11 Things Texas City Councils Get Wrong About Personnel Decisions

The Light Didn't Come On, So Somebody Opened the Wall

Here is the short answer, before the story, because some of you are reading this on a phone in a parking lot ten minutes before a meeting. In a Texas council-manager city, the council hires and fires the city manager and whichever officers the charter names directly. That is the list. Everybody else works for the manager. If your council is voting on whether to terminate a public works director, you are not exercising authority, you are creating a lawsuit and putting your own seat at risk while you do it.

Now the story.

I have watched a version of the same meeting in enough Texas cities that I could set my watch by it. A council gets frustrated with a department. Service is slow, a resident complained at the podium, somebody's cousin got a runaround at the counter. The frustration is legitimate. The response is a switch on the wall that does not work, so a councilmember decides to open the wall and start pulling wire.

And the thing about pulling wire is that it feels like action. It feels decisive. You are not sitting there tolerating a problem, you are reaching in and fixing it yourself. Right up until the point that you discover the wire you yanked was carrying the load for the whole building, and now you have a bigger problem, a repair bill, and an electrician explaining to you that the switch was never the issue.

I want to be careful here, because I am not writing this to make councils look stupid. Most councilmembers I meet are running a small business or a ranch or a shift somewhere, serving for a stipend that would embarrass a part-time barista, in a role nobody trained them for, being asked to make decisions with real legal consequences. The failure is almost never bad character. It is that nobody handed them the wiring diagram, and then the first time the lights flickered we acted shocked that they went looking for the breaker.

So here is the diagram. Eleven items, each with what councils actually do, where the boundary comes from, and what it costs when nobody in the room says stop.

The Eleven

1. Believing that because you are elected, the staff works for you

This is the root error, and nine of the other ten grow out of it. The logic feels airtight from inside the chair: the voters put me here, the employees are paid with public money, therefore I am the boss of the employees. Every part of that sentence is true except the conclusion.

In the council-manager form, the council is the board. It sets policy, adopts the budget, and hires one person to run the operation. The city manager appoints and removes department heads and staff. That is the entire architecture, and it exists specifically to keep personnel decisions from being made by a body that faces re-election. Chapter 25 of the Local Government Code establishes the city manager form, and home rule charters build on it.

The correction is not complicated: you have one employee. Direct your energy there. If a department is failing, that is a conversation about the manager's performance, held in the manager's evaluation, where you have all the authority you need and none that you do not.

2. Treating "I was just asking a question" as unlimited license

Most Texas home rule charters carry a non-interference clause, and the standard language runs close to this: neither the council nor any of its members shall direct or order the appointment or removal of any person by the city manager or the manager's subordinates, and except for the purpose of inquiry, the council shall deal with the administrative service solely through the city manager.

Read the exception carefully, because councilmembers lean on it hard. Except for the purpose of inquiry. You may ask. You may not steer. And the distance between "how long is the backlog on water taps" and "I need you to move the Hernandez tap to the front of the list" is the entire ballgame.

3. Posting "Personnel" on the agenda and calling that notice

The Open Meetings Act requires notice sufficient to alert an ordinary member of the public to the subject of the meeting. A single word does not do that. "Personnel" tells the public nothing, and Texas Attorney General guidance has long treated generic labels as inadequate where the matter is significant, which the removal or evaluation of a chief executive certainly is.

The practical standard: name the position and cite the exception. "Deliberation regarding the evaluation, duties, and possible reassignment of the City Manager pursuant to Section 551.074." It is not hard. It is just a habit nobody built.

Source reference: Texas Attorney General, Open Meetings Act Handbook

4. Believing executive session means the conversation disappears

It does not, and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding on the list.

First, Section 551.103 requires the governmental body to keep either a certified agenda or a recording of most closed meetings, with the attorney-consultation exception. Section 551.104 governs preservation and provides for release under court order. So the "private" conversation in which a councilmember said the quiet part out loud about somebody's age, or accent, or church, is memorialized, retained, and reachable.

