BoD Meeting, March 18th, 2021
Just three days after the council had modified the SEDC’s by-laws, the BoD had a meeting. The city’s audio recording of that meeting is available on YouTube (https://youtu.be/EDM_E9RsXG4). I had the City Manager (in her new role as CEO) put an item on the agenda to discuss the by-law change. She tried to talk me out of discussing it at that time, but I did not relent on my direction to add it to the agenda.
Jeff was grilled by a few directors about why he had not brought concerns about the CEO’s performance to the board. He said that he had raised them to the CEO, and it was her duty to tell the board how he felt, though he had been right there at the meetings and could have spoken for himself. He admitted he “could have did a better job of communicating” his concerns to us after he realized the CEO hadn’t. I think at one point he publicly criticized the CEO, just days after we had signed her severance agreement with the one-year moratorium on doing so, but I didn’t catch him in time to stop him.
Jeff had painted himself into a corner with the various stories he had told to multiple people. If Jeff had been having concerns about the CEO, then he needed to have those concerns addressed through the board. In this meeting he claimed that he had a right to take his concerns directly to the CEO, and that it was her responsibiliity to tell her employer, the BoD, about his issues with her. He said he had taken his concerns directly to the top, but the CEO isn't the "top" of the SEDC. The BoD is the top. I don’t think any of the board members believed what he was telling us. As far as I can tell, every director in that meeting was critical of Jeff for not bringing his concerns to us earlier, when they could have been addressed. At one point when Jeff was criticized for not raising the issues to us he said something along the lines of "If I told you about every issue how could I judge how you were performing as board members?" (Sorry, I'm not going to subject myself to listening to the meeting again to get the quote exactly correct.)
Even if somebody wanted to believe that Jeff had raised the issues to the CEO with the intention that the CEO would inform the BoD, Jeff acknowledged that he knew the CEO had not done so, and he acknowledged that he should have spoken up directly to the BoD but hadn’t. It’s also important to note that as Board Liaison Jeff had no authority to tell the CEO how he wanted her to do her job. At this same meeting, Jeff said he believed that he was free to interpret his role as Board Liaison in any way he chose, and that he had no obligation to communicate to the BoD about his concerns. The frustration from the board members was very noticeable at the meeting, and backed up the statement in my email to Jeff’s fellow councilmembers when I said “It is clear to me that I am not the only board member who feels that our Board Liaison's actions and inactions led to substantial turmoil and harm to the SEDC.”
It seemed to me that Jeff was trying to counter the claims that I had made in my email. He was now claiming that the CEO was aware of his concerns and she did have a chance to improve, but this was the first we had heard this from him. He was also countering that he had any duty to communicate those concerns to the BoD. which is absurd. He was a liaison to the board, not the CEO. To me, it was lie after lie, trying to cover up his mismanagement of the Board Liaison role and his illegitimate attack on the CEO’s job. It was horrendous watching all of this play out in the SEDC, after having spent nine years on the BoD trying to be a good partner to the city council.
More Background, and my Assessment
From my perspective, there is absolutely no truth to Jeff’s allegation that he had raised complaints to the CEO. The CEO and I often spoke after her meetings with Jeff and she would recount important issues to me. Over the seven years she worked for the SEDC, there were several times she would call me to help her navigate sensitive issues. The BoD had told the CEO how to build the Strategic Plan, and we were working together on our combined vision. If Jeff had told her he was unhappy about any aspect of the plan or her role in it she absolutely would have called me to discuss his concern. She had no reason not to, and she was well aware that she needed to keep the Board Liaison happy.
The whole situation was absurd, but I think I need to give some more background to comprehend what was going on.
As I mentioned earlier, Jeff had been appointed Board Liaison when he took Jared Patterson’s seat on the council. At the time, the council’s liaison was appointed as one of the seven full voting members of the BoD, so the BoD was Councilman Bickerstaff and six citizens. His position gave Jeff a lot of power, as the board almost always “fell in line” with whatever position Jeff was advocating for. He didn’t “throw his weight around”, but he didn’t have to. There was a lot of deference to his opinions just by the nature of the arrangement. As I think every other board member can attest, Jeff very often prefaced his opinions with “Of course I can’t speak for council”. He said it so often that it was routine. He was differentiating that he was not acting as “Board Liaison”, but as himself, Jeff Bickerstaff, the “full voting member of the BoD”.
