Councilmember Jaynie Schultz last week announced she won’t run for a third term. She sent an email to supporters and then spoke with the Dallas Morning News.
For me, a single quote stood out in the News’ story about her planned exit: “We don’t have any vision for our city, and there’s no effort on the part of our leadership to help us achieve one. It is exhausting to work without a vision and constantly have to make decisions in silos.”
I called her after I read it. I’ve written about City Hall for more than a decade. Schultz is one of the council members who has really done the work before her election—a plan commissioner for six years, a president of the Foundation for CityLab High School—and during her time in office to understand the big-picture projects that will improve her district and the city as a whole. She shoots straight, often without considering political blowback. She’s facing a (long-shot) recall because of her support of rezoning an aging shopping center to allow for denser housing—the sort of adaptive reuse project that Dallas will need to embrace to solve its housing and transportation issues.
Her District 11 is a camel-shaped spread of North Dallas that includes portions of Preston Hollow and the apartment-dense swath now being called the Dallas International District, whose roughly 450 acres include the Galleria and the ruins of Valley View Center. She will be remembered as the council member who was in office when the last of the mall’s remnants finally came down, ending the Cold War between property owner Scott Beck and the City Attorney’s Office. The recent bond election included $20 million for land acquisition for a signature park here, which everyone I’ve spoken to believes was integral to attracting the development that will make it a success.
Both Alpha Road and Montfort Drive are being redesigned to be more walkable and encourage street-level retail. She says she’s working with property owners to access bond funding for mixed income housing in their developments, “the kind of housing that’s needed there.”
Dallas bought the Prism Building, a glass office building that bathes in natural light, the type of purchase that isn’t usually worth mentioning but is now home to the French Trade Office and the European American Chamber of Commerce’s Texas branch. Its semi-regular night markets have attracted thousands. The Prism has boosted the area’s goal to be a hub for international representation. She helped create an environment for Dallas ISD to feel comfortable launching a K-12 STEAM school nearby, with half of its enrollment reserved for kids in poverty.
“I believe that a good public servant, an elected servant, ought to review their decision to run every single time. It should not be automatic to run every single time,” she told me. “We need to evaluate: what did we get done? What do we still need to get done? When I did that, I realized the big bucket items I wanted to get done, I’ve gotten done.”
But back to that quote in the News, the one about how the city doesn’t have a vision. Schultz last month got hoovered into Mayor Eric Johnson’s seemingly semi-annual committee swaps. She lost her position as chair of the Workforce, Education, and Equity Committee. She doesn’t know why the mayor made the decision. “I don’t have a relationship with that person,” she told me last week.
Johnson’s time in office has frequently required reporters to explain byzantine administrative processes regarding power and procedure, dating back to his tussles with the city manager during the height of the pandemic. The quote Schultz gave to the paper speaks to his game of musical chairs; some of his Dallas City Council colleagues clearly believe that the organizational chaos happening behind the scenes is affecting the work they do. Schultz says she didn’t—doesn’t—have a vision to follow.
The thing for the public to know about these committees is simple: this is where the real work happens. The mayor’s appointees draft and debate policy, and the chairs set the agenda. This is where the debate about cop spending begins, where we learn whether we’ll have to haul our trashcans to the curb or the alley, whether a bike lane is painted on the street or protected. “Policy” is really a wonky word for the operations that affect how we live here.
Every mayor builds and rebuilds the committees over his or her tenure. For instance, former Mayor Mike Rawlings’ most notable reshuffling involved combining and reconstituting committees altogether. But he explained why, in tandem with the city manager. Johnson makes his changes with seeming caprice and communicates his intentions only through memos.
“It was one of the huge problems in the ambiguity regarding T.C. Broadnax—he could only set his own plan and then guess whether we thought that was good,” she said of our now-former city manager.
This wasn’t the first time Schultz had been caught in an abrupt change. Johnson moved her off the Housing Committee. He then replaced the Environment and Sustainability Committee with one that he charged with focusing on parks and trails rather than difficult environmental and conservation matters like managing our tree canopy, encouraging urban agriculture, and controlling the emerald ash borer that’s destroying trees in the Great Trinity Forest. Schultz lost her spot when the committee’s purpose changed.
“The rules by which the city operates happen through the council committees. And so when those committees are constantly in flux, then it’s very hard to make change in our city,” Schultz told me. “I think it’s not good business practice if you as the leader who are making the assignments, are sincere in the desire to move things forward, then constantly shifting the people doing the work does not serve the purpose.”
She announces her departure at an interesting time. Broadnax left in April. His top deputy, Kimberly Tolbert, is the city’s interim chief executive while a search firm identifies outside candidates for the Council to consider. And Johnson’s relationship with some of his colleagues appears to be growing more frayed at a time when Dallas desperately needs stability from the body, which is essentially the city’s board of directors. Accountability is its most important function, and the mayor hasn’t been able to coalesce his colleagues around an established platform. Johnson led the failed coup against the city manager, and, ultimately, Schultz and seven of her colleagues coordinated his resignation two years later. They concluded that the relationship had cratered so deeply that Broadnax could no longer be productive.
“I think it is the obligation of our mayor to create the environment where we as a group can set the vision. I don’t have a relationship with that person,” Schultz said. “It’s like someone you’re passing on the street; we’re gonna be friendly. But we’ve never talked about anything that matters. If you are part of a group that has a leader who is not interested in a group vision or a group process, then it’s impossible to do that. You can’t do it without your leader.”
Her district was something she could control, goals that she could establish and execute—away from the noise that will almost certainly continue when the City Council returns next week from its July recess. Schultz is 64 and says she is ready to travel with her family and enjoy life away from 1500 Marilla.
She wouldn’t say what I’m about to, at least not in such concrete terms. But I think her comments tell an additional story: the dysfunction at the top of City Hall, particularly with the mayor, made it impossible for her to work another four years.
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