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Bird is the Word: Richmond and Norfolk’s Mid-Major Mediocrity

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Dockless scooters: Oh, the outrage. Oh, the pearl-clutching. Oh, the incredulity. This story would be equal parts comedy and tragedy if not for the actual tragedy of two mid-major cities feigning outrage that these scooters are an affront to the decent folks of the Commonwealth. Fact check, they’re not. Welcome to the gig economy. Welcome to the sharing economy. Welcome to the 21st Century.

These scooters arrived on the streets of Richmond on Aug. 16 and Norfolk on Aug. 29. Both cities made moves to promptly round them up and ruin everyone’s good time. Classic Virginia.

Richmond is trying to be conciliatory, however, with Mayor Levar Stoney blasting out a tweet on Aug. 17, signaling a willingness to work together, saying, “Hey Bird Ride! I like these scooters. How about we get our teams around the table and make this work the right way?” He’s Virginia’s cool mayor so that makes sense (in fairness, he is pretty cool).

The actual dirty work was left to the Department of Public Works, who in a letter to Bird said, “The unregulated and disorderly deployment and use of powered scooters has the potential to create a public nuisance on the city’s streets and sidewalks and endanger public health and safety.” Apparently, there is a timetable for putting a scooter ordinance before city council, but no one has actually seen it; so that’s probably on the same timetable as completing the 17th Street Farmers Market.

Norfolk, on the other hand, was not so conciliatory. City Councilwoman,  in a tweet, said, “I’ve seen these Bird scooters littering the streets all over LA this summer. Whether or not @NorfolkVA allows them in the future, this in-the-middle-of-the-night approach is totally unacceptable and does not make me inclined to support this company.” In a Facebook post, she also said, “Hey there, Bird. Bad first move. I’m looking for LIME’s number now…” Lime is a competitor in the dockless scooter game. Scooters are apparently litter.

McClellan’s observations are as petty as they are patronizing. Wanting a company to pay homage to a council member’s perceived idea of ethics (we’re talking about scooters, not North Korea) in the sharing economy at the expense of entrepreneurship in the 21st Century reeks of all the reasons why Norfolk, like Richmond, will never grow past mid-major status. Not to mention the idea of a guerrilla roll-out like this is as clever as it is emblematic of what young people are expecting from growing cities; cities that should be flexible enough to tap into the dynamism of the next-generation economy.  

While McClellan selectively used San Francisco as an example to make her point, a more apt example would be Austin, Texas – a city that has a similar composition to Richmond and Norfolk – and currently boasts over 2,000 dockless scooters which zip along their city streets. Instead of threatening innovative companies like Bird, Austin worked out an interim ordinance that can be reviewed every six months, giving them the option of pulling licensing should their rules be broken.  

According to CNN, each of the 2,000 scooters in Austin is now ridden over 20 times a day. Austin’s assistant director for their smart mobility program was also quoted as saying that their introduction has reduced cars on the road, congestion, pollution and are “bringing to the table discussions about developing a roadmap to deploy transportation that from the get-go has equity and access for all built into it.”

Alternatively, while Richmond is basking in the unrequited glory of managing to implement a bus that drives in a straight line, Bird has just agreed to give discounts to low-income communities in Baltimore; ensuring that part of their fleet can meet the transportation needs of mixed-income communities. The Baltimore Sun was quoted as saying this about dockless scooters, “City Hall saw an opportunity and seized it. In a town whose transit deficits are as widespread as they are neglected, companies developing leapfrog technologies like electric scooters are a beacon of hope. Baltimore is in desperate need of a few overnight, starter solutions.”

Bird Scooters in Richmond. Photo by David Streever

San Diego, on the other hand, is apparently just rolling with the times. Their mayor released a statement in June saying, “The mayor welcomes more transportation choices and options for people to get out of their cars. As this is still a relatively new business model in San Diego, we continue to monitor its effectiveness and believe that the market will dictate how the businesses continue to operate within the city.”

The arguments for and against this technology and innovation are not stacked evenly. To think so is to fall into a self-made ambush whereby a city council or mayor, bound by their lack of understanding about the sharing economy claims “public health and safety” or in the case of Norfolk just wants to be insulting about something they clearly do not understand.

While the public safety argument is a fair one, Virginia DMV already has baseline regulations in place to regulate motorized scooters under the rules for mopeds. And on any given day in Richmond, you can find any number of mobility devices from mopeds, motorized longboards, electric scooters, and electric bikes cruising around the River City without incident.

If a city thinks their residents are not capable enough to manage the risk in renting and riding a scooter, then they are engaged in the kind of nanny state tactics and over-regulation that kills innovation and stymies new forms of 21st Century economy. For a city to be against them on principle is to interfere with the free-market, determining and ultimately limiting which transportation options are best for their citizens. Either outcome should deeply concern and worry an informed citizenry who should be trusted to make their own decisions on transportation.

