In 2013, the city of Dallas paid a search firm $40,800 to find qualified candidates to run the city. The result: we got A.C. Gonzalez, promoted from within City Hall. He was a horrible hire. But that won’t affect his fat, sweet pension when he steps down, in January. This time around, the city is paying a search firm $30,000 to assemble a list of candidates for the job. Things are tight around here. We’ve got streets that need repairing. The city might be on the hook for a bailout of the cop and firefighter pension. I guess that’s why it was decided we should save the $10,800, which is 0.000009 percent of the city’s $1.2 billion budget. To put that in perspective, if you made $50,000 a year, that would be like spending 45 cents.
Whatever. That’s math. It’s boring. Let’s talk about the rivalry between Austin and Dallas. Austin, with about 375,000 fewer people than Dallas, will likely spend $90,000 searching for its next city manager. At the very least, it is going to spend $40,000.
For more than three decades, Dallas city managers have been promoted from within City Hall. It’s time for a change. That can’t happen without spending what it takes to conduct an actual search. The one we’re paying pennies for is a sham.
