by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Hopefully, the new Richmond mayor, Danny Avula, will avoid the examples of his recent predecessors who spent their terms chasing shiny, big economic development projects and instead will try to improve the basic operations of city government. That will be a tall order in itself.

One of my long-term complaints has been that the City of Richmond seems unable to do the basic things that local governments do. The most recent examples:

1.A couple of weeks ago, the city sent out thousands of tax rebate checks with the wrong names on them. It had to cancel those checks and reissue them.

2. Not to be outdone by the finance department, the mail room overseen by the city’s Dept. of Information Technology sent out hundreds of debt collection notices the next week to the wrong addresses. To make matters worse, in this latest incident, “residents’ names, addresses, claim numbers and debt amounts [were] issued to the wrong locations.”

The new mayor has his work cut out for him.