Richmond and Norfolk desperately need to court the next generation economy. Both cities need to offer more than wall murals, a handful of restaurants and breweries, and Confederate monuments. Offering smart amenities that excite young people, provide flexible mobility options for residents of all financial stripes, and taps into the sharing economy is only smart business. To think otherwise is to prove just how provincial cities like Richmond and Norfolk actually are.

Either way, Bird is the word.

Petersburg Overturns 1950s Motion that Preserved Segregation of Wilcox Lake

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After more than half a century, Petersburg City Council has approved a motion to reopen Wilcox Lake, which was previously closed in 1958 to prevent desegregation in the area. City Councilwoman Treska Wilson-Smith brought the motion forward this year, after previously attempting to pass it five years prior.

“The council of 1958 made a decision to close the lake so as to prevent African Americans from swimming with others,” Wilson-Smith said. “Something was in our book that upheld racism. I feel that I must do what I can to preserve the history of the African-American in Petersburg.”

Sixty years ago, Wilcox Lake was a popular recreational swimming facility – but only for white people. In 1958, some of Petersburg’s African-American residents wanted to open the lake up recreationally to everyone. In response, the city council (which at the time was all-white), closed the lake and the entire swimming facility down. Wilcox Lake has been closed to the public ever since, preserving the area’s segregated past well into the 21st century.

June 19 marks the date Petersburg City Council approved the lake’s reopening. The date holds an extra amount of weight, coinciding as the date commemorating the emancipation of the last remaining slaves in the U.S., nicknamed “Juneteenth.”

“Juneteenth is the celebration of the end of slavery,” Wilson-Smith said. “And this motion is the end of a segregated act by [Petersburg City Council].”

Despite overturning the previous 1958 motion in a “monumental” decision last week, the present-day Wilcox Lake might not be much more than a pretty view. In 2013, Petersburg spokeswoman Joanne Williams told NBC12 “the lake will probably never be open for swimming because of the liability to the city.”

Even though it may not reopen as a full-blown swimming facility again, the decision to reestablish Wilcox Lake as a public recreational area is a step in the right direction for Petersburg.

The 1958 decision to close down Wilcox Lake was not too surprising, given the racial tension that existed in Petersburg at the time. The New York Times reported, “Petersburg had full-dress segregation into the 1960’s, including separate Bibles in courtrooms and separate entrances and reading rooms in the library.” The city did not integrate schools until nearly 15 years after the crucial Brown v. Board of Education decision in favor of desegregation – quite the opposite of the call for racial integration with “all deliberate speed” in the 1955 Brown v. Board of Education II decision.  

Despite “integrating,” Petersburg implemented “freedom of choice” plans like many other school districts at the time, giving students the right to choose to attend white or black schools. The policy kept schools naturally segregated, as most students chose to stay at the schools they already attended.

We’d all like to think desegregation is a problem of the past, and that all there is left to do is overturn outdated motions like that of Wilcox Lake. However, the Richmond-Petersburg area still has a major problem with isolation of certain racial groups – most prominently in education. A 2013 report conducted by the The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found nearly 20% of all schools in the Richmond and Petersburg districts were “intensely segregated,” and 40% were “stably segregated” in 2010.

The lines of segregation see overlap in race and economic status; the report found that the average black student attended schools where low-income students made up more than half of the school’s enrollment. Meanwhile, their white counterparts attended schools where low-income students only made up a quarter of the school’s enrollment. Virginia’s major metropolitan regions have experienced surges in multi-racial diversity, but the CRP report found school districts across the state lacking in integration of their African-American and Latino populations.

Regardless of the long-overdue desegregation of Wilcox Lake, where race relations in central Virginia are concerned, there’s a lot of work left to do. Still, it’s nice to see Petersburg working to heal the wounds left by the city’s legacy of racism.

Racial Tensions Grow In Virginia Beach As College Beach Weekend Starts Tonight

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This upcoming weekend is Beach Weekend, the unofficial “spring break” for nearly 40,000 mostly black college-aged visitors to the City of Virginia Beach (VB). For residents and visitors, it’s inextricably linked to Greekfest, which drew national attention in 1989 when the city declared it a riot and called in the National Guard after making the unusual decision to stop offering programming or activities for the black fraternity and sorority members. As a result, subsequent Beach Weekends have been set against a backdrop of racial tensions.

