Gina Nash was (and is) Intentionally Manipulating the City Council
When I asked Jeff during that phone call on February 1st of 2021 who had told the councilmembers about the exit interview, he said that it must have been Gina Nash. That fact was confirmed to me by multiple councilmembers.
The topic was never taken officially to the council as a whole. If it were it would have had to be in a meeting open to the public, as Texas’ Open Meetings Act would not permit the council to address it in any other manner. Instead, Gina spread these rumors behind closed doors, in private one-on-one meetings with the councilmembers, where she had complete control of what information was presented.
All city employees have an ethical duty to make sure that council is fully informed about issues, so that the council can make fully informed decisions. This is to prohibit employees, like Gina, from presenting only the facts in favor of the course of action which the employee thinks is the right course of action.
Gina was fully aware that she had a moral and ethical obligation to not let the council make a decision based solely on vague incriminatory allegations against the CEO without also letting the council hear the exculpatory defense against the allegations. Gina’s actions would have been wrong even if she didn’t stand to personally gain from the council’s decision. The fact that her actions led directly to her own promotion are particularly damning. Gina’s manipulation of the council helped her get what she personally wanted for herself, and what she wanted was increased involvement in Economic Development (per Jeff’s statement in the council meeting where he first proposed modifying the SEDC’s by-laws back on January 19th, 2021).
Gina had told the councilmembers that she couldn’t let them see the actual exit interview reports due to employee confidentiality. That reason is completely false, and a perversion of what confidentiality means. Confidentiality would prevent Gina from spreading rumors about the exit interview to the same extent that it stopped her from sharing the actual reports. Yet confidentiality isn’t really an issue here. Neither Ben Walker nor the former CEO were city employees, and the city’s HR department had no reason to conduct an exit interview with an employee of the SEDC. There is some question here as to whether the reports on the exit interview belonged to the city, as they were created by the city’s HR director, or to the SEDC, as they were the records of SEDC employees. Either way though, Gina was either bound by full confidentiality, or she was not. There is no “50% confidentiality law” on employee records which allows rumors to be spread.
I should point out at this point that Gina does not allow the council to read the reports of exit interviews of the city’s own employees, which is very interesting. Chance Lindsey told me that he had asked to see some, and Gina told him that she could not share that information with him. It is totally inconsistent with how Gina and Jeff shared Ben’s exit interview with the EDC’s Board of Direcors. Why could the Board of Directors be shown Ben’s exit interview, but the council could not see a city employee’s exit interview? It is also problematic because Gina’s policy blocks the council from having insight into the work environment of its employees. Are city employees frustrated, underpaid, or overworked? How would the council know?
I spoke to one former city employee who told me that they didn’t feel there was any point to being honest about problems in the city administration during their exit interview because they knew the complaint would go nowhere.
If Gina was concerned that the Board of Directors was failing to properly address the issues Ben Walker raised, she had multiple valid avenues she could have taken:
- She could have voiced her opinion in either of the CEO’s reviews in 2020.All she had said in those reviews was to “take these issues seriously”, which, as I stated above, we had.
- She could have asked me to revisit the issue in yet another review if she still had lingering concerns.
- She could have notified me or Mayor Felix that she thought a joint session was needed, where the council could have reviewed the exit interview reports with the board in Executive Session, which is closed to the public to actually protect employee confidentiality.
- She could have asked me to authorize the release of the SEDC’s employee file to the council.
Even if you bought into Gina’s defense that she couldn’t share the details with the council, there were multiple paths to get that document in front of the council would have been trivial, and then the council could have made an informed decision.
Even if Gina had not intended for her vague rumors of the exit interviews to manipulate the council, comments were made in front of Gina in the council meeting showing that the employee issues were influencing their decision on the by-laws. At that point, Gina’s obligation to present both sides of the issue were clear, and she failed to meet that obligation. She was getting what she wanted, so she kept silent.
To me, Gina knew two things:
- The actual issues raised by Ben Walker were assessed to be minor by the entire Board of Directors in multiple meetings.
- The rumors of the issues, which she was spreading, were influencing the council to take the action which Gina wanted, which was to promote her over the SEDC.