Second, and this one genuinely surprises people: Section 551.074(b) provides that the closed-session personnel exception does not apply if the officer or employee who is the subject of the deliberation requests a public hearing. The employee holds that switch. Not the council. Not the attorney. The employee. I have watched a council walk into a closed session fully prepared to discuss somebody's shortcomings candidly and get informed at the door that the discussion would be happening in front of the chamber, the newspaper, and the employee's family.

Source reference: Texas Government Code Section 551.074

5. Reaching consensus behind the door and staging the vote outside it

Section 551.102 is short and unforgiving: a final action, decision, or vote on a matter deliberated in a closed meeting may only be taken in an open meeting.

Councils rarely violate this crudely by raising hands in the back room. They violate it elegantly. Everyone emerges with the same position, the item is called, the vote is 5-0 with no discussion, and the whole thing takes ninety seconds. That is the violation with better choreography, and any attorney deposing your councilmembers will find it, because five people cannot separately reconstruct a decision they never actually made in the open.

6. Closing the door for a conversation about a group of employees

Section 551.074 covers deliberation about a public officer or employee. Singular. It is not a blanket personnel exception.

Discussions about a pay plan, a reorganization, a reduction in force policy, staffing levels in a department, or a benefits change affecting a class of employees are policy discussions, and they belong in open session. Councils close the door for these constantly because they are uncomfortable, and discomfort is not one of the statutory exceptions.

7. Treating a complaint made to you as constituent service

An employee stops a councilmember at the grocery store and says her supervisor has been making comments about her pregnancy. The councilmember listens, is sympathetic, tells her to hang in there, and tells nobody, because it felt like a private confidence and because it did not arrive through channels.

The city is now on notice. Notice runs to the employer, and a member of the governing body is the employer for this purpose. The clock on the city's obligation to investigate started at the grocery store, and every week between then and the day someone official finds out is a week the city will have to explain.

8. Guessing about whistleblower protection, in both directions

The Texas Whistleblower Act, Chapter 554 of the Government Code, protects a public employee who in good faith reports a violation of law to an appropriate law enforcement authority. That phrase is doing enormous work, and the Texas Supreme Court has read it narrowly: the recipient must be an entity that actually enforces or prosecutes the law allegedly violated, not simply someone senior enough to do something about it.

Councils get this wrong in both directions. Some assume any internal complaint triggers absolute protection and freeze, unable to address genuine performance problems for fear of the word retaliation. Others assume no internal report ever counts and proceed as though nothing happened. Both are guesses, and this is precisely the question you pay a city attorney to answer on the specific facts before you act.

One number worth carrying: a supervisor who knowingly takes adverse personnel action in violation of the Act can face a civil penalty of up to $15,000 personally. Not the city. The person.

Source reference: Texas Attorney General, Whistleblower Act notice

9. Botching the one personnel decision that actually is yours

Here is the irony I never get tired of. Councils spend enormous energy reaching for decisions that belong to the manager, and then handle the manager's own separation like it is a routine agenda item.

This is the decision the charter genuinely hands you, and it is the one with the most moving parts: the notice provisions in the employment agreement, the severance triggers and what conduct forfeits them, whether the agreement requires cause and what the agreement means by cause, the difference between resignation and termination for every downstream purpose, the retirement and insurance consequences, and the public statement afterward. Cities routinely give away six figures of leverage in the first forty-eight hours because nobody read the contract before the motion was made.

If you are contemplating this, the order of operations is: read the agreement, call the attorney, then talk about how you feel. Not the reverse.

10. Talking about it afterward

The vote is over. A councilmember goes home, opens the community Facebook group, and explains to constituents why the city had to let that person go, because people deserve to know and because the version circulating is unfair to the council.

Two problems. First, under the Public Information Act, records relating to the transaction of public business are subject to disclosure regardless of what device or account created them. Your personal phone does not launder a public record. Those texts and posts show up in discovery, and they show up looking exactly as unguarded as they were.

Second, publicly stating the reasons for a termination in stigmatizing terms is how a routine separation acquires a constitutional dimension for a public employee. A former employee who cannot get hired anywhere in the county because of what a councilmember posted has a different and more expensive case than one who was simply let go.

The discipline here is unglamorous and absolute. "Personnel matters are confidential and I am not going to discuss them." That is the whole statement. It will feel inadequate. It is not.