While all of the business leaders, elected officials, and community members RVA Mag reached agreed that crime and violence are an issue, there was clear disagreement on the severity and appropriateness of the city’s response. One local performer who often works the clubs during the event, DJ SDot, said that concerns over Beach Week have been blown out of proportion. “Every year I have DJ’ed for it I have never had a fight or an altercation,” he said, stating that other events, like city-sanctioned Crush Fest, also have high levels of public intoxication and corresponding arrests.

He said the primary difference between Crush Fest and Beach Weekend was race, adding, “it’s only when the kids look a certain way that the people get upset and boycott. As the local business owners call it, #escapebeachweek.

His comments about a racial divide were echoed by Louisa Strayhorn, the first black woman elected to Virginia Beach City Council and chair of a recent task force that reviewed the city’s response to Beach Week to issue recommendations to city council. She said critics of the event often fell back on racist language. “You’re hearing, ‘Those people are coming down to the beach, what are we going to do when those people come down here?’”

As part of her work reviewing the event, she looked into spring break events in Miami, Cancun, and other beach destinations, saying they were all pretty similar, with one exception, “the majority of the people at this [college event] are black.”

The fifteen-member task force included business owners, NAACP members, and local community leaders who issued a set of recommendations. In an official response, Dave Hansen, Virginia Beach city manager, accepted many of the recommendations but rejected others, some of which Strayhorn identified as the most critical. She pointed to three: Controlling traffic by temporarily reorganizing road directions along the oceanfront, providing programming and venues for visitors, and issuing welcoming proactive messaging.

For his part, Hansen felt positive about the current direction the city is taking, contrasting it favorably with what he described as a past failure. “I realized about 14 months into my job as manager that we’d defaulted our job to the police,” he said about previous years. Hansen went on to say that it shouldn’t solely fall on the shoulders of the police and that the burden needed to be shared across city government.

Community leaders disagreed with his assessment, pointing to a pamphlet issued by the Virginia Beach Police Department to beach residents highlighting departmental policies during the weekend. The issuance of the pamphlet is unique among high-traffic event weekends according to the critics, who also said the pamphlet was focused on criminality and punishment with a statement of zero tolerance for “disorderly conduct”, “illegal weapons”, and “crimes against persons.” Hansen didn’t see an issue, pointing to the pamphlet as being representative of a city he described as, “friendly, fair, and firm.”

The pamphlet also contains warnings about drinking in public, something Hansen said would be a matter of “voluntary compliance”, not an instant arrest, adding, “some kids don’t know you can’t walk around Virginia Beach with a beer in your hand.”

Julie Hill, director of the communications office for Virginia Beach, clarified that there will be zero tolerance for violent crimes and property damage, but said that victimless crimes could be handled by police simply asking offenders to simply stop. “Getting compliance is the right course of action. Our officers do this year-round, we’re a resort community, they’re good at that. Whether it’s turning down music or not walking around with open containers.”

Strayhorn’s criticism also noted a lack of welcoming language for visitors, highlighting the pamphlet as mostly an attempt to comfort locals. She and another critic, city council candidate Aaron Rouse, both questioned why the city doesn’t issue similar pamphlets for other events.

Hansen praised Strayhorn’s work with the task force, but said some of the recommendations go beyond his authority, “because they involved spending public funds.” Hansen and Hill also pointed to serious disagreements between residents on the event, such as a petition that circulated last year gaining over 11,000 signatures calling for an end to Beach Weekend. Since the beaches are for the most part public, it is not possible to “ban” the event, something Hansen said he routinely addresses at public meetings.

When talking about the task-force’s recommendation of venues and programming, Hansen was openly dismissive. “Events end at 11 o’clock, what do you think those kids are doing after?” he asked. “The threat factor grows after 11 o’clock, so let’s be real about what the entertainment does for you.”

Rouse, a former NFL player and Virginia Tech alumni, disagreed, saying the programming just had to take into account the audience. “These are college kids, they’re young adults,” he said. “They’re going to stay up past 11 AM. You have to plan for that and give them something to do. When you’re 20, 30 years removed from that generation, you think differently. You need to invite young people to the conversation.”

He said the benefits of adding structure would also help the police, who he praised. “They do a great job, but when you’re talking about 40,000 people coming down here with nothing to do, you’re putting a burden on them. That’s asking too much of our men and women on the police force.”

“People don’t understand that you should be putting on some events to keep people busy so they aren’t just wandering the streets and getting drunk,” said Strayhorn, expanding on Rouse’s point and offering a response to some of the critics. “The opposition says, “Why should we reward them for bad behavior?” Well, because it’s your beach. You don’t want it destroyed, you have to do something.”

She said she wanted to be fair to the city leadership, but felt that they’d offered few concrete solutions beyond moving port-a-lets and placing more trash cans at the oceanfront, two of the solutions Hill highlighted in a section of the city website on Beach Weekend.

