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Less than five months after he was fired by our City Council and paid nearly $890,000 in severance, Tommy Gonzalez was hired July 11, 2023 as City Manager of Midland with a base salary of $350,000 and a vehicle allowance of $9,000.
The El Paso Times claimed the new job represented “a significant pay cut for Gonzalez, whose salary was more than $436,000 at the end of his tenure in El Paso.”
That is not exactly true.
Gonzalez’s contract with Midland authorizes him “to perform outside consulting services” provided the services do not “conflict with or otherwise interfere with the City Manager’s duty to the City.”
Our friends at West Texas Red Wave provided us with a copy of a contract between Tommy Gonzalez and the City of Pecos (pop. 7,980) for “comprehensive consulting services” at a rate of $9,500 per month from May 1, 2024 to April 30, 2025. He also provided us with an amendment to the contract extending his services and compensation through April 30, 2026.
That is $228,000 for only 24 months of work, which essentially means that every man, woman, and child paid him $28.57!
In addition, Wave Texas Red Wave sent us payment records showing that the City of Ferris, Texas (pop. 3,740) has paid Gonzalez a total of $122,613 between August 2023 and March 2025, or $32.78 for every man, woman and child.
Brooke Williams is Ferris’s City Manager, and Gonzalez happened to write the foreword to a book he released last year. Moreover, Williams and Gonzalez are both involved with an organization called Quality Texas Foundation (Williams is CEO and Gonzalez is “Chairman Emeritus”).
Thus, in addition to his Midland salary of $350,000, Gonzalez will have earned an additional $350,613 between August 2023 and April 2026, an average of $131,480 per year.
That means that Gonzalez is earning about $481,480 per year, quite a bit more than he earned in El Paso in the final year of his contract, and that is only what we know so far!
But does his extensive consulting for Pecos and Midland conflict with his full-time duties in Midland?
We’ll let Midland City Council wrestle with that one.
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