Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson spoke with The Dallas Express in an exclusive interview to discuss the hiring process and contract for new City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert.
Mayor Johnson said the lengthy hiring process was meant to find the best candidate available and that Tolbert underwent an “11-month interview” during her time as the interim city manager.
“I didn’t think that she got a big leg up in my mind for having been here a long time. Because I do think there are some real problems with how we’ve done things around here. What did it for me, and I can speak very clearly to this in terms of what was important, was she, by the virtue of how long the process took, which is neither good nor bad, it’s just how long it took, she found herself in an 11-month interview with me without knowing she was going to be in one,” he explained.
“So we had to work together for 11 months. So, I actually got to see what it would be like to work with her. It wasn’t theoretical.”
City Council Member Kathy Stewart of District 10 followed up on Mayor Johnson’s statement and said the candidate search was incredibly thorough.
“We talked to people who either had worked in or were working in a lot of different cities. You know, we were talking to people who worked in Philadelphia, and Atlanta, and Sacramento, and Grand Rapids. A lot of different perspectives. And there was this very similar thread of bureaucrat, how they’ve been trained on strategic planning and budget and all of that,” Stewart said.
“When I would listen to them, what struck me about Kim over and over again was her energy and that she’s an extrovert. And she’s willing to collaborate and sit down and work with people,” Stewart added.
Mayor Johnson said that he “would have been the first person to be ready to break with T.C. Broadnax’s wingman” when the process began because he “did not like the way he [Broadnax] handled that role.”
Many of these issues revolved around the lack of communication between Broadnax and Mayor Johnson, with the mayor saying that Broadnax would purposely inform him about decisions at the last minute.
“There’s no asking what we should do. There’s no checking in with the chief elected official in the city, the only citywide elected official in the city, asking what do you think the voters of the city elected you and this council to achieve,” stated the mayor to The Dallas Express.
“Kim Tolbert, despite having worked with TC Broadnax, didn’t operate like that at all for a whole year. She had a year to let her guard down and show me TC Broadnax-like tendencies, and it never happened.”
The communication issues between the mayor, city council members, and the previous city manager became a major topic of conversation. These issues resulted in communication and transparency becoming components of the search, especially in keeping city residents informed.
“Even though we hire the city manager, we still have an obligation to make sure the public knows who we’re hiring,” explained Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins, who led the search through the Ad Hoc Committee for Administrative Affairs.
Mayor Johnson further discussed how he learned from his time with Broadnax and said that the contract the former city manager signed with the city was a “Terrible contract from the city’s perspective.”
According to the mayor, Broadnax “clearly had another job lined up with Austin” when he left Dallas and should not have received the $450,000 severance payment.
“He clearly was outside of any reasonable period of job security that you want to give someone through this type of provision, being in his fifth year, which is basically the average tenure of a city manager. So, the idea that at that point he needed to be paid a severance call is already a bad deal, but that’s in the contract.”
The new contract Tolbert signed with the city was meant to address these issues. Mayor Johnson stated that a few misconceptions about the agreement existed when it was first mentioned in January.
The biggest misconceptions addressed during this discussion concerned the alleged two-year severance pay. Johnson said the contract includes a mechanism that is “quite elegant and quite well thought out.”
“Because in a nutshell, the way the mechanism works is that if Kim Tolbert, the new city manager, is terminated by an official act of the city council, meaning an actual vote of the council, not a suggestion, and it happens any time between now and the day she could retire, which is two years from now, we would pay the remaining vacation time after we’ve already deducted the vacation time she’s already earned,” said the mayor.
As a result, Mayor Johnson said, “the value of that severance diminished every single day” from the moment Tolbert became the permanent city manager and “goes to zero” when Tolbert becomes eligible for retirement on February 8, 2027.