“It was the most amazing experience of my professional career,” said Mary (Moore) Suhm ’68, Dallas city manager, as she talked about providing emergency services for evacuees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “We were beginning to get people who needed some help, and we knew there were people already staying in the hotels. We pulled out the emergency plan, and it called for opening the recreation centers. We had 60 people or so in the centers; so we were feeling pretty good about ourselves until we found out there were 25,000 people heading toward Dallas who were not going to be able to take care of themselves. I remember looking at a spot on the wall wondering what in the world I was going to do. I haven’t had that feeling very often in my life.”
Providing emergency response for Katrina and Rita evacuees was one of the most emotionally trying yet professionally fulfilling times for the chief executive officer of Dallas. For one swift moment, a hint of trepidation crept into her mind, but it quickly passed as she gathered the staff and prepared for the largest evacuation the United States had ever encountered. Working 16-, sometimes 24-hour, days for six weeks didn’t seem to bother the city staff. There were so many people who had literally lost everything in the storm, the long hours required to care for evacuees seemed to pale in comparison. Although, while growing up in Beaumont, she had gone through Hurricane Audrey, a Category 4 hurricane, in 1957, and Hurricane Carla, a Category 5 hurricane, in 1961, nothing prepared her for the devastation wrought by the 2005 storms.
“People came to us with literally nothing. Their lives were devastated, and everyone needed assistance of some kind. I was so proud of our response team and the city staff for doing the things that were necessary to help so many disaffected people,” she recalled.
“Everyone pitched in and gave all they had during that crisis.”
Mary Suhm is an executive who likes to keep her options open to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. Suhm graduated from Lamar earning a bachelor’s degree in education with an emphasis in biology and English. She was awarded a pre-med scholarship and considered pursuing a career in the health care profession, but, at the urging of her mother, who was a teacher at French High School, she earned a teaching certification so “she would always be able to get a job.”
Her career began as a teacher at R.L. Turner High School in Carrollton, where she taught for a year before moving to a teaching position at Allen High School near Dallas. During the spring of her first year at Allen, she became pregnant with her first child, which cut her teaching short.
“As I think back about that now, I can just imagine that principal was ready to kill me,” she said. “A friend was going back to school to get her master’s degree, so I decided to go with her.”
That decision earned her an M.B.A. and a master’s degree in library science from the University of North Texas. Her position as director of the Allen Public Library led to a director’s position with the Dallas Public Library in 1978, beginning her long tenure with the city of Dallas.
She has held many leadership roles in Dallas city governance, including executive assistant director of the Dallas Police Department (the first female non-sworn executive in DPD history), director of court services, assistant to the mayor and assistant city manager, which eventually led to her appointment as city manager in 2005. She is responsible for an annual budget of more than $2 billion while supervising in excess of 13,000 employees.
Suhm has been recognized for her professional achievements by the North Central Texas Council of Government with the Linda Keithley Award for Women in Public Management, the Women’s Council of Dallas County as Woman of the Year and by the North Texas Chapter of the American Society for Public Administrators as the North Texas Public Administrator of the Year. She has earned a reputation for creativity and innovation by reorganizing city services delivery to align with priorities established by the City Council, establishing better customer service throughout the city organization and establishing a permanent efficiency team to streamline city processes and identify revenue sources and savings. Suhm is active in mentoring other female mid-level managers in the city of Dallas by being available for counsel, offering advice and making opportunities available.
“I recognize the challenges for women in general in their careers, but, for me personally, I don’t think about challenges as challenges for women. I think about the challenges women deal with as professionals, such as the problems you have to solve and the things you have to deal with along the way,” she said. “I try to give women as much opportunity as possible in roles that are not historically female roles with the city.
“We have, I suspect, one of the few female directors of a major water system in the country, a woman whom I hired. The woman who is head of the sanitation department is another example. Those are not traditional jobs for women.”
A member of Alpha Delta Pi sorority, she worked at the Lamar swimming pool as a lifeguard during the summers. One not-so-fond memory was preparing for graduation. Her schedule was to graduate at 10 a.m., get married at 2 p.m. and begin a new teaching job the following week. That’s when she found out she was one credit hour short of graduating.
“I panicked,” she recalls. “Dr. Richard Setzer, the president of Lamar at the time, took time to see me and hear my problems. I realize now that he went out of his way to see me and even set up an individual study class that helped me get all that resolved. Years later, in looking back, I realize how much he helped me and the fact that he probably wasn’t even the one who should have been dealing with my problem.”
When asked about hobbies, or special interests, she laughs and comments that running the city of Dallas is a seven-day-a-week, 18-hour-a-day job, but she loves her work and feels honored to be entrusted with such an awesome responsibility. She does enjoy spending time with her grandchildren. Suhm has two sons, Gabe and Josh, and four grandchildren, Emma, Eli, Collin and Jared.
