by Jon Baliles

“A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.”
— Dalai Lama

Less than three weeks ago, we wrote about transparency’s obituary in RVA, but few would have ever guessed that City Hall was apparently not only serving as funeral director but also continued to keep throwing dirt on top in hopes that it will never be seen again. That might seem a bit hyperbolic, but consider that while many people welcomed a new administration into City Hall last year anticipating a new attitude and an eagerness to rebuild trust with the people, the public is instead being treated like the dirt.

Mayor Avula has made it clear in the last 15+ months that transparency is not a priority but merely a political pawn and tactic to prevent the public from getting the impression that anything is wrong and merely keeping a positive effort and attitude will cure all our problems. City Hall has for too long been insecure about sharing what’s really going on and worried that bad news might lead to discord, a reputation for futility, or political exile. However, when you lead by example and are honest with the hurdles you face, you create trust and buy-in and that engenders goodwill and people are more likely to have patience with city government. Keeping people in the dark only breeds distrust and resentment, but some political actors and those driving the policy are clueless to that reality.

The Avula administration seems to believe transparency is something to limit (or shut off) because it could lead to unfavorable news that highlights problems that are in need of solutions.

For example, everyone would agree the meals tax fiasco was a news disaster for the Stoney administration given the city’s restaurant community’s buzzing reputation and putting our city’s food scene on the map. But it was a huge and unaddressed problem that only came to light because restaurant owners got so fed up and went public over insane and escalating penalties and fees for overdue bills the city never told them about for years. That problem never would have been addressed had it not been exposed. You can’t find or identify — or fix — problems without transparency (and honesty).

A complaint (or a bad news story) is often a gift for government officials in that it leads to the exposure of something that needs fixing. It is often an opportunity to show strength of purpose and acknowledge something is wrong and move to get it right and prove that fixing a problem is a priority and not a player to be named later. The nature of all government (local, state, or federal) means problems will always exist, the press will always dig for them, and the people will either roll their eyes as more of the same, or, in more transparent and responsible localities, thank their elected for addressing and fixing the problems.

Mayor Avula recently came up with the slogan that he is applying a “look for it, find it, fix it” approach; However, since transparency’s obituary, it seems it is more of a “deny it, bury it, move on from it” approach. The last administration mastered that strategy, and the current one is quickly elevating to chess grandmaster status. For example, City Code §12-16 requires that all financial data be published online (aka the check register) so the public has access to who the city pays, how much, and for what services, just like you do with your checkbook (if you are old school) or when you download your financial transactions.

To make it appear as if transparency was a priority, Mayor Avula released a “registry” of Fiscal Year 2025 payments two weeks ago and claimed it “represents a meaningful move toward improved transparency while longer-term system enhancements are underway.” However, one look at the spreadsheet shows the “registry” he released is not at all meaningful or transparent, nor does it meet the requirements of city code because it does not include who the city paid and what good or service they provided. The new “registry” shows dates, amounts, payment methods, and fund codes (which the city has hundreds), but none of what you could use to track and monitor spending of public dollars.

The Mayor’s release claimed his action was “aimed at improving how the City delivers payment registry data, as required under City Code §12-16. This effort is part of a broader initiative to address long-standing operational challenges within City government, especially the Finance Department, and ensure that the City’s commitment to transparency is supported by reliable systems and processes.”

The Stoney administration took the check register offline in 2019 despite the requirement to maintain it in city code because they claimed it was too staff intensive and inefficient and they needed to protect financial payment information of those involved. Of course, as we have pointed out here ad nauseum, the city’s check register ordinance from January 2015 was based on a very similar ordinance drafted and implemented by Richmond Public Schools who launched their check register in 2014 and have posted it monthly ever since without ever whining or moaning about it or releasing sensitive information. Nor was there ever any concern in the Jones administration after the check register was implemented in 2015 that any sensitive information was exposed (because none was).

The decapitation of the city’s legally mandated check register took place in 2019 but it only came to light in the Times-Dispatch in 2024. In fact, the day after that story broke, the city turned off public access to even the outdated database that was still online at the time. From 2019 through today, no one knew or knows who is cutting checks to whom, and now all of the checks going back eleven years are no longer accessible.

In 2025, it was revealed there had been a massive credit card scandal going on for years (including one departmental lunch that cost $19,600) and another one in the Fire Department in which a former employee used purchase orders to abscond with more than $2 million (so far, but it’s still being investigated); that case included spending more than $74,000 on custom-made cabinets, which surely would have raised alarms had copies of those large checks been publicly available, but they were not. All purchases (and other possible fraud) would have been required to be listed in the check register, but no one knew anything about them while corruption blossomed unchecked. Coincidence?

Last April, after the news stories broke about the credit card abuse, Avula announced a tightened and more restrictive city credit card policy within weeks. More than ten months ago, when asked about getting the register back online, Avula said, “Over time, I’d love to explore a realistic and sustainable path to relaunching an online spending portal,” he said. “We just aren’t there yet.” Fast forward to April 2026 and there is still little reason to expect anyone will get anywhere anytime soon.

The timing of the latest press release was more likely a political move to buy time and diffuse a potentially tricky situation for the Mayor as 3rd District Councilwoman Kenya Gibson has been less than satisfied with the administration’s games with the absence of the legally mandated register. After her repeated inquiries were ignored earlier this year, she sent the Mayor a memo saying she was considering sending a subpoena to get the information. The Mayor’s March 27th press release was ostensibly a bargaining chip so he can say he is doing something to move towards complying with city code without having to actually do anything, or at the very least for a while.

