In December, we wrote an article for the Richmonder with five issues we would be talking about in 2025, and one of those issues was that community outreach would be critical with a new Mayor in office. We were hopeful that Mayor Avula would establish “real and regular outreach to the community and its neighborhoods. It could come in the form of a newsletter, regular press discussions, a podcast, following FOIA laws (instead of building walls), and being seen regularly in the community (Twitter and showing up for photo ops don’t count).”
And beyond communication channels, we suggested Avula reestablish the Neighborhood Teams process that partner people at City Hall with the people in their communities to identify problems beforethey get too big and solve them quickly and before it gets too expensive to fix. Working as a team to make good ideas better can cover everything from neighborhood safety to economic development. It’s not easy, but neither is local government. It is a lot easier if you work together and listen instead of dictate and think you have all the answers. The last eight years are more than proof that the top-down, we-know-everything “strategy” does not work.
According to Graham Moomaw and Sarah Vogelsong at The Richmonder, City Council and the Mayor held a “strategic retreat” held just over a week ago where they discussed their respective roles and responsibilities, how they engage citizens and communicate with the public and what officials can do to think more strategically about achieving the city’s goals.
As the city leaders discussed new ways of doing things in a new era for City Hall, trust and transparency — both with the public and among elected officials — emerged as two key themes.
“We plan to do communications very differently,” Avula said.
That would be very welcome news because the last two mayors avoided transparency and community outreach/engagement like the plague and saw them as an anathema to running City Hall to do what they wanted to do, not necessarily what the people needed or what was best of the city.
Avula ran for Mayor promising to bring transparency to City Hall and now is the chance for him to prove it and begin to rebuild trust with residents and show that transparency is the fundamental ingredient in fixing what is broken. His recent and repeated statements that communications with our regional partners were “reasonable” and “appropriate” when the water plant failed on January 6th are baffling given all the evidence to the contrary, and seems like a page from the Stoney media playbook of denial.
However, he took a good step by elevating Ross Catrow to director of the office of strategic communications. Catrow was one of the leaders in the local news/blog movement in the 2000’s and for years ran the popular Good Morning, RVA newsletter. There was some hope (however slight) that the city might actually begin an earnest attempt at an informative newsletter and communication effort last year when Catrow was hired as the deputy director; but it was just not in the Stoney Administration’s DNA to engage with the public. At the retreat last week, two of City Council’s newest members hinted that the new Administration looked a lot like the last one. 4th District Councilwoman Sarah Abubaker said she’s sensed a “stifling” vibe and an unwillingness to get into deeper discussions when members ask follow-up questions.
“When we are digging into questions, the response shouldn’t be defensive in nature,” she said. “It should be that we’re all coming at this out of a sense of curiosity and a desire to deeply understand what is going on as opposed to just what you present to me in a slide deck.”
3rd District Councilwoman Kenya Gibson said, “We’re trying to get information. I think the public is trying to get information,” Gibson said. “There’s no way for council to be proactive and be strategic without having information.”
Avula offered a rather astounding (almost Stoney-esque) response to the Council’s comments, as noted in The Richmonder.
In response to those concerns, Avula said the public nature of many administration-council conversations can at times discourage transparency because it fuels negative news coverage.
“Our media environment is brutal on our staff,” Avula said. “Over the years, what has happened I think… is this learned behavior of like, they can’t be honest about what’s happening because they’re going to get raked over the coals. It’s not good.”
People will tolerate a certain amount of bad news from City Hall if they really believe that you’re trying to solve a problem and being honest than if you instead come up with bullshit excuses why the problem isn’t really a problem. They will also tend to give a little leeway if they see you are earnestly trying to work on the issue, especially if you work with neighborhoods instead of dictating to them.
Abubaker hit the entire row of nails on the head at the retreat when she said, “people are hungry for that transparency and authenticity.”
Leaders should send a message to staff, she said, that if they made honest mistakes while trying to make the city better, they’ll be protected.
“If you screwed up because you have malfeasance or because you don’t care or you’re apathetic or you didn’t follow through on a procurement contract, that’s on you,” she said. “And we need to own that and say we’re going to hold those people accountable. And we’re going to hold ourselves accountable.”
Going back to the Mayor’s quote, what happened over the years is that Stoney’s team didn’t want any information getting out that they couldn’t control and when the news was bad (as it often was), they just pretended it was an anomaly and not really news and ignored it. If Social Services was months behind providing benefits to people in need or if restaurants were being gouged with penalties and interest they were never told about, it was someone else’s fault, not a real problem, or the trusty pandemic-excuse was never far away.
Communicating and rebuilding trust with the public starts with the simple stuff. For example, in August of 2023, we bemoaned the Stoney Administration’s allergy to community outreach and did a comparison of the “Big 3” local governments’ (Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield) efforts to inform their citizenry through email newsletters. That month, Chesterfield sent their newsletter with news about the latest Board of Supervisors meeting, a video from the voter registrar about preparations for the November election, putting solar panels on six county schools, expanding two GRTC routes, an airport enhancement project, as well as an update about new school construction the issuance of $130 million in Virginia Public School Authority bonds to fast-track construction (instead of a baseball stadium?).
The HenricoNews Weekly News Update had an update about pedestrian improvements near several schools, using a $870,000 grant to enhance programs to deal with the opium epidemic, an open house meeting in Varina about environmental concerns in the community, information on the county’s Lead Service Line Replacement Program, a brief about the county hiring 76 students to intern across 19 government agencies to let them gain work experience and make connections, recreational improvements in Pouncy Tract Park as well as a great video that spotlights the preservation efforts at the historic African-American Woodland Cemetery and highlight the efforts of non-profits like the Henrico Community Food Bank which began in 2021 with seed money from the county.
Good stuff. Helpful, informative, and even a bit inspiring.
The city’s attempt to launch a newsletter in 2018 did not quite take. There is one edition from October 2018 and one from April 2019 but went quiet after that. Early in 2023, they began an email called ROC (Richmond’s Own Channel) News You Can Use, but it only published three times (once in February and twice in April 2023). Even those three editions, however, were not filled with information that residents might find terribly helpful. For example, the February 2023 issue included a feature on the Mayor’s State of the City address and how much “progress” we were making under his “leadership.” The April emails mostly just featured reminders that Stoney was hosting a forum at the Library of Virginia about providing residents with a Guaranteed Income.
Read more from Jon Baliles on his RVA 5X5 Substack HERE
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