Hansen didn’t think his critics had a realistic understanding of the event. Speaking of previous Beach Weeks, Hansen said, “My community leadership was not there and they do not understand what was going on, so this year I am inviting all those that have an opinion about this event to come and get an understanding.” Rouse, SDot, and many others RVA Mag spoke to all said they’d been to Beach Week in the past many times.

According to Rouse and Strayhorn, racist messages on social media from some business owners and residents have also increased the tension. They thought the city had a responsibility to de-escalate the situation, yet when asked, Hansen ascribed the sentiments to fear on the part of residents.

Example of Local Resident’s Facebook Posts

One example is a Facebook post claiming, “Gearing up for College Beach Week. I’m ready are you?” followed by a photo of a handgun and ammunition clips with the hashtag #64rounds. Rouse said photos like this were disappointing for the community, “The perception that businesses are not welcoming to African-American college students, that’s real. All of us have a responsibility to really be the inclusive city we want Virginia Beach to be, to show our best side to the world.”

Rouse also said some businesses were embracing the weekend, but pointed to bars and restaurants shutting down for the weekend, as reported by WAVY TV. The closures recreate the situation in 1989 where attendees faced a shortage of activities, a problem highlighted by Dr. James Allen, President of the Interdenominational Ministers Conference, in  Strayhorn’s task force report. The report says the closures were “caused by the wrong signal we send by telling the youth that they can’t come to the Beach, by restricting their access and shutting down businesses.”

Facebook posts and the decisions by business owners are only part of the growing tension. Hansen recently expressed “regret” that local Christian ministers “were offended” after a text message thread he was on referred to civil rights marchers last year at the oceanfront as “five percenters,” a reference to a splinter group of the Nation of Islam. The ministers saw the text messages after a Freedom of Information request revealed a text message string between various city officials to the public in early April.

This was in addition to another racially insensitive comment made by Vice Mayor Louis Jones on April 21, who at an event called Taste of India asked the crowd, “Is there anybody here who doesn’t have the last name Patel?”

Virginia Pilot Reporter, Alissa Skelton

As the event begins, DJ SDot has his own picture of the weekend, an image he says he’ll never forget that best expresses the racial politics of the city. “One year there was a white male riding a skateboard around the Nubian college kids,” he recalled. “With a confederate flag tied around his neck, screaming out racial slurs. That will always be how I see beach weekend.”

Fed Up with Public Housing Conditions, Residents & Advocates Confront City Council

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Sha’Randa Taylor delivered an impassioned plea before City Council Monday night. Displaying a clear container containing what she said was her fetus, recently miscarried due to the stress of her living situation in Richmond public housing, she called on Council for justice.

We first met Taylor while reporting on the heating crisis this winter at her unit in Creighton Court. The young mother and nurse was living in an unheated apartment with clear evidence of a mice infestation despite the sealed Tupperware containers she stores food in. “I was housed like an animal,” Taylor said, recounting her experience before Council,

Among her complaints were financial ones. She had with her a stack of receipts she said “total $10,000 in possessions I can’t get to anymore,” as they remained in a unit she no longer has access to. She also maintained that her rent was overcharged at $92 a month, $42 more than her income allowed the Authority to charge, and said she’s overpaid by more than $800 in total.

Police ask Taylor to leave

Taylor said she lost her job and her unborn baby over stress, and as her 3-minute comment period ran out, she raised her voice, asking, “I am here, I am talking, do you hear me?” In a tense moment, police moved in around her before City Council President Chris Hilbert asked them to stand down.

Like other residents without heat, Taylor said she was eventually offered a hotel room during the heating crisis, but it wasn’t a good solution for her and her three children she said, noting the lack of a stove. “I get food stamps. How do those help me if I don’t have a stove? I don’t eat fast food,” she said.

As Taylor finished her story and stepped away, a woman from the audience yelled, “Help her. Who’s going to help her?”

Council Vice President Cynthia Newbille tasked Orlando Artze, the interim CEO of Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, to provide that help.

Taylor was joined at the meeting by a broad coalition of groups and individuals advocating for people living in public housing. The Coalition For Better Housing held a press conference in front of the Marshall Street entrance to City Hall, with many long-time leaders in social justice and civil rights.

The press conference before City Council

Among them were Lillie Estes and Arthur Burton, both long-time advocates for civil rights and justice in Richmond, Green party House of Delegates candidate Montigue Magruder, and Leaders of the New South founder, Omari al-Qadaffi, who brought the dire situation in city housing courts to public attention this past winter.

The group cited the resignation of T.K. Somanath as a success and delivered a set of demands intended to make RRHA accountable and transparent going forward. Before the meeting, on Marshall Street, Magruder was cynical speaking on our city government “They just passed a meals tax they say is for the kids, but those same kids go back to these dilapidated homes” he said.

