Storrs/Screenshot via City of Amarillo
Interim City Manager Andrew Freeman has promoted City of Amarillo CFO Laura Storrs to Interim Deputy City Manager.
The main role of the Deputy City Manager is to fill in when the City Manager is unavailable. This role was previously filled by Freeman, who had served under former City Manager Jared Miller.
According to her profile on the Texas Municipal League website, Storrs has worked for the City of Amarillo since 2006, when she was hired as a budget analyst. She served in that role until 2013, when she was promoted to City Auditor, where she served for nearly a year before being named Finance Director in 2014 and Assistant City Manager in 2020.
Storrs made headlines last year during businessman Alex Fairly’s lawsuit against the city. A key fact was the erroneousness of an agenda item which referred to “combination tax and revenue notes.” The item in question was for approval of tax notes, not combination notes, meant to fund renovations to the Amarillo Civic Center. During a pre-trial hearing, Storrs referred to the error as a typo. (During the trial, then-councilman Eddy Sauer took a different stance, where he testified that it was a ‘combination’ of 0% revenue and 100% tax.)
In an opinion from the Seventh Court of Appeals released last month, Justice Lawrence M. Doss referred to the item as “patently incorrect” and stated that “inclusion of these words in the City’s notice cannot be ignored as a mere ‘typo,’ as they mislead even the most informed citizen.”
Storrs has a MPA from West Texas A&M University and is a CPA. According to her bio on the city’s website, “in her spare time, she enjoys supporting the local sales tax here in Amarillo.”
“Congratulations on the promotion to Interim Deputy. We look forward to working together,” said Mayor Cole Stanley, who also spoke briefly on plans to begin a search for a new permanent City Manager. “We will have the conversation here in the fall about what it looks like next year and moving forward with the search.”