The Days after the Phone Call
If you’ve listened to the recording of my phone call with Jeff, on YouTube here, you heard that Jeff said several times that his message was coming from the council. That “they” (meaning the council) wanted to move on from the CEO, and “they” had concerns. He portrayed himself as the unfortunate guy who hated doing this but had to convey this message in his role as Board Liaison.
Shortly after that call from Jeff, I called Councilman Frank Millsap to verify that he had received the emails I had sent him a few days earlier, and to try to understand why Jeff was saying the council wanted to move on from the CEO. That call was also recorded and is available on YouTube.
On that call, I told Frank that Jeff had told me it seemed pretty clear that the council would like for the CEO to be discharged, but that I didn’t agree that it seemed clear as I had not heard that from the council. Frank said “That’s a good point that you make because I have not been conferred about that, not at all.” He went on to express frustration that Jeff had gone to the City Attorney to have an amendment drafted with no input from the council on the matter.
Frank recounted to me that Jeff had come by his shop a few days earlier:
“I just told him point blank he, and he sort of admitted he could have done things better, and I said you literally didn't do your job and I'm asking you to simply resign as liaison for the EDC for the better of Sachse and put your aspirations, personal aspirations aside and do that. He said ‘Well I'm probably not going to do that as you understand.’ I said ‘Well, I didn't expect you to but I just want you to be aware of, that when this comes up for action at the board at the public meeting I'm going to publicly ask you to resign and say you've already admitted you didn't do your job. So they didn't put it on the board for tonight.”
Frank had given me confirmation of my suspicion, that there was no truth to Jeff’s statement “Council wants to see a change.” My biggest hope was that council would call a joint session between the BoD and the City Council to address the mess which Jeff was creating, and I believed that Frank and Chance were going to work to get one called, but I didn’t know how that process worked.
Because I knew that the facts of Ben’s issues did not warrant the CEO’s removal (which was the opinion that the board came to after a full discussion), I wanted to have a discussion with the city council about the issue. It was entirely possible that they saw the issue differently than the board had, but it was peculiar that the council, with limited insight into the activities of the SEDC, would come to such a different opinion than the board of directors had come to. From my conversations with Frank, it was clear that he was aware that Ben had raised issues in his exit interview, but that Frank had not known how the CEO’s review had played out. He knew there were allegations, but he did not know that the issues were fairly minor or that the CEO had adequately defended herself.
The situation started to feel very similar to how Jeff had recounted Mike VanBuskirk’s concerns. The council was told just enough information to believe there was a problem, but not enough information to understand the truth at the heart of the issue. It was, to me, another indication that the council was being manipulated into believing there were larger problems in the SEDC than there really were. And it was all being done to support Jeff’s by-law amendment and the CEO’s removal.
I spoke to the CEO a little while later, as Jeff had called her to tell her that he was going to advocate for her removal.
The CEO and I spoke for quite a while, and one of the most shocking pieces was that she said Jeff had told her “Of course the board doesn’t have to fire you. I have no idea if they’re going to or not. I’m just the liaison, and they can choose not to, but if they do I can tell you the next thing we’re going to do is either go back and revisit the by-laws change or the council could just fire the whole board.”
Jeff had laid it out pretty clearly to the CEO. If the board did not acquiesce to his request, he was going to strip the board of its authority, or strip the board of its members. And while he kept saying “we” to the CEO, according to Frank the council had never had a single discussion about the CEO’s job performance. To be clear, this wasn’t a case of Jeff misunderstood what the council wanted from some conversation. Over the weeks and months after Jeff made these claims, every councilmember I asked has confirmed that the council had never had discussions about the CEO’s performance. Most have gone so far as to say that they had no basis to weigh in at all as they had never received any substantive information from the Board Liaison (Jeff) about the operations of the SEDC. Jeff was fabricating the entire notion that the “council” had given him any input on the matter of the CEO’s employment, because Jeff had kept council completely in the dark about the SEDC. As Frank had told Jeff, “you literally didn't do your job [communicating between the BoD and City Council as Board Liaison]”.
On my phone call with the CEO, she had also said it was “very clear that he [Jeff] is bound and determined…that this was going to go down, one way or another”. The CEO said that nobody had ever told her why council wanted her dismissed, and she said she hadn’t asked.