Burton chimed in, sharing similar frustrations to Magruder’s. “These are government homes and government schools. It’s a double dose of government oppression,” he said.

Estes said it was a case of “intentional blight,” a theme which Burton expanded on, pointing back 13 years when he said, “The truth is, the city started this with Dove Court. It was intentional blight to justify destroying public housing.”

“If you create this narrative, that communities are isolated and blighted and ridden by drugs and crime, and you don’t provide services because you privatized the streets, then you make that narrative come true,” Burton continued, claiming that the lack of maintenance was intentional.

He said that even when the city tries to help, they have to package the help to appeal to a broad audience, giving the coliseum project as an example. “We advocated for a new transfer station, to replace one that everyone acknowledges is alienating and dehumanizing. And what does the city do? They tie it to a $160 million new coliseum,” he said. “We see this over and over again.”

The problem, the advocates say, is that it all comes down to accountability. Burton said the authority system, in particular, exists to give political cover for unpopular decisions, allowing mayors to point to councils, councils to mayors, and both to point back at authorities, over which they have limited direct control.

“It’s the same thing from Jim Crow, you have these authorities set up to eliminate accountability,” Burton said, pointing back to the highways that were built over the homes of Black Richmonders in the 1950s.

After the conference, the group headed inside, where Estes delivered their demands to Council with an extension on her three-minute speaking time. After sharing statistics on poverty in Richmond, she asked for audits or reviews of existing audits of the RRHA, inclusion of community leaders on the RRHA Board, an evaluation of the contentious tenant council system and specific positions at the Authority, and support for “Know Your Rights” trainings that educate residents about their rights in public housing.

In a split from the coalition, she asked that every sitting board member of the RRHA be removed and replaced. Reached after the meeting, she said that she loves some of the people on the board, and she’d be happy to see them rejoin, but she “feels we need a clean slate, a new beginning.”

Only Taylor and Estes were signed up for citizen comment, but al-Qaddafi used the regular agenda section of the meeting later to make his own comments. He said he’d like to support an agenda item honoring a former public servant for his good work, but that those were different, better, times for Richmond government, saying, “we are not living in those times.”

“There is a humanitarian and a civil rights issue in the housing authority right now. This is not just about heat any more than the problem at schools are just about facilities. This is about systemic problems,” he said, before demanding better results from City Council. “I can’t speak for RVA. They may be drowning their meals tax sorrows right now somewhere west of the Boulevard, but residents of Richmond will no longer accept cries of, ‘We didn’t know.’”

Photos by David Streever. We updated this story to add a link to a PDF of the demands. We also made a minor correction to one quote.

Heated Over Proposed Meal Tax Hike, Restaurateurs Form Lobbying Group

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Richmond restaurateurs are heated once again, as the city has served up a proposal for yet another hike to meal taxes. And this time, restaurant owners have united to form a lobbyist group to fight back.

In his State of the City speech this week, Mayor Levar Stoney proposed raising Richmond’s meal tax to 7.5 percent to help renovate and repair Richmond City Public Schools, which would produce approximately $9.1 million a year and allow the city to borrow $150 million in new capital funding over the next five years.

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Mayor Stoney with students at Chimborazo Elementary School

“I do not relish the idea of imposing a higher tax on any of our residents or even our visitors. And I respect the concerns of our restaurateurs who are responsible for so much of the positive trends we’ve seen in our city,” Stoney said in his address. “I promise to be a committed champion for their success, and pledge that we will work with you to make it easier for you to grow and expand.”

But that burn of a meals tax increase is an all too familiar feeling for local restaurant owners. In 2003, the city tacked on an extra 1 percent, raising the meals tax from 5 to 6 percent to help pay for the construction of Centerstage. Once the performing arts center was built, the tax was supposed to be tossed, but it remained on after a 2006 City Council vote to be poured into Richmond’s general fund for “operational costs”.

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Now, the new proposed 1.5 percent increase may not seem like much, but combined with the 5.3 percent state tax, the total tax would increase to 12.8 percent. To compare, Henrico collects a 4 percent tax, but surrounding counties, like Chesterfield, and Hanover, do not have a meals tax.

Restaurant owners, fed up with forking over hefty payments and shifting the costs to customers and in turn, hearing complaints, losing money, and some even losing business to the surrounding counties, are fighting back with a newly formed group, the Richmond Restaurant Alliance.

Jake Crocker, owner of F.W. Sullivan’s, Lady N’awlins, and Uptown Market & Deli rallied more than 30 people in the restaurant community this week to form the organization and talk about next steps to take on the proposed heighten tax.

