The Foundation

On what 5,000 emails do and do not show

John Stankey already wrote this article for me.

In May of last year, the CEO of AT&T, Dallas's largest private downtown employer, wrote to our city manager and told her that his concerns about Dallas extended to "foundational issues" with "effective/sustained governance of the City." He was not talking about crime, or homelessness, or the parking, or the panhandlers, or any one problem you could fix with a task force and a press release. He was talking about the foundation. He was questioning, really, whether the city can govern anything at all, let alone our downtown. Whether you can count on it to follow through on any decision it makes.

That email sat in the city's files for nearly a year. Nobody quoted it at a council meeting. Nobody cited it in the debate over City Hall, or the debate over the future of downtown, or the debate over the arena. It surfaced only because over 5,000 pages of internal communications have slowly dripped out over the past two weeks via the Morning News.

This is not quite the Epstein files. There are fewer presidents involved. The reveals have come one at a time, some a little worse than the last, and all uniquely damning in the way that only Dallas could manage.

What the emails have not yet shown matters as much as what they have. There is no smoking gun with the Adelsons. There is no back and forth that shows the City Hall report is knowingly inflated. People are upset that tours of potential replacement City Halls were conducted, however, the council voted in November to start exploring options. The site tours only came after that vote, not before it.

What they also do not show, is a City prepared to make the right decision about City Hall. They show a web of half-truths, over-reactions a day late and a dollar short, and a chronically-missing mayor. They show I fear, process that is designed to deliver an outcome, not one that is designed to build consensus around it.

Writing about the City Hall debate, I have asked you to name your tradeoffs, shown you the math, and laid out the vision of a Downtown yet to come. Those pieces were about City Hall, the building. This one is going to be about City Hall, the institution. The way the City has been revealed to be handling the City Hall question through these email leaks has done more damage to my position than any critic could. When the process looks this bad, it does not matter if the answer is right. Nobody trusts the answer because nobody trusts the people giving it.

What the Emails Show

The CEO of the largest employer in Downtown could have simply come out and said, Plano has cheaper land. He could have left it there. Instead, John Stankey told our city manager he had worked in central Dallas for eighteen of the past twenty-five years and had watched the city run the same cycle over and over: a problem emerges, a campaign is mounted, progress is made, attention drifts, the problem returns.

The emails show City Manager Kim Tolbert followed up three months later in August with an update on the new "Safe In The City" campaign. Crime was down more than 25 percent downtown due to a new task force and enhanced rehousing efforts. She promised this was "not just a one-time initiative."

Please tell me you caught the pattern.

Stankey thanked her for the progress. Then he noted that he could already see the problems shifting to other areas of the city. He had seen this movie before. He was telling her, as clearly as a Fortune 500 CEO will ever tell a city manager, that he did not believe the improvement would last.

Eight months later he moved six thousand jobs to Plano. The city told the public it was about wanting a horizontal campus. That is not what the emails say.

Stankey's diagnosis is the one no one in Dallas wants to say out loud, because saying it out loud means the problem is not the building, or the arena, or the parking, or the panhandlers. The problem is us. The way we run the city. The cycle he described, the one where we surge resources at a crisis and then lose interest, is not a failure of one administration. It is a pattern, and it is the pattern that the rest of the emails make visible.

Consider WFAA. The city filed eminent domain proceedings against the land owner of the news station's parking lot for our convention center expansion. WFAA, understandably, started looking at leaving downtown, given their building would no longer have parking. The emails then show officials, including the City’s Economic Developer Corporation CEO Linda McMahon, scrambling to keep WFAA from relocating. We are now presumably going to offer tax incentives or concessions to retain a company that wants to leave because of something we did to them. The city condemned their parking lot and then panicked when they reacted like any rational actor would. That is the cycle. Create the problem, react to the problem, claim credit for managing the problem.

Consider the mayor. The emails show Travis Machen, the CEO of Scotiabank, a company Dallas had just approved an incentive package for, unable to get Mayor Eric Johnson to return a phone call. McMahon wrote to Tolbert that Machen "has talked to everyone involved from the Governor on down" and wanted to know why the mayor would not call him back. When the EDC organized a meeting of CEOs to discuss the city's technology future, McMahon noted that she had extended an invitation to the mayor. He declined. When Scotiabank's ribbon-cutting was scheduled, city staff had to notify organizers the mayor might not attend and asked whether the mayor pro tem could fill in.

Johnson ultimately showed up to the ribbon-cutting. He later celebrated it in his newsletter. The Dallas Morning News and D Magazine have taken to calling him "the Mayor of Somewhere Else." The nickname is cruel. Also, it is earned. In a city manager form of government, the mayor has a limited operational role. However, the one irreplaceable thing the mayor can do is be the mayor. Show up. Take the call. Convey to an executive deciding between Dallas and Plano that someone in charge gives a damn. Johnson could not be bothered. There must have been a lot going on in Somewhere Else that day.

What the Emails Do Not Show

The emails do not show a conspiracy yet. I want to be precise about this, because the temptation to find a villain is strong and the evidence does not support it. If they do, I pray the Morning News is not still sitting on it three weeks in.

As far as we know, there are no renderings of the Adelson’s new arena in the City Manager’s inbox. There is no email directing the engineers to inflate the City Hall repair costs. The site tours that have seemingly generated so much outrage happened only after the council voted in November to start exploring options. That vote was 12-3. The tours were within the scope of what was authorized, even if the way they were conducted, selectively, without disclosure to the full council, was sloppy and corrosive to trust.