11. Applying the wrong rulebook entirely

Texas municipal employment is not one system, it is several, and which one governs depends on what your city adopted and for whom.

• Chapter 143 civil service applies only in cities that adopted it by election, and covers fire and police personnel, with its own commission, notice, appeal, and hearing examiner machinery.
• Chapter 174 governs collective bargaining for fire and police, again only where separately adopted.
• Chapter 617 bars collective bargaining for public employees generally outside those authorizations.
• Everyone else is at-will, subject to your charter, your personnel policy, and every federal and state protection that applies to any employer.

I have seen councils run a full civil service appeal for an employee civil service never covered, and I have seen councils summarily terminate a firefighter as though the chapter did not exist. Both are unforced. Both are expensive. Both start with nobody in the room being certain which rulebook was open.

The Council Authority Line

If you keep one thing from this article, keep this table. Print it, laminate it, put it in the front of the council binder next to the agenda. Nearly every item above is a variation of somebody being unsure which row they were standing in.

The Council Authority Line. Faulkner HR Solutions. Original framework, 2026. Cite as: Faulkner, T.W. (2026). The Council Authority Line. Faulkner HR Solutions.

The rows in bold are the ones where the council genuinely holds the authority. There are four of them. Everything else on this list is a place where the most useful thing a councilmember can do is ask a question and then sit on their hands.

Why This Keeps Happening to the Same Cities

Now let me say the harder thing, and it is the same argument I make about supervisors and documentation, so I may as well be consistent about it.

If your council keeps ending up in personnel trouble, the councilmembers are not the disease. They are the symptom that shows up first because they are the most visible people in the building. A council that reaches past the line is almost always a council that has been left without three things: a written orientation that covers this material before the first meeting, a manager who says "that one is mine" out loud and early without treating it as a confrontation, and a city attorney who is in the room before the motion rather than after the lawsuit.

When those three exist, councils behave. I have seen it hold in cities with genuinely contentious politics, because the boundary was established as architecture rather than as a personal objection from whoever happened to be manager that year. When those three are missing, you can replace every seat on the dais and get the identical outcome from the new people within about eighteen months, which should tell you something about where the problem actually lives.

This is the same trap I have written about elsewhere: collecting the most emotionally satisfying explanation and calling it a diagnosis. It is very satisfying to decide that the last council was a mess and this one is better. It is much less satisfying, and far more useful, to admit that the city never wrote down where the line was and has been relying on everyone's good instincts to find it in the dark.

I will also be honest about my own incentives, the way I always try to be. I make more money on the version of this problem that has already produced a demand letter than on the version where somebody sat a new council down in January and spent ninety minutes on this material. The second version is cheaper for you and duller for me. Do the second one anyway.

"You cannot govern your way out of a boundary nobody wrote down. Every council that keeps crossing the line is a council that was never shown where it was."

— Dr. Thomas W. Faulkner, Faulkner HR Solutions

What to Do Before the Next Meeting

Four things, none of which require a consultant, a budget amendment, or anybody admitting fault in public.

• Pull your charter and find the non-interference clause. Read the consequence sentence out loud at a workshop. Not as a threat — as information most of the room has never seen.
• Adopt a 24-hour complaint routing rule in the council rules of procedure. One sentence. It closes the single most common notice gap on this list.
• Change how personnel items get posted. Name the position, cite the exception. Retire the word "Personnel" as a standalone agenda item permanently.
• Put this on the new-member orientation agenda alongside the Open Meetings Act training every member already has to complete. The state training covers the meeting mechanics well. It does not cover the charter boundary, and the charter boundary is where councils actually get hurt.

If you want the harder version, the one that finds out whether your personnel policy, your charter, and your actual practice agree with each other, that is what a municipal people systems audit is for. But do the four above first. They are free, and they prevent most of what I get called about.

A necessary note. I am an HR and organizational consultant, not an attorney, and this article is general information rather than legal advice for your city. Charters differ, adoption status differs, and the facts in front of you always matter more than the pattern. Your city attorney is the right person to answer the specific question. What I can tell you is which questions to ask before the motion is made.