“Every few years they target one specific industry, our politicians make promises to reduce the tax, and now they’ve reversed it,” Crocker said. “The current mayor has publicly and privately made those promises to a number of the restaurant owners, so we’re very disappointed that this was the ultimate solution.”

Owners from Richmond Restaurant Group, to Rueger Restaurant Group to Johnny Giavos, were in attendance, with the group representing over 100 restaurants in the area combined according to Crocker. Since the meeting, the newly-formed RRA organization has partnered with the Virginia Restaurant, Travel and Lodging Association (VRTLA), who will help push efforts forward.

“They’re committed, and they have fought this successfully in other localities including Fairfax County, so they’re going to be working with us,” he said. “They have expertise in the area from other initiatives in other parts of the states so we’re excited.”

Matt Simmons, owner of Capital Ae House and secretary of VRTLA, said his restaurant has been a member of the association for years and like most in the community, wants the schools to be improved, but doesn’t agree with the way the city is suggesting to get the money for the much-needed repairs.

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“No one is arguing that our schools need to be fixed, but it’s absurd to target one industry to solve this or any issue,” he said. “Richmond has a vibrant restaurant scene and this would throw cold water on the good things that are now happening. We are meeting to discuss this issue and get the word out to city council members that taking the easy way out could hurt an industry that helps Richmond shine.”

The VRTLA, a political action committee for the aforementioned industries, organized a grassroots campaign in 2016 with the National Restaurant Association to help successfully defeat a proposed 4 percent meals tax increase in Fairfax County.

Crocker, who threw his political hat in the ring this year as a Libertarian candidate for the 69th District, headed up a “Repeal the Meal Tax” campaign back in 2011 to urge the city to get rid of the Centerstage tax hike that was intended to be temporary.

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And up until a few days ago, he, like many restaurant owners, was under the impression there was going to be a reduction in the taxes.

“The fact that all the restaurants are mobilizing to prevent an increase is unfathomable,” he said. “No one even had a taste of this. A few of the restaurant owners did meet with the mayor and expressed their concerns, and he still went ahead with it anyway. It’s frustrating because I’m a supporter…but a lot of the restaurant folks who rallied behind him are feeling hurt…it’s our livelihoods.”

Patrons are the ones that bear the brunt of the taxes getting collected, which Crocker said is an issue that regularly comes up at his Fan restaurants.

“Everyday you have a customer who points at that tax and confronts the server about it and demands to see a server or manager,” he said. “They think we’re gouging them and I’m like, ‘look I’m on your side, I don’t want to charge this tax.’ Especially at Lady N’awlins, I get a lot of people from around the region and the counties and they’re like, ‘what is this?’”

Often the customers that complain, then, in turn, take their frustration with the taxes out on the restaurants, which was one of the many common themes brought up at the RRA meeting according to Crocker.

“Many times, they will tip extremely low, or, this is the fun one, they’ll write ‘taxes’ on the tip line so they stiff the server,” he said. “Everybody (restaurant owners) had the same story.”

Simmons has Capital Ale House locations both inside the city, as well as Midlothian and Innsbrook, and he said customers from the counties are also steamed when they see those added taxes to their bill.

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“Right now my customers pay 6 percent more for everything in Richmond than they do at our Midlothian location,” Simmons said. “When quoting prices for banquets and other events, people are shocked to find out taxes are 11.3 percent currently and will be even more shocked if that increases to 12.8 percent.”

Jimi Foster, Manager of The Daily Kitchen & Bar, part of the Richmond Restaurant Group which own several spots in town, said he’s constantly explaining the extra costs to out-of-towners and is not happy about the proposed tax hike.

“During the busy season, I have to explain the taxes to tourists multiple times a week. Think about that, I’m running a restaurant and hours of my life are spent explaining tax code to people from New York, that’s insane,” Foster said. “People that travel into the city from any other state are appalled at the tax rate. Last year, our restaurant alone paid well over a million in taxes, in addition to supporting local causes like the Feedmore food bank and Real Local RVA. What do we get in return? Bike races that hurt our business’ by almost 50 percent and a training camp filled with national restaurant chains. Now the city that has spent years mismanaging funds is asking restaurants and working-class Americans to pay 12 cents out of every dollar claiming that it’s for schools.”

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The Daily Kitchen & Bar

But, despite customers protesting the taxes, Crocker did address the heightened taxes on a meal will be a huge burden on low-income families and single parents working multiple jobs that need to eat out while they’re on the go with their children.

“There are families I heard from in the previous campaign, both working two jobs, single mom or dad, they’re shuffling between different shifts and they’ve got kids,” he said. “These lower-income families don’t have a stay at home member of the family and the kids have to eat and they’re often grabbing food on the fly, some are mom and pop owners themselves. Eating out is a necessity when you’re working two jobs and raising kids so it affects them.”