It turns out that the rumors of that exit interview were much more useful than the reports from the exit interview. By keeping the details from the council, unethically preventing them from making a fully informed decision, Gina gave herself the best chance to gain control of the SEDC.
But why had she mentioned her concerns to the council at all? The council had no authority to fire the CEO, or to even discipline her. If Gina actually had concerns that the issue hadn’t been properly resolved, her concern should have been brought to the board where they could have been dealt with. The way she took those concerns to the council did nothing to have those concerns properly addressed by fully informed individuals.
As I mentioned earlier, I had emailed Mike Felix on February 1st of 2021, just hours after Jeff had lied to me about the council wanting “to see a change” in the CEO’s employment. Mike Felix ignored my request for a joint session and my request for communication directly with him. Why would the Mayor ignore requests from the president of one of the city’s boards?
If we had been granted a joint meeting, the topic of Ben’s exit interview almost certainly would have come up. It would have been very hard for Gina to reconcile the concerns she had privately expressed to the council with the reality that the board had accessed Ben’s concerns to be minor. Even if Gina went all-in to try to convince the board that the issues were more severe than they had realized, she would have had to explain why she had not taken a stronger position on them during the two reviews where they had been discussed, when Gina had been explicitly asked for her opinion.
The board knew that the issues were minor because we had investigated and discussed them at length, and we also knew that Gina had not expressed any strong reaction to them in the CEO’s reviews. A joint meeting to discuss this issue would have unraveled all of Gina’s attempts at manipulating the council, and also risked exposing that Gina had been manipulating the council to believe the issues were severe. From my point of view, I have no doubt that the council would have agreed with the board’s assessment that the issues did not warrant the level of concern which Gina had been expressing to the council.
Two days after I emailed Mayor Felix asking for a joint meeting, I called the CEO and mentioned to her that I had emailed the Mayor and was awaiting a response. She recounted to me that “a little birdie” had told her that she had seen Mike Felix discussing my email with Gina Monday evening at the City Council meeting.
I have no doubt, in hindsight, that Gina was doing all she could to convince Mike that he should not get involved. Even a phone call to me about the issue would have exposed to me that Gina had been spreading rumors about the exit interview, and that would have been devastating to Gina’s attempt to work with the board. Mike put a lot of trust in Gina -- she was the City Manager, after all. The council had entrusted her to run the entire city. If Gina had told Mike that it was best to let the Board Liaison handle the matter, and that Mike should not insert himself in the SEDC issues, I have no doubt that Mike would have taken that advice to heart.
Why did the Mayor ignore my request for his opinion, and my request for a joint meeting? Because Gina Nash was backed into a corner by the rumors she had spread, and she couldn’t let her manipulation come to light. She’s still fighting to keep her illicit manipulation from coming to light.
Gina and I had had a good relationship. At one point, just a few weeks before Ben Walker put in his two-week notice, she had told me privately that she thought I should run for council. She said that she had been worried about an opening on the council, after Bill Adams had resigned, and she recounted to me that she had been in church praying for a good candidate to run, when my name had popped into her head. She said that she appreciated my leadership, and that I never operated with a hidden agenda. At the time, hearing praise from Gina meant a lot to me. I don’t have an ego, I know I’m not perfect, and I don’t feel pride a lot, but I was proud of those compliments, because they came from her and I had a lot of respect for her.
Now I have to wonder if it was just an attempt to curry favor with me. To manipulate me. It was just a few weeks later when she told me privately that the complaint against the CEO was severe enough to warrant her dismissal.
I no longer feel pride for those compliments from Gina. I can’t feel that they were sincere.
According to her bio on the city’s website, “Ms. Nash is a member of the Texas City Management Association’s Ethics Committee, where she develops and presents ethics training for the statewide association.”
One of the documents which TCMA publishes includes a “Code of Ethics with Guidelines”. There are several statements of interest related to Gina Nash’s conduct related to these matters (emphasis mine):
- “Members shall not disclose to others, or use to advance their personal interest, intellectual property, confidential information, or information that is not yet public knowledge, that has been acquired by them in the course of their official duties.”
- “A member shall not leverage his or her position for personal gain or benefit.”
