The process for the Dallas City Council to evaluate the performance of top officials — like the city manager and the city attorney — is murky. That despite the fact those officials have an integral role in how Dallas operates.
City officials told the council Wednesday that there is no standard process for setting goals for the city's top officials, inconsistent evaluation criteria and limited stakeholder input.
Some staffers haven’t had a review in years. That includes the City Secretary and the City Auditor, both of whom have not had a performance review since 2022.
If the council doesn’t get a standardized process started — the auditor and the secretary could miss another performance review.
The City Attorney was due for an evaluation in 2024. That has yet to happen.
What’s at stake is communication between the city council and their direct appointees — and possible salary increases for some of them. The city secretary handles records, meeting agendas and council legislation.
The auditor oversees oversight of the departments inside City Hall. And the city attorney dictates the legal path Dallas takes.
Without an evaluation process, how can elected officials gauge how these important roles are working?
The council wasn’t in agreement on how the process should proceed. City staff recommended finding a consultant to implement and conduct the evaluation process.
That recommendation could include a multi-year contract that would see the council’s direct reports getting a “catch-up” evaluation — for the years missed — and a current review.
But the procurement process likely wouldn’t see a consultant hired until June and the actual evaluations happening in October. Some council members said they didn’t want to wait for that.
Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins pushed for moving the process forward — and didn’t want to delay the timeline.
“It’s s shame that we waited this long, but I don’t think we should wait any longer,” Atkins said.
Atkins said he wanted to evaluate two of the council’s direct appointees before he terms out of office in May.
“I feel like…a bad boss that I did not evaluate my employees for two years,” Atkins added. “I hate that someone else who comes in, does not know who they are or the kind of work that they do [because] they have not been evaluated.”
District 12 Council Member Cara Mendelsohn said city staff’s recommendation was “needlessly complicated, time consuming and expensive.”
“I am trying to understand why we can’t have a written evaluation, distributed to the council members, they fill it out and then its aggregated by the mayor in executive session,” Mendelsohn said.
When it came to the timeline to get the evaluations started, Mendelsohn said she couldn’t “imagine giving a raise without doing a performance review, unless it was an average of the raise that all the city employees receive.”
The council went back and forth about how to speed up the review process to be fair to those staffers who have not had one for years — and being respectful not to push it through too fast.
What the council initially landed on — although did not take formal action — was to build in a “catch-up” review for the staffers that haven’t had one. After that, the city will look into procurement for a consultant to standardize the process for the coming years.
The lack of process around how these significant positions are reviewed comes at a time when the city is facing financial, public safety and policy issues inside City Hall.
Got a tip? Email Nathan Collins at ncollins@kera.org. You can follow Nathan on Twitter @nathannotforyou.
KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, consider making a tax-deductible gift today. Thank you.