For example, the Mayor said in his release he would introduce a new ordinance establishing a new register, but he did not give a timeline. If this was actually a serious move towards transparency, he would have used the last few months to draft an ordinance to accompany his press release and offer it as a starting point to be considered and tweaked by Council.

All of the excuses from Stoney and Avula about the staff time and manual labor to produce the check register are political excuse theater. I know from personal experience because I introduced the ordinance in City Council in 2014 that was approved unanimously in early 2015 with a launch date of July 1, 2015. An email from April 2015 from the city’s then-Department of Information Technology Director in the Jones administration to the City Council Chief of Staff offered an update on the implementation schedule that showed not only would the check register be up and running by July 1, but they promised to provide more information than the ordinance required.

The email mentioned how the data would be collected and published “in a number of innovative and creative ways we feel will meet the requirements of the ordinance as well as please citizens and stakeholders who desire access to this data” and it would also include “data not specified in the ordinance. This is in keeping with the [Jones] administration’s transparency goals and we believe the intent of the ordinance.” Nowhere in the email were concerns expressed about excessive staff time, a manual process, or any of the other excuses flying around for the last two years since the Times-Dispatch article.

A 2014 memo uncovered by Graham Moomaw at The Richmonder found that some additional staff time “may” be needed to comply with FOIA compliance in the 2015 law, but that “review should be the only manual time needed as the city’s financial system has a standard payment register report that can be run at any time.”

While it’s not a secret the Finance Department has been a mess for years (and cratered in the last administration) with staff turnover, vacancies and complete void of leadership, that is not an excuse for not maintaining the register. The department was hardly a Swiss watch under Mayor Jones’ administration, but they made the register work. Yet, the city maintains the position across two administrations the register is “too much work” to maintain it, so they just quit.

If the Finance department is broken or dysfunctional, it’s the Mayor’s job to find ways to fix it and comply with the laws that the department and the Mayor are supposed to uphold, especially concerning the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money. There is no “time out” or recess for political leadership just because a certain department is falling apart. The water plant meltdown made this very clear.

Further, we are talking about spreadsheets and payment information in 2026 which should not be as complicated as editing or deciphering a nuclear physics equation. Richmond Schools are diligent and honest about publishing their information (as are hundreds of other localities with a check register) while protecting the sensitive data every month without complaining about staff time, and there is zero reason why the city shouldn’t also be doing it. ZERO.

Mayor Avula’s obfuscation of not letting the public see who is getting paid for what is not just limited to refusing to publish the register; he is also charging an arm and a leg and other body parts for it. Graham Moomaw from The Richmonder reported he submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on March 10 for financial information from 2025 as it would normally appear in the check register required by city code. A few hours after the Mayor’s “acknowledge it, dodge it, and move on” press release on March 27th with the phony register, Moomaw was told it would cost his publication at least $5,732.40 to proceed with the request for the financial information he was seeking.

Moomaw reported: “A few hours before that FOIA response, Mayor Danny Avula’s administration released a less detailed subset of the data The Richmonder requested. The financial data the city released doesn’t list the names of companies being paid with public funds or specifics on what the city was buying.”

He continued: For example, the spreadsheet shows city police spent roughly $590,000 on an “Equipment And Other Assets Expense” in the fall of 2024. But without the name of the payee and the invoice description — information required to be in the register under city code — the dataset doesn’t offer a clear view of what the city purchased. The mayor has acknowledged to Council members that the two missing fields contain the most relevant information that makes the payment register useful.

Councilwoman Gibson was unimpressed by the Mayor’s latest release and told Moomaw, “I’m not surprised that the city is proud to have published a payment register that omits the names of the payees, but frankly — it’s embarrassing. The Richmonders I know won’t be fooled to believe that this is what being transparent looks like.”

When Gibson recently asked for a copy of the FY25 payment register, she was told by the administration that staff would have to review and redact 200,000 records to provide her the information. They claimed it would take staff away from other core financial processes and take until the end of October to complete the task. In other words, the Avula administration’s aversion (and derision) towards transparency is not just for the general public, but City Council, too.

As for the absurd $5,732 minimum payment for information requested by Moomaw that by law is supposed to be available online for free, Gibson added, “I just can’t accept that the city’s public information team requested payment in exchange for data they are legally required to publish.”

Moomaw also reported that after requesting a more detailed breakdown of the cost, the city replied the $5,732 was based on “the estimated time it would take for city staff to review and redact an estimated 2,000 pages of records.”

Moomaw’s case proves that Avula is following the same playbook and showing the same indifference to transparency, sunshine, and honesty as his predecessor — the city won’t publish the information for the public as required by law, it won’t provide it even if you are on Council, and if you go looking for it via FOIA, they will bill you an absurd amount that guarantees you won’t get it because of the astronomical cost. That’s not a fluke or an aberration — it is policy, just as it has been for the previous eight years.

Consider this: the administration claims they can’t publish the required check register information with the important information mandated by city code (like who got paid how much and for what purpose) because it takes too much staff time to remove sensitive information from the file.

And yet, two weeks ago, the Mayor released the phony and worthless “register” after they did exactly that — they took the time to remove the sensitive information from the same file that also includes the payment information required by city code — and they removed BOTH sets of data and left behind meaningless scraps for the public and called it “transparency.”

They could have only removed the former data and left the latter and, voilà!, you have real transparency, are in compliance with city code, and shown a willingness to change and take the city in a better direction. Instead, it is clear the lack of sunshine will continue as administration policy (unless you have $5,732), no one will provide real answers or solutions, and there is a 100% chance of heavy clouds in the forecast from City Hall for the months and years to come.

Jon Baliles is a former Richmond city councilman. This column is republished with permission from his blog RVA 5×5.