Former Dallas Planning Chief Julia Ryan Slams ‘Toxic’ Criticism of Public Sector Employees
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When Dallas Director of Planning and Urban Design Julia Ryan announced her departure from the city, speculation swirled that all was not well at Marilla Street.
Ryan’s resignation was announced in a memorandum from City Manager T.C. Broadnax, in which Dallas City Council members were advised that Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization Director David Noguera was leaving, too.
Both department directors were vocal experts in their fields and occasionally respectfully clashed with members of the elected City Council and the public.
Both left for good jobs in other states, Ryan as a transportation planner with a consulting firm in Arkansas and Noguera with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Miami.
Then came an Oct. 14 opinion column in the Dallas Morning News by Dallas Cothrum, president of Masterplan, a Texas planning and permitting consulting firm.
The column was titled, “Dallas’ planning department is awful. Here’s the chance to turn it around.”
‘The City of Dallas Insists Everyone Wait in Line’
Cothrum called out the backlog of zoning cases and inefficient processes that Ryan herself acknowledged in a 2022 interview with CandysDirt.com.
“The recent citizen satisfaction study ranks the planning department next to last among city departments,” Cothrum wrote. “Only 5 percent of respondents reported the department was excellent, compared with 41 percent that rated it poor (the lowest category). Another 30 percent thought the level of service was only fair.
“Land-use professionals might argue the scores are not low enough,” he continued. “The city has a backlog of cases it’s leaving unaddressed. Meanwhile, there’s a long-range planning group with numerous employees primarily working on the ForwardDallas plan. If this was a business, management would shift these planners to their current jobs, realizing that the future starts now. It’s as if city leaders have never been to the grocery store when they summon more checkers to the front. The city of Dallas insists everyone wait in line.”
He’s not wrong that the department has faced challenges. Now, with Interim Director Andrea Gilles at the helm, all eyes are focused on Planning and Urban Design to see if the implementation of the ForwardDallas comprehensive land use plan might get the train back on the tracks.
Ryan Reacts to Criticism of Department
The problem with all the criticism, Ryan pointed out in an October LinkedIn post, is the negative attitude and unreasonable expectations the public has toward government employees.
“There hasn’t been enough conversation about the toxicity faced by public sector employees by the public,” Ryan wrote in reference to Cothrum’s editorial. “This is a great (bad) example of a self-serving article by an author who runs one of the largest pay-for-zoning change companies in Dallas. In part, this toxicity (from developers and residents) led me to stepping back from the public sector.”
Local governments are facing staffing shortages and have a limited number of quality applicants for critical positions such as senior planners, Ryan added.
“We are then forced to quietly endure the parade of angry residents, business owners, [and] politicians for policy issues that are out of our control,” she said.
The engagement on Ryan’s post was limited, save for Dallas civil designer Justin Moeller, who asked the former planning chief to elaborate on her views. Current municipal government employees and council members didn’t want to speak on the record about the matter, though several acknowledged it is challenging for city employees to offer their expert opinions and then be lambasted in a public setting when those views go against the grain.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Ryan’s departure came shortly after she suggested in a June council meeting the unpopular opinion that short-term rentals be regulated through the city’s registration ordinance, pointing out that the matter isn’t a land use issue but a code compliance issue.
A couple of council members suggested at the time that Ryan’s opinion wasn’t requested or supported.
Other council members asked in the same meeting for a formal, written recommendation from the Planning and Urban Design Department after being advised by City Manager T.C. Broadnax that they might not like the result. Ultimately, the council opted to address the matter as a land use issue and ban STRs in residential neighborhoods. The City is being sued by the Dallas Short-Term Rental Alliance, and enforcement is slated to begin next month.
Ryan didn’t mention STRs in her LinkedIn post but alluded to pushback from residents and developers on zoning matters that are beyond the control of city staff.
“To the residents, the status quo is what they bought into and will fight (dirty and loudly) against seemingly innocuous code amendments, such as how to measure height,” she wrote. “The toxicity is growing by leaps and bounds and spreading like a cancer. As a recovering 16+ year public servant, we need to talk more about how to professionally confront and shut down this kind of toxicity. If we don’t, the good public servants will flee to the private sector and where will our cities be then?”
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I attended that meeting and have never heard a public official spoken to so rudely by a council member in my life. It was jaw-dropping.
I sympathize with Julia Ryan and her colleagues, and believe Karen’s recollection of the meeting. But what’s missing here is, “who, then, is accountable?” For how much longer are staffing shortages (and other excuses/reasons) acceptable?
With all due respect, I completely disagree with Julia Ryan’s perspective on the City of Dallas Planning and Urban Design Department. This is one of the most important departments in our City, not only because it analyzes and ultimately approves or denies every new development in Dallas, but as a result, the PUD is the basis for creating increased property taxes for the city’s coffers. The more efficient the process for allowing new construction starts, the quicker Dallas benefits from receiving higher property tax revenues. City Planners need to be skilled urban planning professionals and Dallas needs to be actively seeking qualified candidates. Historically, many of the planners have been low performing city employees recycled from department to department at City Hall and then to PUD. Dallas also has less urban planners than any other major city in the U.S. The result is that it is often taking 14 months or more to get a plan from submission to approval. This is unacceptable.
While Ms. Ryan claims the issue is the toxicity faced by city employees and the unreasonable expectations of public employees by the public, I do not agree. The problem is that money has not been allocated by the City of Dallas for outside recruitment and competitive salaries for City Planners. There are skilled urban planners throughout the U.S. who would be thrilled to move to Dallas, Texas, if they were solicited through hiring outreach. Additionally, the planners’ salaries are so low that as soon as a Planner is trained, they leave for greener pastures in the private sector.
The City of Dallas and T.C. Broadnax need to recognize the importance of our Planning and Urban Design department as the basis for almost all increased property tax revenues. This requires that Dallas fund this department sufficiently with trained professionals making a competitive salary, so that applications to build in the City of Dallas can be processed within six months. We are the 9th largest city in the country with many companies moving here, yet we have failed to prioritize Planning and Urban Development in order to physically grow proportionately to our increased population.
The low salaries are an issue, but the interdepartment racism and incompetent management who favor white planners over planners of color is an even bigger problem. There are plenty of planners who want to stay and grow with the City, but the lack of support minority planners receive turns them off from this. Start treating black and brown employees like they matter, and maybe they would want to stay.
Always someone to make it about race.
My wife worked for Dallas city planning, had a 100% success related to her cases being approved. She has a MS in planning, and another in City Management with more than 6 years experience, yet she was denied over and over a promotion (she is Hispanic). As with most of her co-workers (all with MS degrees and years of experience) she also left the city. I myself worked for another City of Dallas department, and it was no different. Dallas suffers from an endemic bureaucratic stupidity, coupled with a high degree of nepotism and cronyism, in addition to misogynistic attitudes among upper mid-level management as I witness towards my immediate supervisor (an educated Hispanic woman).
The claim that they cannot find qualified personnel is a complete lie, Dallas has a wealth of educated and capable employees, they just leave the city because of the toxicity that permeates in Dallas.
Dallas talks big, but fail to deliver, over, and over, and over.