The Dallas city manager search has unspooled in the chaotic style we’ve come to expect from this City Council. There was the ho-hum recruitment brochure draft featuring the wrong skyline. There was the council civil war over the timeline of the search and the flow of information about candidates. And nothing says “we’ve got our act together” like eleventh-hour candidate interviews the day before Christmas Eve.

When two original semifinalists and a former Dallas city official dropped out of the race, no one was surprised.

We wish the next city manager the best of luck because no amount of talent and hard work can overcome a fundamental flaw of this search, and that is the lack of formal, measurable goals by the City Council. Our city is about to hire its CEO, but its board of directors has no metrics to set expectations or hold that person accountable for the most important job in Dallas.

If you want to understand how dysfunctional the situation is, start with the fact that the council’s appointees — the city manager, city attorney, city secretary and city auditor — haven’t had a performance review in more than two years. Our last city manager, T.C. Broadnax, had his last evaluation in August 2022. He left in May 2024. Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert, the front-runner for the job, hasn’t had an evaluation since her appointment last spring.

The council has hired a consultant over the years to help conduct the evaluations of its appointees. But no consultant can fix this council’s main problem, and that is its inability to come together to develop a consensus around four or five priorities and the metrics to measure progress in those areas.

Even when performance reviews for council appointees were happening, the process was broken. The council’s consultant called council members individually to solicit feedback, with the consultant identifying “themes” shared verbally with the council, and with no particular comments attributed to specific people, according to a 2022 memorandum from Management Partners, the firm hired to do the work. The city manager and other appointees were “invited” to prepare a report on their accomplishments and goals for next year, with the potential for “refinements” based on council input.

There was no written report from the performance evaluation, other than any goals reports produced by the appointees.

It’s a shockingly wishy-washy approach to evaluating an employee, let alone a C-suite executive.

And don’t expect even a veneer of transparency for taxpayers. Last year, we requested Broadnax’s goal reports and were told by the city that there were no responsive records, only to hear a council member remind her colleagues last week that Broadnax produced a memo with his goals after his last performance review in 2022. City staff failed to release this memo in response to our request. Such a document should be public under the Texas Public Information Act.

Now, on the brink of hiring its next city manager, the council is panicking about the fact that it hasn’t evaluated its council appointees in a long time and that it has no measurable goals for any of them. The council committee whose job it is to codify the annual review process can’t seem to agree on how to move forward.

Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins chairs the committee. In a December meeting, he led a discussion on next steps to resume performance reviews of council appointees. Council members learned that their previous consulting firm, Management Partners, had been acquired by Baker Tilly, the company that is leading the messy city manager search. But the woman who had worked closely with the council on previous performance reviews was no longer associated with either company.

The committee gave city staff mixed signals on how to proceed. Some council members said they wanted to continue working with the previous consultant. Others asked to hear from Baker Tilly. Some said they were dissatisfied with the previous consultant or concerned about Baker Tilly and wanted to hear from other vendors. Council members said to move quickly.

By the time the council committee picked the conversation back up this month, confusion reigned. Baker Tilly prepared a presentation that described a performance review process very similar to what the council had with its previous partner. Atkins indicated that the council was moving forward with Baker Tilly using an existing contract, and other committee members pushed back. Meanwhile, an assistant city manager and an assistant human resources director couldn’t answer a council member’s simple question about when the council appointees were last evaluated.

“Yes, we are overdue for these reviews, but I think that they should be pursued seriously with the appropriate time periods involved,” said council member Paul Ridley. “I don’t think we should out of convenience select someone who is doing other work for the city at the present time.”

Council member Jesse Moreno asked whether Baker Tilly would have a conflict of interest in facilitating the performance review of an executive the firm helped hire. A representative tried to assuage Moreno, but he is right to bring that up, given that Baker Tilly would be required to conduct a new search at no cost to Dallas if the city manager doesn’t last a year. Council members should be skeptical. (Keep in mind it was Baker Tilly that produced the hiring brochure for Dallas city manager. The cover photo was a shining image of the Houston skyline.)

The council now seems poised to consider other consultants for the performance evaluations. Council members should do their due diligence instead of repeating their sloppiness for the sake of comfort.

Hire a consultant, if you must, to moderate the conversation or offer pointers, but a management firm can’t do the hard work for you.

Outgoing council member Jaynie Schultz said it best: “This problem is ours as a council. We have not done our work. And so we can try spending all of our time diverting all the problem and the blame on Baker Tilly. … The delay is us, 100% us.”

The council’s job is not to run the city but to set clear, measurable expectations for the people it hires to do that. It’s telling that council members have relied on a consultant to remind them to perform a fundamental duty.

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