Questions are still swirling around Dallas about the level of public support for the city manager and how Kim Tolbert was selected.
A survey was conducted at an event on January 11 to record the levels of public support for each of the three city manager finalists. Yet, more than two months later, after Tolbert was selected as city manager, the results have still not been released to the public.
One Dallas survey respondent, Regina Imburgia, filed an Open Records Request with the City to obtain the survey results. Under state law, most files produced by a city or its contractors are supposed to be available to the public upon request, with the exception of trade secrets and sensitive employee information.
Imburgia shared her email and voicemail correspondence with The Dallas Express, and it shows City Secretary Nancy Gonzalez spending several weeks attempting to find the survey results in city records in January. Eventually, both Gonzalez and Imburgia contacted Baker Tilly, the firm that conducted the survey and the city manager search. Yet neither Gonzalez nor Imburgia has been able to obtain the survey results from the firm.
“We were told by [city employees at the event] that the results would be made public,” Imburgia told DX. She also said that the staff “impressed upon us that we should respond to the survey quickly because it was going to close at 11:59 [PM],” giving the impression that the results would be available quickly.
Other respondents agree.
Cyrena Nolan, also present at the event, said, “There should be no reason why those results are not public.” She pointed to the yearly Community Survey, which is always made available to the public, adding that the City clearly knows how to conduct and publish surveys.
Imburgia believes this matters because “I took my time to be part of this process, and we were told that the public’s opinion was going to be considered.”
The Dallas Express contacted Baker Tilly to ask the same questions as Imburgia and Gonzalez.
A press officer for the company said, “Baker Tilly maintains a policy of not commenting on client matters. The citizen survey conducted during the City of Dallas’s city manager selection process was part of our engagement with the City, and any related materials were provided directly to our client. As part of this process, we provided the unedited community responses to the City Council on January 14, 2025. We have also reiterated to the City that we do not disclose client information or release records on their behalf. We defer to the City of Dallas regarding any decisions about the release of this information.”
This comes after DX obtained more than 50 applications from prospective candidates who filed applications for the job through an Open Records Request with the City Secretary.
DX filed this request on December 16 but did not receive the applications until January 17, after the applicant pool had been substantially narrowed. Requests for communications between Baker Tilly and the city council on the application process remain only partially filled at the time of this writing.
Some applications appear to have been culled by Baker Tilly early on. These include applications from a New Zealand-based engineering professor and a trucking fleet manager, neither of whom had experience approximating the role of city manager.
However, it is less clear how some candidates came to advance over others, as some qualified candidates appeared to receive little consideration. One application came from Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Secretary and CEOGina N. Fiandaca.
Fiandaca’s resume indicated 20 years of executive public administration experience, including around four years as Assistant City Manager for the City of Austin.
Another application came from Robert J. Sivick, a lawyer who has served as a city councilman or county administrator in various locations and as an advisor to local and federal agencies since the early 1990s.
Neither Fiandaca nor Sivick advanced to the semi-finalist round.
At the time of the January survey, DX reported that Baker Tilly had narrowed the pool of semi-finalists to William Johnson, the Assistant City Manager of Fort Worth; Mark Washington, the City Manager of Grand Rapids, Michigan; Zachary Williams, the County Manager for DeKalb County, Georgia; and Kimberly Tolbert, the then-interim City Manager.
Notably, neither Zach Williams’ nor Kim Tolbert’s applications appeared in the initial compilation of applications; their qualifications did not appear to enter the formal review process until the Dallas City Manager Semi-Finalist Report by Baker Tilly.
The Baker Tilly report on the semi-finalists raises questions about why more qualified candidates were culled from the process. For example, while Williams has worked in public administration in Georgia and Florida since at least 2003, he has not held the high-level positions that Fiandaca has, and he does have the breadth of experience Sivick does.
Tolbert distinguished herself in the semi-finalist reports by having the strongest connections to North Texas and the City of Dallas. She completed her Master of Public Administration and Bachelor of Political Science at the University of North Texas in the early 1990s. Tolbert has worked in North Texas Public Administration since the mid-1990s and the City of Dallas since 2008. At the time of her selection as City Manager, she had been the Interim City Manager for a few months shy of a year.
The total cost of the Baker Tilly-led manager search was 80K, according to emails between city officials and representatives at Baker Tilly obtained by The Dallas Express.
The incomplete record of internal communications between city staff and the Dallas City Council obtained by DX does not give many answers about why or how candidates are culled or advanced. The City Council periodically received messages about the process, but the members did not appear to ask many questions in the available records.