Resigning Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax is in the running to become Austin’s next city manager.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson announced Tuesday in a post on the Austin City Council’s public message board that Broadnax is a finalist for the job, along with Denton City Manager Sara Hensley and Kansas City (Mo.) City Manager Brian Platt.
Watson said all three will be in Austin meeting city staff on March 25 and take part in a community town hall that night. The candidates will be interviewed by the City Council on March 26.
Additional interviews could happen on April 1, and a council vote to start negotiating a contract with one of the candidates could happen as soon as April 2.
“Of course, we reserve the right to take more time in making this very important decision,” Watson said in the post.
Broadnax declined comment Tuesday about being named a finalist for the Austin city manager job.
The Austin City Council was scheduled Tuesday to discuss candidates in executive session. Watson said in a March 1 message board post that 39 people applied for the job.
Broadnax being named a finalist for the Austin job comes nearly two weeks after his resignation was announced for the same job in Dallas. He has held the job for seven years, and it came “at the suggestion of the majority of the City Council.” That action apparently could trigger a clause in his contract that says the city will owe him a lump sum payment matching his $423,246 annual salary.
Broadnax’s resignation goes into effect on June 3. The Dallas City Council last week appointed Deputy City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert as interim city manager after Broadnax leaves.
According to a Dec. 26 message board post from Watson, the application period for the Austin city manager job was from Jan. 8 to Feb. 12. At some point after, Mosaic Public Partners, the search firm hired by Austin to oversee the search process, extended the deadline to Feb. 26. Broadnax’s resignation announcement was Feb. 21.
Greg Nelson, founder and managing partner at Mosaic, declined comment last week when asked by The Dallas Morning News about the updated deadline and the names of people who applied for the job.
“As a matter of practice our firm does not interact directly with the media on work we are doing for our clients,” Nelson told The News in an email.
Rumors were circulating that Broadnax was seeking the Austin city manager job to the point where residents were commenting on it.
“If Mr. Broadnax applied for that job in Austin, it is your responsibility to make sure that our taxpayer dollars do not pay him,” Yolanda Faye Williams, a former city park board member said to council members during the Feb. 27 meeting when Tolbert was named interim city manager. “Because if he did that and did not disclose that to council, that is not fair.”
Austin, like Dallas, is under a council-manager form of government, where the city manager runs the day-to-day operations of the city and is appointed by the City Council, whose members are each elected by the public and have equal voting power.
Austin, the 10th largest city in the country with more than 970,000 residents, has more than 16,000 municipal employees, and the Austin City Council last summer adopted a $5.5 billion budget.
Dallas is the ninth largest city in the country with around 1.3 million, has around 13,100 employees and a $4.6 billion budget.
Interim City Manager Jesús Garza has been Austin’s top government administrative official since last year when the City Council fired former City Manager Spencer Cronk in February 2023. Cronk was fired amid criticism of the city’s response to an ice storm earlier that month that left more than 100,000 homes and businesses without power. He also faced backlash tied to his work negotiating a new police contract.
Cronk, who had been Austin city manager since 2018, issued a public apology for the storm response. Garza is a former Austin city manager.
This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas.