Jeff and I both had routine communication with the CEO when she was preparing for upcoming BoD meetings. She would put together an agenda and what she planned to present, and then she would meet with me and Jeff separately to discuss the issues. There was no particular order to who she met with first, it was just an informal talk based on our availability. If I met with the CEO first, she would often call me after her meeting to Jeff to let me know if he had wanted anything changed, or if she was making any change based on her conversation with Jeff. It was in these conversations where I would often help her navigate how to address issues Jeff had created. They were almost always minor things, like I had advised the CEO to bring certain options to the BoD and Jeff was suggesting to scrap one of the options or modify one. There were times the CEO agreed that Jeff had made a good suggestion and we incorporated it, and there were times when the CEO didn’t agree with Jeff and I helped her figure out how to address his concern without abandoning the path she thought was best. It was these conversations which make me confident that the CEO would have brought any concerns to me if Jeff had raised them to her. We had been through that kind of issue from Jeff numerous times and the CEO knew I was there to help. Again, she was well aware that she needed to keep the Board Liaison happy.
At some point, I think November 9th, 2019, the council had voted to make Jeff just the Board Liaison, and appoint a 7th citizen to the board. This change meant that Jeff no longer had a vote or even any personal voice in the activities of the SEDC. Cullen King later told me that it was his idea to make the change, so that the BoD would be filled with citizen volunteers, like the majority of the city’s other boards, and he had thought Jeff was fine with the change.
After the change, Jeff largely took an approach in the BoD meetings that he wasn’t going to offer an opinion on anything unless he was asked. I believe it was generally the approach that liaisons took in Sachse. The liaisons were there to answer questions and to gather information to take back to council, and Jeff demonstrated that he knew that by changing his behavior to keep his personal opinions to himself during the meetings.
Jeff did continue meeting with the CEO to go over agendas for meetings, and Jeff took these opportunities to influence the SEDC. I didn’t take any issue with it, because I believed it was important to keep the SEDC closely aligned with the council and I thought Jeff was doing that. In hindsight, Jeff was using conversations behind closed doors to continue his own personal influence over the SEDC and I should have mitigated that.
After these events unfolded, the CEO recounted to me that Jeff on one occasion had been irritated that she had told the board that he had given her advice on some issue. She said that Jeff had suggested a certain approach to an issue, and in the BoD meeting the CEO had said “Jeff had a good idea, that we should do <whatever it was>”. She said that Jeff chided her afterward for saying that he had told her that. He wanted to have a voice, but he didn’t want the BoD to know that he was influencing the SEDC’s activities behind the scenes.
If you’re following the timeline, it was November of 2019 when Jeff lost his voting right on the BoD, and it was just three months later in February of 2020 when Jeff and Gina brought Ben Walker’s exit interview to my attention. I don’t think that was completely a coincidence, but I intend to get back to that later in this blog.
To this day, I don’t know what Jeff’s actual motive was for removing the CEO. The only time he has spoken of his motive for changing the EDC was at the meeting when he introduced his plan to modify the by-laws, and he had said that the city manager, Gina Nash, had said she wanted a larger role in EDC activities. He had said that in front of Gina and the City Council so I assume at least that much was true.
I don’t speculate much in these writings, as I was a direct witness to virtually everything I am recounting here, but I’ll make a brief exception here. If I had to speculate on Jeff’s motives for forcing out the CEO and restructuring the SEDC under the City Manager, I would speculate that he was struggling to adapt to the loss of voting rights on the BoD. I think when Jeff was a full voting member he came to feel like the SEDC was his own little piece of Sachse that he had complete dominion over. The BoD and the CEO largely bowed to his wishes. He did not need the council interfering with his control, so he kept them in the dark about the SEDC’s activities. If they didn’t ask, he wasn’t going to discuss it with them. Then when he lost voting rights he felt frustrated and isolated, and he may have figured that putting the SEDC under Gina would allow him to exert control again, as he was one of Gina’s bosses and she would have to take some direction from him.