- “The member should openly share information with the governing body while diligently carrying out the member's responsibilities as set forth in the charter or enabling legislation.”
- “Manage all personnel matters with fairness and impartiality.”
Gina Nash used the information about the existence of a complaint about the CEO to advance her personal interest. Gina Nash leveraged her position to influence the council to believe there was a problem in the SEDC which she could solve. Gina Nash did not openly share the information about the details of the complaint, nor that the CEO had adequately defended herself with written documentation. Gina Nash did not treat the CEO with fairness, and especially not impartiality. Gina wanted the CEO out of the way, so that she could take control of the SEDC for herself, and she made it happen with the help of Jeff Bickerstaff’s lies.
There are two more pieces from the TCMA Ethics document, which Gina glaringly failed to uphold:
- Members should conduct themselves so as to maintain public confidence in their position and profession, the integrity of their local government, and in their responsibility to uphold the public trust.
- Members should conduct their professional and personal affairs in a manner that demonstrates that they cannot be improperly influenced in the performance of their official duties.
Gina conducted herself very poorly when she allowed her own desire for control of the SEDC to influence what she told the council, and it is going to risk public confidence in not only her, but also in the integrity of the council she serves.
There was no reason for the city’s HR director to conduct Ben’s exit interview, unless she and/or Gina were hoping to dig up dirt on the CEO. While the HR director routinely conducted exit interviews of department heads, she did not make a habit of conducting exit interviews for the city’s low-level employees, so why did she do one for Ben Walker, who wasn’t even a city employee?
Gina had told me that she had directed the city’s HR Director to write up her separate review of the CEO, which had been a one-sided critique of the CEO. At the time, I thought the HR Director had only seen bits and pieces, and I naively believed that what she wrote was the HR director’s unbiased recounting of issues which she had limited information on. Now I see that it was a hit piece, designed solely to add criticism of the CEO on top of Ben’s exit interview. Most likely, Gina and the HR director realized (as the board later did) that the issues in Ben’s exit interview had been minor and didn’t warrant the CEO’s removal, though they had done their best to amp them up. Gina needed more damaging accusations against the CEO so she asked the HR director to write something up for her. It also explains why Gina did not want the CEO to see the HR director’s report, as the CEO would have known that the HR director knew more than she had put into her one-sided report. The CEO would have recognized that it was an intentional hit piece.
At the meeting where Jeff advocated for the CEO’s removal Gina had dropped off of the call without warning or explanation. She had always been in the CEO’s reviews, so why had she disappeared without a word to me? The board had needed her opinion more than ever as we tried to deal with Jeff, and at that point I had no idea that Gina had been manipulating the council. For several months afterward, I wondered if she had dropped off so that she didn’t have to back-up or contradict Jeff’s accusations. By being absent she could remain neutral and uninvolved, but she was the secretary of the corporation. She had an obligation to be there.
As I began to understand that the council had been kept in the dark about Jeff’s role in the CEO’s removal my thinking evolved on the topic. I now suspect that Gina dropped off of the call so that she could plead ignorance of what had happened. If a councilmember asked if Jeff had been involved in having the CEO removed Gina could plead ignorance. Keep in mind, Mike Felix prevented discussion of what had happened when Tim Shivers tried to bring it up in May of 2021 at the first joint meeting, and the City Attorney had prevented it from coming up in the meeting when they removed me. According to a statement Cullen King made to a board member after my removal, he had no idea that the CEO was forced to resign, or that it was at Jeff’s behest. That was a full year after Jeff had asked for the CEO’s removal, and Cullen King still had no idea that the CEO had been forced out.
How culpable was Gina in all of this?
Gina had misled me directly and intentionally, by priming me to believe that the issues in Ben’s exit interview were severe enough to warrant dismissal.
Gina dropped off of the meeting before Jeff started advocating for the CEO’s removal without warning or excuse, though she had an obligation to be there and had always been in the CEO’s reviews before.
Gina had spread the rumors of Ben’s exit interview to the councilmembers, telling them explicitly that the board had failed to address the issues properly. She ignored avenues which were available to her to have the council actually read the reports, and ignored her ethical obligation to fully inform the council about the issues, all in pursuit of her own personal goal, control of the SEDC.