Foster chimed in on this as well, agreeing that it’s going to hurt the mom and pop restaurants and working-class residents of Richmond.

“The mayor is claiming that it’s ‘just a couple pennies’, but my two cents is that this will hurt him in the next election. The margin he won by is less than the profit margin of most restaurants,” he said. “I’m also almost always in support of taxing the wealthy to support our society, but this is a tax this will hit the working class consumer the hardest and restaurateurs that struggle with 15 percent profit margins so they can keep the doors open to employee thousands of people second.”

But it’s not just restaurant patrons that are left with a stomach ache when the bill arrives, Richmond restaurant owners are having to pay extra fees, and some have to hire employees to keep track of the taxes collected.

Crocker sends between $10,000 to $15,000 a month to the city for the meals tax, and beyond that, Richmond restaurants combined are paying about $25 million a year to the city for the meals tax alone.

“Everybody says it’s just a pass through, but you find me a restaurant that’s not struggling to keep up with it, and you’d be hard-pressed to find one that isn’t.”

Carter Snipes, who runs The Hofheimer Building and The HofGarden, is fairly new to the issue, but that’s been his biggest gripe.

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“We’ve got to have separate bank accounts, we get charged fees on all those dollars coming in, we’re paying $1,000 a month to collect the city’s taxes, and we have to hire a bookkeeper and not only does it cost us money from the credit card processing to collect the money for the city, we also have to then, pay someone from our company to administer that whole process, and a lot of these restaurant owners are small business owners, they don’t have a bookkeeper. And that’s a huge deal, that’s a huge burden on these operators.”

And Foster said between all the Richmond Restaurant Group’s restaurants combined, the group is paying hundreds of thousands each month to the city for meals taxes, which has forced the group to make sacrifices at their establishments.

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Pearl Raw Bar, part of Richmond Restaurant Group

“In order to deal with the increase in taxes, restaurants have to either raise prices or cut labor. So for a lot of places, in order to keep the lights on and still be competitive in the market you have to cut peoples hours back,” he said. “That means that people then have less disposable income to put back into the local economy, so less people go out to restaurants, so you cut back on labor even more, then quality goes down and business’ close. I’m just not sure what this city and state seem to have against local business’ and why they always seem to push and promote outside business over the welfare of its residents and voters.”

Snipes brought up the referendum on the ballot this past November, which stated that the mayor had to come up with a plan within six months of the election to repair and fund the schools without tax increases, and 85 percent of voters approved it.

“In my opinion, they haven’t done the first step, which is to offer the plan or say it can’t be done, and they came out with this tax increase,” Snipes said. “But the referendum specifically said a plan without tax increases.”

A recent Richmond Times-Dispatch article broke down some of the city’s spending courtesy of reports from Virginia’s Auditor of Public Accounts. According to those reports, Richmond is spending more per capita on administrative costs ($381.80), public safety ($822) and health ($823) than the state averages for each. However, when it came to education, the city spends $1,511 per capita, which is less than the state average.

But Snipes, who has two children in grade school, along with Crocker, and the majority of the restaurant community stressed that they are in favor of supporting and rehabilitating the schools, but that the city needs to come up with a better way to reduce expenses and overhead.

“I’m fully 100 percent in support of the schools, but I think this particular proposal is not the best or most efficient proposal to solve the problem,” Snipes said. “I think most people would be fine with tax increases if the city showed some goodwill and find some savings in the budget.”

He suggested breaking up taxes to a few industries equally across the board.

“There a should be a quarter percent tax on real estate, a quarter percent tax on meals, a quarter percent tax on hotels, and everyone shares that burden because it’s something we need to do for the community at large. It’s totally unfair to single out this one industry that has nothing to do with schools.”

Crocker had a similar suggestion for the city to implement retail taxes to help spread out some of the burdens.

“You put a 1 percent tax across the city on retail, grocery stores, bookstores, shoe stores, and restaurants, you’re going to get a hell of a lot more money than just restaurants,” he said.

The money that was given to Stone Brewing ($31 million) and the construction of the Redskins Training Center ($10 million) were also factors that Crocker pointed to as money that could have been diverted to the schools.

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Simmons, on the other hand, said taxing an untapped resource like local vacation and apartment rentals would be a good source to generate revenue.

“The city is not taking advantage of new legislation that allows them to collect taxes on the many Airbnb properties in the city,” he said. “That’s a start that would bring in funds and level the playing field with the area hotels who do collect and pay taxes. An across the board sales tax increase on every purchase in the city would be much fairer than targeting restaurants.”

