Mark McDaniel, you’ll recall, was the odds-on favorite to be named Dallas’ city manager when A.C. Gonzalez announced he was retiring. Then, lo, the City Council surprised everyone but T.C. Broadnax when it instead hired T.C. Broadnax. With Broadnax “taking care of business,” that put McDaniel in a tough spot. As he told the Amarillo Globe-News in January, when he was a candidate for that city’s manager position, “[I]t’s really hard to take second fiddle and drive from the back seat.” Not as hard as it might be to play a tuba in the back seat while trying to drive, but his point was taken. Imagine every meeting with your boss playing out with the subtext that you wanted his job and didn’t get it. The Amarillo gig, by the way, according to numbers published last year by the Texas City Management Association, would have paid him somewhere around $250,735, a small raise. As an assistant city manager in Dallas, McDaniel was making $248,063.
Which brings us to the news that McDaniel has decided to become the city manager in Kerrville, a Hill Country town with a population of about 23,000. The City Council there has not yet approved his salary, but according again to the Texas City Management Association, the job pays something like $147,900, meaning McDaniel will take a $100,163 pay cut. Money isn’t everything, but it is something. You could occupy the driver’s seat and be playing lead guitar for U2, and $100,163 would still feel like a chunk of change.
A few short months ago, McDaniel was ready to take on the major challenges presented by the ninth largest city in America. Now, instead, he’s headed to Kerrville, a small city that, I hasten to add, has just scored a major coup. From the Dallas perspective, though, it seems like an odd move.
“I’ve got 28 years in the Texas Municipal Retirement System,” McDaniel told me this morning. “I’ve been eligible to retire for a while. So I’m going to go ahead and take an early retirement and start a second career in local government and return to the role of city manager. [Ed: before coming to Dallas, he was Tyler’s city manager.] A big draw, quite frankly, is that my wife and I have aging parents that are 20 minutes away from Kerrville, out in the country. The Hill Country has always been home base for us, as we’ve moved around the state. It’s really like coming home in a lot of ways.”
I told him it seemed to me like he must have had a huge change of heart. First he wanted to run Dallas; then he decided to half-retire in Kerrville. I asked when and how that change happened.
“It’s actually not [a change of heart],” he said. “Because it’s returning to the role of city manager. That was a big draw. And while Kerrville is certainly a smaller community, it’s a regional hub for that part of the Hill Country. So it’s a full-service city with all the challenges that go with that, lots of issues and opportunities that match up with my experience over the years. I see it as really a unique opportunity for me.”
So good for Mark McDaniel. And good for Kerrville. Also, too, it seems, good for the city of Dallas.