I told her that Frank had said the council had never discussed her performance, or whether or not they wanted her removed. She couldn’t fathom why Jeff would present this as being the wishes of council if that wasn’t the case. She said “it’s weird, and it’s dangerous, that Jeff is coming out there and doing that because it would get back, I mean he has to know that it would get back to council that he was representing that to the board.” She later said “This just goes to show that he will go to great lengths to make that happen.” She indicated that she felt that Jeff and Gina were clearly looking for any reason to get rid of her. She said Jeff offered (as a supposedly friendly gesture) to ask for a special meeting to have her removed earlier if she wanted it to happen quickly. How nice of him.
I asked the CEO how I could go about requesting a joint meeting with the council, and she gave me several options.
Later that day (the same day as the call, February 1st) I took what I felt was the best approach, and I emailed the mayor, Mike Felix. I still very much wanted to avoid taking a confrontational approach. My only goal was to try to get the SEDC back on track, and try to get the facts about the SEDC in front of the council. I had no need or desire to paint Jeff in a bad light. I hoped that a joint session would allow the board to explain the whole truth about the CEO’s job performance and together we could make an informed decision on whether or not it was time for the SEDC to part ways with her. If the joint meeting made it clear that the council did not want the CEO removed, I hoped that Jeff would back off, because he would have heard that the council was not on board with his goal. On the other hand, if the council did in fact want the CEO removed they could clearly communicate that directly to us.
I explained to Mike that Jeff had called me “to advocate for the Board of Directors to dismiss our CEO” and that “He [Jeff] conveyed that it seemed pretty clear that her dismissal is what the City Council would like to see.”
I asked Mike for his opinion, if he had decided she should be removed, and if so could he share his reasons. I also told Mike that other councilmembers had discussed having a joint meeting and “I would appreciate your support for such a joint meeting.”
I had hoped that Mike would realize Jeff had stepped out of line by asking for the CEO’s dismissal, and I hoped that he would call for a joint meeting to resolve the issue. I had emailed Mike directly in the hopes that he would just take action without consulting with others. As Mayor it is my understanding that he can call joint meetings whenever he wishes, so he didn’t need anybody’s approval.
There was a council meeting that evening, Monday, February 1st of 2021, and while the SEDC was not on the agenda Mike could have announced that he was going to schedule a joint meeting, but he did not.
Two days later Mike replied to my email, with a brief “Maybe we can talk soon”. I responded within minutes with my phone number and my appreciation.
Mayor Felix never called me to discuss my email, and he never called the joint meeting I had requested. In fact, one month later he voted down an opportunity to have a joint meeting.
The joint meeting was the only hope I had for the council to intervene in Jeff’s plan, and with the Mayor seemingly not even willing to talk to me my hopes dwindled. I couldn’t fathom how he could ignore a request to talk from the President of one of the city’s boards. It was unconscionable to me that he read my email and emailed me back but wouldn’t answer my questions, wouldn't talk to me, and wouldn't call a joint session. The SEDC, its Board of Directors, and its CEO were in the midst of a crisis, created by Jeff Bickerstaff, and nobody was coming to help.
Though the Mayor wasn’t willing to talk to me I found that other councilmembers were. I emailed Cullen King and Michelle Howarth an email similar to the one that I had sent to the mayor, asking for their opinion and their support for a joint session. All of them emailed me back or were willing to have phone calls.
The response I got from each of them was basically the same, that they didn’t have enough information to determine if the CEO was doing her job well as they hadn’t had sufficient updates about the SEDC.
It was surprising to hear over and over. Jeff had told me the council wanted a change, but four (Franks, Lindsey, King, and Howarth) of the seven councilmembers had now told me that they had no basis to judge the CEO’s job performance because the council had never discussed it. In these conversations several of the councilmembers did tell me they appreciated the SEDC’s Strategic Plan, which the CEO and the BoD had presented to the council on October 26th of 2020, and which the council had unanimously approved. I’ll discuss the Strategic Plan a bit later in this document.
Several of them also said, along the lines of not being in-the-loop on EDC issues, that they felt they needed more information and involvement in the EDC, which is why they were open to the idea of restructuring the EDC with Gina as the CEO. That was also surprising to hear, as keeping the council informed about EDC activities, and passing along their wishes to the EDC, was the sole duty of Jeff Bickerstaff as Board Liaison. If they felt under-informed and out-of-the-loop, then Jeff was failing at his job as Board Liaison. If they had input they wanted to give us, to increase their involvement in EDC decisions, then Jeff was the person who was supposed to get that guidance from them and carry those messages to us. Yet several councilmembers who were supportive of Jeff’s restructuring initiative failed to realize that the issues they were concerned about were caused by Jeff’s failure to communicate as Board Liaison.