After seven years as the city’s chief executive, T.C. Broadnax has resigned. The official story is that a majority of the City Council more or less said they would vote to fire him. Mayor Eric Johnson tried and failed to punt the city manager out of I.M. Pei’s leaky City Hall in 2022, and Broadnax walked away from that dustup proclaiming that he would leave if he ever lost the support of his bosses.

Whether he was playing his eight votes for a contractual clause that guaranteed 12 months of severance or if he had just had enough, the most important man at 1500 Marilla will be gone after June 3. The news release, which was drafted by six City Council members, blamed Broadnax's departure on his acrid relationship with the mayor. It had grown so toxic, so unproductive, that it “hindered the realization of our city’s full potential.”

The two men rarely, if ever, met. In Dallas’ form of government, the city manager is essentially the CEO. He plans and oversees a $4.6 billion budget and more than 14,000 employees. The mayor creates and assigns committees and runs Council meetings, in addition to organizing volunteer-led task forces and other adjacent initiatives. But he is one vote of 15, and the city manager follows the will of the Council as a whole.

Even recent planning for the $1.25 billion bond was marred by their inability to communicate. The mayor created a volunteer-led task force to make recommendations on how to spend the money it planned to borrow, but the city manager prioritized the analysis of his staff. The mayor was absent when the community task force presented its report, which caused more confusion about what set of numbers the City Council should be working from.

Most people seem to agree that seven years is a long time to run a city. Broadnax was Dallas’ first outside hire in decades, perhaps since the 1960s, which will likely be a positive for recruitment. His hiring signals that the city is at least willing to consider candidates from other places. 

We are in rare air: Dallas is the ninth largest city in America and the third-largest city with a council-manager form of government (weak mayor, basically). This should be appealing to the “unicorn,” as former Mayor Mike Rawlings called it, who has the resume to qualify for the job.

Austin and El Paso, which also have council-manager governments, have openings for their top jobs. So competition will be stiff. Some on Council have been semi-privately floating the idea to slow the search to wait out Johnson’s second term, believing that he is not at war with the person but with the position. There are no guarantees he plays nice with Broadnax’s successor.

But this is all politics. How does the city manager affect the 1.3 million people who call Dallas home? Broadnax had highs and lows; it’s impossible to avoid failures with so much under his purview. Hiring and defending U. Reneé Hall as police chief, especially after she lied about her officers spraying chemicals on protesters, is part of his story. The city has known for decades that its permitting process was broken, but it fully collapsed under his watch. Things seem to be improving, but it is still difficult and arduous to get permission to build things in Dallas. Likewise, the city’s IT department made a giant mistake by deleting millions of police case files during what should have been a routine server migration.

He had his wins, too. The city is financially stable and the budgets have been balanced. In awarding Dallas an A1 rating, Moody’s Investors Service cited its “conservative budgeting and revenue growth.” Broadnax oversaw early planning for large-scale strategic changes around housing, land use, equitable investments, and the climate.

In many ways, Broadnax’s time in Dallas felt like a bridge. He was the outsider candidate brought in to shake things up and set a new path. Some of the processes that broke under his tenure had been open secrets at City Hall for years. His relationship with the mayor made it difficult to coalesce around solutions, and he was often prickly when challenged.

But his successor will walk through the doors of a very different City Hall than what Broadnax found.

But in the near-term, we have a City Council and a mayor that cannot even agree on the process to find his replacement. We should probably start there.