However, the glaring absence in the heart of the emails is something worse than a conspiracy. A conspiracy requires a plan. What I fear we have is a series of over-reactions dressed up as conspiracy. This is the third option, and it’s the category for which we lack a good name when it is so tempting to label anything we don’t like as corruption. I would humbly propose we use a word that EDC CEO McMahon used in a email January of this year regarding a mishap involving the proposed new Dallas NASDAQ Texas office: cluster. You fill in the four-letter word that goes after it.

Something happens, the city lurches in response, and the response creates the next problem. The convention center needs WFAA's parking lot. WFAA wants to leave. We need to keep WFAA. Downtown is losing tenants. The Mavericks want to move. We need an arena to save downtown. The arena needs the City Hall site. City Hall is too expensive to fix. We need to move City Hall. Where do we move it? We don't know yet, but we toured fifteen buildings and a handful of members got private tours of fifteen sites while their colleagues learn about it from the newspaper.

This is the cluster-f. This is what Stankey saw. Everybody is reacting. The emails do not show anyone steering.

They do not even show key players at the City getting along with each other. Something of a pre-requisite, if you ask me, for a conspiracy.

Drilling in on the January “cluster” emails from McMahon, in this note the EDC CEO outlined her displeasure with how some communications with large employers are routed through the Economic Development Department, a branch of the City government reporting to the City Manager, while some are left to McMahon’s Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-governmental entity sponsored by the City, but not directly one of its constituent parts.

Her frustration seems pointed specifically at a miscommunication between top city leaders that led to the Regional Chamber of Commerce telling mayors of other Metroplex cities they should reach out to NASDAQ to discuss relocation incentives. (Yes, we are losing employers to the suburbs that haven’t even moved here yet.) McMahon needed the City Manager to hear that everyone: the Regional Chamber, the mayors of somewheres else, and everyone at the City, needed to know this was not an “auction.” This was a “Dallas deal” on which she had personally worked for over a year. She alluded to the staff members by name which she believed were responsible for the miscommunication.

What follows is, by my estimation, one of the most interesting windows into the City Hall process. Remember, it is McMahon’s EDC that actually hired most of the consultants engaged in the City Hall study. I am quoting her at length because her words, frankly, speak for themselves. She wrote, emphasis added:

“I am not copying my board chair and Alan [on this email] because I have several of the board ready to resign - including my board chair, Alan and Jeanne and probably at least half of them will follow....which as you can imagine - will cause every thing to collapse. And I will unwind the EDC as soon as that happens.

“I have expressed my displeasure and frustration directly to Robin this evening - as I did with you - I am not holding back. This is not sustainable. I have kept you out of the sausage making for a year and a half but I will not risk the reputation of the good people on my board and as my last chapter in my career - my reputation.

“I sincerely apologize because the issues facing the city does not need your attention diverted to this - unfortunately - I cannot see another path forward except through your decisive action - either way.”

Do these seem like co-conspirators to you? This reads to me like two people who could barely stand to be in a room with one another, let alone orchestrate a plot to tear down City Hall.

What I see here is not evidence of conspiracy, but only more of Stankey’s “foundational issues” with “effective/sustained governance.” We have an understandably frustrated, private sector executive running our EDC, who cannot even get the City to get out of its own way when it comes to attracting and retaining jobs in the City. This is the cluster, not the conspiracy.

The Cracks

This is not the article I want to write about the City Hall debate, because it is the one that makes “my side” look bad. But the version of this article where I don’t talk about the credibility of the people making these decisions is the dishonest version. If nothing else, I have spent three weeks here arguing against dishonesty. I would rather lose this argument in a transparent process than win it in this one.

I can no longer make that argument without saying this: the people currently managing this process have not demonstrated, through their actions, that this process is going to result in what’s best for the City. They have yet to prove that City Hall is not simply our next over-reaction. I want to be clear that is not a claim about motives. I have no reason to believe the city manager, Councilmembers like Chad West, or Linda McMahon are acting in bad faith. I am saying that the judgment on display in these emails, the selective briefings, the repair estimates initially presented without alternatives, the private tours, the in-fighting, and the inability to keep the full council informed, does not inspire confidence that a billion-dollar decision about the future of downtown Dallas is currently on the right path. We don’t set ourselves up to make the right decision when the process is a cluster-fuck.

Perhaps this is just the effect of having your emails leaked. There is a level of scrutiny at play here from which it would be hard for anyone to come out clean. However, nearly every email the city manager sends is public information. That is not a leak. That is the law. If the way you conduct business cannot survive being read by the people you work for, the problem is not the disclosure. The problem is the conduct.

All of our actions have consequences. Running the city well entails knowing and naming those consequences before we act, not scrambling to clean them up after. That is all I have been asking for in this newsletter for the past month. It is what the people who want to save City Hall are asking for. It is, if you read carefully, what John Stankey was asking for too.

I am asking for the people making these decisions to do the hard part and name these consequences out loud, in public, and still make the case that you are making the right decision. Tell us what we are losing and why we should give it up. Don’t rely on inflated numbers and selective tours. If you cannot do that, then you are not governing. You are just winning.

Somewhere in the next ten years, the next CEO is going to sit across the next table from the next city manager. They will have watched us handle this decision. If what they watched us do was another cycle, another task force, another independent review, another set of selective briefings, all followed by a scramble when the emails come out, they will see the same cracks in the foundation that Stankey did. They will come to the same answer. Plano has land too.

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com