City Manager Finalists Share Visions of a Better Dallas in Meet and Greets

It has been nearly a year since former City Manager T.C. Broadnax announced his resignation from Dallas’ CEO seat, and this past weekend marked the first time community members have had a say in who his replacement should be. 

Kimberly Bizor Tolbert, interim city manager for Dallas, William Johnson, an assistant city manager for Fort Worth, and Mario Lara, an assistant city manager for Sacramento, were named finalists for Dallas’ top job in the final days of 2025. While Bizor may be the frontrunner – she’s held the interim role since May and has spent the majority of her working career in Dallas’ municipal government – attendees at Saturday morning’s City Hall meet-and-greet appeared to be impressed by Lara’s experience in tackling homelessness and Johnson’s public safety background. 

Each candidate was given two minutes to make an opening statement at the event before they took up post at an individual table. Receiving lines allowed residents the opportunity to speak one-on-one with each candidate for two to three minutes, but many attendees noted that they wanted to be able to hear all of the candidates’ answers on a topic rather than a two-minute stump speech.

While residents were encouraged to fill out a survey reporting their perceptions of each candidate, the decision of who will oversee Dallas’ day-to-day operations, 13,000 employees and the hiring of our next police and fire chiefs will ultimately come down to the City Council. The full council will interview each candidate on Wednesday in executive session, and Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins, who chairs the city’s Ad Hoc Committee on Administrative Affairs and has overseen the city manager search, said he hopes the council will signal an intention to offer one candidate the job by the end of January. 

Dallas’ Future Under Three Different Leaders

In their opening statements, Lara and Johnson each alluded to the “challenges” currently facing Dallas.

Lara signaled he is not one of the several city manager candidates who may have been scared off from the job after voters in November passed City Charter Propositions S and U. Johnson also did not specify which challenges have drawn his attention, but said they require a leadership team focused on accountability and transparency. 

When the Observer asked what challenges, specifically, Johnson would hope to address if given the job, public safety was top of mind. Johnson said he intends to “immediately” launch a national search for Dallas’ next police chief, and hopes to reshape Dallas’ relationship with the police department to better accommodate Proposition U, which will earmark city revenue for the police and fire pension while requiring the city to hire around 900 more police officers. (Proposition S opens oens the city to lawsuits if someone suspects the charter or state laws aren’t being followed.)

As an assistant city manager to the west, Johnson was able to observe political opposition to Prop U and has concluded that Dallas’ bigger issues are the pension fund’s billion-dollar unfunded liability and officer salaries, which he feels should be higher to attract better talent. 

“We’ll hire 900 police officers, but we’ll hire the right officers. We’ll hire officers that are going to be boots on the ground in the communities,” Johnson told the Observer. “We need to be focused on diverting crime, focused on our young people. And we need to send a very clear message that if you’re in the city of Dallas and you want to traffic drugs or traffic people or traffic anything else, this is not the place for you.” 

Tolbert also said launching a national search for Dallas’ next police chief would be a Day 1 goal. She added that it is crucial to find a chief who “understands the heartbeat” of the community and would support Dallas’ violent crime reduction plan and hiring initiatives to ensure the police force mirrors the demographic makeup of the city.

Although council members have pointed to the passage of Propositions S and U as a “wake up call” for City Hall and a signal that the electorate is in favor of change, Tolbert said she has been open to change during her interim tenure. 

“The work is already underway, and I think the beauty is that during my time of being the interim city manager, I’ve approached this job with bold actions,” Tolbert said. “This has not been business as usual, status quo. And it’s really given me an opportunity to really do a deep dive into some of the challenges that we face and we’ve already begun to address those.”

Tolbert pointed to public safety and infrastructure funding in Dallas’ nearly $5 billion budget, which initially had a $40 million deficit that Tolbert was able to rectify, as evidence that Dallas is welcoming a “customer centric” leadership strategy and embracing the “cultural shift.” 

Juxtaposing Johnson and Tolbert is Lara, the “external candidate” from Sacramento who says his fresh set of eyes could bring the reset Dallas voters signaled a yearning for. In his opening statement, Lara pointed to Sacramento’s 40% reduction in homelessness as one of the initiatives he is “most proud” to have overseen. 

While Sacramento recently launched their own search for a city manager, Lara told the Observer that Dallas’ is the only job he is interested in pursuing. His family has “always had their eyes” on Dallas,  he said. 

Lara added that his past experience with voter-led ballot initiatives leaves him feeling comfortable he will be able to take on Propositions S and U. He said that building a strong relationship with the city attorney’s office and the finance department would be top priorities to ensure he has the proper plan to handle the legalities and financial impact of implementing the propositions. 

“We have to respect and listen to the voters,” Lara said. “The initiatives passed. If I were city manager I would seek to work closely with my colleagues to make sure that we’re implementing those in a way that is … respectful of what the voters communicated.”