Recent events have raised troubling questions about Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson’s conduct while in office. An allegation surfaced in court during the mayor’s divorce proceedings that he had an affair with a city staffer. Johnson and the woman denied last month that there was an affair.
We expect that a similar allegation against a high-ranking officer at a private company would trigger a human resources investigation. Given Johnson’s position of power at City Hall, the City Council would have been well within its rights to call for an investigation to determine whether there was a romantic relationship. If so, what was the power dynamic between the mayor and the woman? Did he have influence over her employment at City Hall and future career prospects? Were there any city policies broken?
But for all its vaunted ethics reforms, Dallas City Hall, employer of about 13,000 people, lacks clear rules on workplace dating. Such policies are common throughout corporate America and are put in place to protect employees from potential abuses. Our neighbors in Fort Worth and Arlington city government have their own policies. But Dallas doesn’t. It should.
While divorce is a personal matter, an alleged romantic relationship between the mayor and a city staff member is a matter of public concern because it raises questions about the potential for unprofessional or inappropriate workplace conduct. The mayor’s wife said in court that she caught Johnson being unfaithful with the woman in 2021, at the time the woman was a city employee. The mayor reportedly admitted in court that he and the woman had shared a hotel room in 2023, when she was no longer employed with the city, and that it’s possible that he had told her he loved her.
We asked the city for its policies, directives or guidance on romantic relationships between employees and/or city officials. The city sent us its policy prohibiting sexual harassment, which deals with unwanted advances; along with excerpts from its personnel rules, which apply only to city employees; and its code of ethics, which covers employees and council members. Dallas has nepotism rules prohibiting employees from working under the supervision of a relative or domestic partner, defined as someone who is in an intimate relationship with the employee and lives in the same household.
The city highlighted a passage from the code of ethics requiring that council members and employees “operate with integrity and in a manner that merits the trust and support of the public.” Another highlighted provision calls on council members and employees to consider how their personal and professional actions might affect the city’s reputation.
Nothing in those two policies can be discerned as a clear standard of conduct that can be applied with consistency to intra-office relationships at City Hall. Dallas shouldn’t let individual employees or council members be the judge of what office relationships are acceptable.
Some employers prohibit colleagues from dating while others require disclosures to HR. But dating between employees and their managers or people in a reporting relationship is universally frowned upon for obvious reasons. These romances can create perceptions of preferential treatment or leave the partner in the subordinate role vulnerable to retaliation if the relationship turns sour.
The city of Fort Worth’s nepotism rules prohibit “any involvement of a romantic nature” between a member of management and anyone the person supervises directly or indirectly. Arlington’s personnel manual has an entire section on “supervisor/subordinate dating.” It bans employees from dating others in their chain of command, requiring disclosure of such a relationship so that one of the employees can be reassigned.
In Dallas, almost the entire city bureaucracy reports up to the city manager, who reports to the City Council, with the mayor serving in a role akin to board chairman.
Having allegations about the mayor swirling around City Hall is bad enough. Even worse is the city’s silence on intimate relationships between people with an imbalance of power in the workplace, giving a cover of ambiguity to situations that are plainly problematic. The City Council should amend the city’s personnel rules and code of ethics to put in guardrails to protect city employees.
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