallas for leadership. Council members went off-site Aug. 9 for a retreat to discuss “near-term priorities” and “long-term visioning,” according to a meeting agenda. Mayor Eric Johnson, their presiding officer, didn’t attend. His spokesman didn’t respond to emails.

That’s not unexpected. Dallas is in a leadership crisis because we are in a leadership vacuum. But such vacuums aren’t accidents. They arise from a failure of vision. We cannot have a leader without a destination. And neither the mayor nor the council has given the city a destination.

Until Dallas City Hall has real strategic goals for its city manager, it doesn’t have any way to hold the leader responsible for leading. There is no place to go and, inevitably, no accountability for not getting there.

Before it hires our next city manager, the City Council has to take deep stock of itself and decide what the major strategic priorities should be for that leader and how it will measure success and create accountability. How will it reward excellence? How will it punish failure?

Our city needs the council to achieve consensus and draw a map for the next city manager, with mileposts and timelines.

Because no matter how talented or enthusiastic, that person can’t build or sustain a great city on a foundation of bureaucratese and bromides.

Part of our Leading Dallas series, this editorial explores how the City Council can get better results by revamping the performance review of the city manager.

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