UT Dallas Graduate Witnessed, Contributed to Richardson’s Rapid Rise

Managing a thriving city is like being the CEO of a complex corporation with amazingly diverse customers and relentless competition from other entities who want what you have – decades of continuous growth. Juggling those demands may cause some to lose sleep, but newly appointed Richardson City Manager Don Magner BA’96 is up to the challenge.  

“I don’t really lose sleep, but sometimes it’s hard turning off my mind when I go home, especially lately,” Magner said. 

Lately, because Magner was appointed by the Richardson City Council as its new city manager in March 2022. Fortunately, he didn’t step into the job cold. Magner has been with the city for nearly 26 years, working in several departments and serving as deputy, first assistant and then assistant city manager before being named the city’s fifth city manager.  

Of course, Magner isn’t alone in overseeing a complex city like Richardson. He relies on 1,000 employees and many outside private and public partners keenly interested in the city’s success. One of those partners that Magner is intimately familiar with is his alma mater, The University of Texas at Dallas. Since UTD’s founding more than 50 years ago, city and University staff have worked closely, and Magner credits UT Dallas as one of the most important reasons the city has thrived. 

“The UT Dallas presence in Richardson is probably our most powerful economic development tool,” Magner said. 

A New Orleans native, Magner moved to North Texas with his wife, Dionne, in 1993 when she accepted a nursing job in Dallas. Magner took classes at area community colleges and then enrolled at UT Dallas where he studied government and politics in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1996. He later earned a master’s degree from The University of Texas at Arlington. 

The same year he graduated from UT Dallas, Magner accepted a position as a compensation specialist with the Richardson Human Resources Department where he led an analysis of the city’s salary structure. He went on to work for three other city departments, including serving as director of the Community Services Department. 

The 1990s were a heady time for economic growth in North Texas as thousands of telecommunication jobs were created in Richardson and surrounding cities beginning in the 1950s. Richardson became so famous for, and dependent on, the telecommunications industry that it became known as the Telecom Corridor. 

UTD is a differentiator for North Texas. The talent that comes out [of UT Dallas] is just incredible, and right now the number one need of businesses is talent.

Don Magner BA’96, Richardson city manager

By the late ’90s, wild speculation in telecommunication and fledgling internet stocks on the Nasdaq Stock Market created a price bubble that led to a widespread technology stock collapse beginning in 2000 that impacted investors and companies throughout the nation and hit Richardson especially hard. In the aftermath of the dot-com crash, numerous companies failed and, according to Magner, Richardson lost tens of thousands of telecommunication jobs. 

“At the time we were so telecom focused here,” Magner said. “There were a couple of very large companies that were the whales, and you had all the feeder fish, which were all the companies that supported them, and they were all focused on telecom.”  

Magner said the city began a transformation focusing on diversifying the economy, which today boasts more than 5,000 businesses – including 42 Fortune 500 companies – and more than 130,000 jobs, many in high tech, insurance and a resurgent telecommunications industry, according to the Richardson Economic Development Partnership. 

UT Dallas has been a huge part of the city’s burgeoning economy, Magner said, producing a highly educated workforce, especially in STEM fields, that feeds an ever-hungry assortment of high-tech companies.  

“UTD is a differentiator for North Texas,” Magner said. “The talent that comes out [of UT Dallas] is just incredible, and right now the number one need of businesses, from the largest to the smallest, is talent. That exact situation is one that TI was experiencing and is one of the biggest drivers today of a lot of relocation decisions that are being made.” 

Magner cites the example of CBRE, the international commercial real estate services company that recently moved their headquarters to Dallas and opened a technology hub with around 1,000 employees in Richardson. 

“They told us that one of the main drivers [for locating in Richardson] was the data scientists and the computer science majors that UTD is producing. They wanted to be literally a mile and a half away,” Magner said.  

Richardson is now developing a five-year strategic economic development plan, and Magner said one of his major goals as new city manager is to make the University a formal partner in that plan. That partnership was really launched when the city and UT Dallas collaborated on development of the Richardson Innovation Quarter building, he said. 

The facility will be the base for five University research centers, an office of the UT Dallas Venture Development Center and economic development offices for the city. Renovation of the city-owned building is nearing completion and will anchor the “IQ,” a 1,200-acre redevelopment east of North Central Expressway in Richardson that Magner believes will become a major North Texas hub for technology startups. The Richardson-University partnership will also be fostered by Magner’s seat on the UT Dallas Executive Board, a spot reserved for Richardson’s city manager. 

“Through this partnership with UTD, we want to benefit from the ideas of the academics, the entrepreneurs and the students at all those different levels, and make sure that we have a strategic plan that capitalizes on all that talent,” he said. 

Magner said he is excited to take on the challenges of managing the city of Richardson and he’s proud of several initiatives he’s led in his 25 years with the city. One of those was the grassroots Neighborhood Integrity and Vitality Strategy that worked to strengthen more than 70 Richardson neighborhoods and homeowners’ associations through community development and revitalization.  

Maintaining the city’s growth in the face of fierce competition and an aging infrastructure is the number one challenge facing Richardson today, Magner said. Less than 4% of the city is undeveloped while more than 80% of its streets, water and wastewater lines and other infrastructure are more than 25 years old, which means redevelopment and revitalization is now the name of the game. 

“Redevelopment is just much more complicated than greenfield development and much more time consuming and expensive,” Magner said. “So, as a city, we’re going to continue to reinvent ourselves just as we have done for decades.” 

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