Richmond Restaurant Alliance will hold their next meeting on Tuesday, and no matter where you land on the issue, Crocker said the restaurant owners are going to take action very soon.

“We’ve got some initiatives in the works, we’re going to be heard and it’s not just going to be Jake Crocker speaking up, its everybody,” he said. “We will not be cannon fodder for the ambitions of politicians, we’re not going to be put on the frontlines, so they can achieve their goal.”

Councilman Michael Jones Introduced Resolution to Remove Confederate Monuments Last Night

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Last night’s City Council meeting almost filled the 260-seat chamber, thanks to online buzz around a resolution asking the General Assembly to permit Richmond to remove its Confederate monuments, introduced by Councilman Michael Jones. Nearly every seat was occupied by a supporter of the resolution, some standing near the back of the room when they could not find a chair, on a night when public testimony would be limited and the resolution merely introduced, not voted on. They came to support former NAACP of Richmond president Lynette Thompson, Councilman Jones, and a proposed plan to memorialize the victims of slavery in Shockoe Bottom.

The resolution is not binding. It would merely permit the City Council to ask the General Assembly to allow Richmond to vote on removing any Confederate monuments in the city, listing J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Matthew Fontaine Maury on Monument Avenue as examples. Despite a clear show of support from the public, the resolution is not expected to pass. Council members Chris Hilbert, Andreas Addison, Ellen Robertson, Kim Gray, and Parker Agelasto all favored waiting for the Monument Avenue Commission to finish its work, with Hilbert, the Council President, calling the issue a distraction. The meeting tonight only had a few speakers, four of them speaking about the statues, all of whom had signed up in advance.

Lynette Thompson spoke first, urging the commission to remove the statues and to expand the Lumpkin’s Jail Site memorial to include the rest of the 9-acre area where people were sold as slaves. Shockoe Bottom was the site of the second largest slave market in America behind New Orleans, and Thompson expressed worries that African American history would be erased by future development if the area wasn’t protected. The project she referred to is known as the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project, and has been brought before the City Council before. Applause is not permitted, but Council patiently waited as nearly the entire room cheered for Thompson and her proposal.

Thompson brought many of those in attendance, and Phil Wilayto of The Virginia Defender brought the bright yellow signs that read “Take Em Down Now.” After the meeting Wilayto offered his group as volunteers to remove the statues if a museum could not take them.

The second speaker, former Councilman Marty Jewell, was also against the statues. “They were enacted as a middle finger,” he said, in one of his characteristically blunt speeches. He tied the memorials and monuments to Jim Crow laws, and ended his remarks by calling for a full truth and reconciliation process in Richmond.

The theme of history erased was taken up next by Carmen Terrell, who spoke following Jewell. “I’ve seen our black history be removed. If the whole truth can’t be told, why have any statues at all?” She pivoted to classism and lack of opportunities for the poor, before calling for unity and support of Jones’s bill.

Baugham, near center, was the lone dissenter

Only one voice spoke out in dissent; Raymond Vance Baugham, Jr., was the last speaker to address the monuments. He equated General Lee to General Sherman, calling both men controversial, and made a slippery slope argument about other historical figures who kept slaves, asking why we honor George Washington, for instance. He went on to list every US President who owned slaves, and drew a few claps when he described the memorials as an attempt to heal wounds and create unity.

The meeting also had a proclamation making October ‘Walk and Bicycle to School Month’

Statues weren’t the only item of discussion, though. The meeting opened with an awards and recognition ceremony for several different individuals and organizations. Among them was an award for Richmond Kinship Month, recognizing the many people who care for children and another for RAM Camp, thanking VCU and the organization for its role in making Richmond a better place to live. The Council also had a proclamation on bicycling, naming October Walk and Bicycle to School Month, and setting aside the first Wednesday of the first full week of October as Richmond Bike to School Day. Parents and bike activists were on hand to accept the proclamation and pose for a quick photo.

The Council kept quiet during testimony, until the last speaker, who was there for a slightly different issue. “At the risk of sounding ridiculous after all these other concerns, I’m here to talk about trains.” Rebecca Stein, a Carver resident, was talking about the regulation requiring trains to give loud toots at crossings, something which starts every morning between 3 and 4 AM and continues, producing a 90 decibel noise comparable to a lawn mower. She was hoping the Council would consider adopting an ordinance that would replace the loud train horn with a different safety measure. For her, Hilbert had an answer; the Council had considered this in the past, and he’d be happy to let her know what happened with the previous process.

After that, the public largely filed out, leaving a much emptier hall to the Council for their remaining 40-odd agenda items. The next meeting is October 9th, but it’s unclear if the Council will vote on the resolution at that date.

*Photos by David Streever