Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson Starts Memorial Day Weekend With a Fight

Mayor Eric Johnson kicked off Memorial Day weekend by sending a testy memo late Friday to the city manager about the way in which the city’s committee structure has worked in recent weeks. In the page and a half memo, Johnson blamed City Manager T.C. Broadnax for creating “unnecessary conflict” among council members and chided him for not listening to concerns raised by members of Johnson’s staff. Broadnax responded by basically saying his weekend had already started and he’d deal with the issue on Tuesday.

The tension has played out publicly over the last week. When the pandemic reached Dallas, Johnson created two ad hoc committees focused on the city’s response to the coronavirus. Now that regular committees like transportation and public safety are again meeting, it seems most council members believe the work of those ad hoc committees is duplicative. And yet those meetings remain on the city’s calendar. So this week, the members of one of those committees just didn’t show up.

Johnson is still peeved about this — particularly so because that ad hoc committee was to take up an item that Johnson championed that would require the city to prioritize hiring contractors from the city of Dallas. The mayor wanted the ad hoc committee to discuss that item before it went to its regular committee. Now he’s saying that the council members who bailed on the ad hoc meeting were right about the meeting unnecessarily doubling the work, but “their tactic was clearly wrong.”

He’s now blaming City Manager T.C. Broadnax for all the confusion.

“Not only did your decision overstep your authority,” the mayor wrote, “it also created the impetus for unnecessary conflict among members of our City’s governing body. As the presiding officer of that body, charged with maintaining its decorum and civility, I cannot abide by this.”

Read more: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2020/05/mayor-eric-johnson-starts-memorial-day-weekend-with-a-fight/

It appears that the mayor has a problem with working and playing well with others That doesn't bode well for him or Dallas.