Though involved in controversy at times, Shana Yelverton, Southlake’s city manager, said that for a tenure that long, controversy simply comes with the job of city manager.

The Abilene Reporter-News, in an article from April 1997, recalled that Blagg “was generally praised as an effective city manager.” The paper wrote, however, that “Blagg’s administration was also checkered with questions.”

At the time Blagg was a finalist for the job of city manager in Clearwater, Fla., a job he did not get.

Most prominent among the questions was a matter known locally as “Librarygate,” a controversy described in some detail that same month by the Tampa Tribune.

According to the Tribune article, the matter involved land the city wanted to buy for a new library in 1990. The city bid $210,000, but the land was bought in a “last minute” bid by “a group of city power brokers [for] $211,000.”

The same group had reportedly bid $175,000 earlier. Some questioned whether a member of Blagg’s administration had leaked the amount of the city’s bid.

The property was later purchased by the city from the investors for $420,000, the paper reported.

Blagg said the federal Resolution Trust Corp., which was mandated to liquidate insolvent savings and loans, sold the land.

“They were selling property for pennies on the dollar at the time,” Blagg recounted.

A grand jury investigated the matter and no indictments were returned. But, in 1992, Abilene voters rejected a bond proposal to build the library, partially because of questions regarding the sale.

In another matter, the paper noted that not long before Blagg resigned, he and his first wife divorced, and Blagg married a woman 19 years his junior, April Nixon, a former city news reporter for the Abilene paper. Blagg and Nixon were married late in 1994 and moved to Dallas.

“I will say that one of the reasons I left Abilene was the divorce,” Blagg said last week, “but that’s all I’m going to say.”

Nixon works for the city of Arlington as management resources director. Before that she was city communications director. This year she was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry to the Texas Municipal Retirement System board of trustees.

Blagg worked as vice president for the Toro Co. for the next three years, and left that job to re-enter the public sector. In 1997, he was hired as CEO of Metrocare in Dallas, formerly Dallas County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority. About halfway through his tenure at Metrocare, he said, the formula for funding the agency was changed to managed care and the budget was sharply reduced

The agency had major financial problems, got into difficulty with the IRS, and went into receivership by the state of Texas.

“I was CEO for about four and a half years. The first two years was under the old formula. We were treating about 20,000 individuals with various forms of mental illness. We put about $1 million in reserve in those first two years. Under the managed care formula our revenues dropped from about $70 million a year to just over $50 million. We lost about $8 million the last two years. We had too much capacity, buildings and other facilities ..... that we could not divest ourselves from.”

“We were behind in our payroll tax payments to the IRS, basically because our director of finance was not keeping me informed,” Blagg said. “I terminated him.”

Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price said he was often critical of Blagg’s leadership.

“I had no confidence in him,” Price said, “which I expressed on several occasions.”

Price said that Metrocare has “reimbursed the state since receivership. We’ve stayed positive.

“[Metrocare], compared to any other Texas agency like it, [now] has the best cost-per-patient delivery of services, ” Price stated.

“Just for the record book,” Blagg told The Journal last week, “the board didn’t ask me to resign, I did that myself. I felt it was in the best interest of our clients. Why? Because we had asked the state to intervene to help ourselves get out of debt. They were not willing to do that with me still there; they felt that would be inappropriate.”

Researcher Marcia Melton of the Star-Telegram contributed to this story.