by Jon Baliles

Today is Election Day and a free issue for all RVA 5×5 subscribers! If you haven’t voted, be sure to get out and do so!

Speaking of voting, today’s issue is about Mayor Stoney’s press conference last week in which he released a city-funded study to prove everything is fine at City Hall and claimed none of the candidates running to succeed him are audacious enough.

As people go to the polls today to vote for a new mayor, it is worth looking back at last week’s press conference held by Mayor Stoney at which he simultaneously said none of the candidates on the ballot have the vision to earn his endorsement while he also talked up a month-old report conducted by a hired consultant that found (after being paid $49,500) City Hall was running like a Swiss watch and that no one should be fired or replaced when the new mayor takes office in January.

The message that Stoney, who is term-limited from running again, wanted to put forward was that people are concerned about real issues and do not include the functioning of City Hall as a serious concern, even though all five candidates for the office have said repeatedly they will work hard to fix City Hall. All five candidates have said that they are going to work on listening to the people and employees and find ways to improve processes. None of the five have attacked Stoney directly, but none of them have said they would continue the great work of the Stoney Administration (or identified what that has been) or said they would be a third term. In fact, all five have said they would replace Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Lincoln Saunders, who is Stoney’s best friend and was appointed CAO despite lacking any experience running a municipality, organization, or business.

Stoney also claimed the entire field of candidates was simply talking to the wrong people and only spending time in privileged parts of the city. Graham Moomaw reported in The Richmonder on Friday:

‘Are they spending time in areas… where people are struggling economically, where they’ve seen improvements and investments in their neighborhoods,’ Stoney said. ‘Or are they spending a lot of time in the areas where, you know, they have the privilege to show up in the middle of an afternoon and tell you what they think is wrong with the City of Richmond?’

So, not only does Stoney think the candidates are clueless about how City Hall works, they also need to listen to his consultants so that the “leadership” team that brought you the meals tax fiasco, crazy water bills for people months after they move away, serious deficiencies at social services that fail or delay helping people get aid and services they need, refusal to fill freedom-of-information-act requests, and the city credit card scandal in which the Director of Communications found ways for the city to spend $345,000 with her former business partner in Florida who ran another business, gets more time at the helm of the ship.

Stoney said he saw some of the mayoral forums and that the candidates have “sounded the same” and failed to “distinguish themselves from the pack” and issued a challenge to show what they would do “beyond what this administration has done for the last 8 years.”

But the main point of the press event was not to tout the outgoing mayor’s long list of accomplishments or lack of an endorsement. It was to talk about a follow up report to Stoney’s May 2017 Performance Review that he promised (and delivered) after the 2016 campaign. It identified areas where the city could improve operations and working environment. James Burke, who co-authored the original report with colleague Linda Pierce from TEO Consulting (but were at VCU in 2017) issued the 129-page report and found that things were actually quite rosy at City Hall (the report was dated in late September but was only revealed by the Mayor at Halloween — trick or treat!).

The original 2017 report focused mostly on the “Big 4’ departments that needed overhauls because they touched most every other department and operation in the city — Finance, Procurement, Human Resources (HR) and Information Technology. The 2024 report found that “extreme changes” have helped those four turn the corner. They noted for instance that the HR department had been turned around — in 2023, seven years later. Better late then never, perhaps, but anyone who was at City Hall in recent years knows that department has been a runaway roller coaster of changing leadership, understaffing, lack of training, and slow hiring that affected numerous departments.

But the real purpose of the 2024 report was not to brag, but to offer cover for the new mayor to keep Saunders as CAO and all of the department directors that are in place. Saunders started as Stoney’s Chief of Staff in 2017 and was appointed to the CAO position in 2020 despite the lack of experience running a large and complex operation like a municipality with a $1 billion budget and more than 4,000 employees. When Saunders ascended to CAO, his salary was $198,000 but since then he has received large raises annually (approved by the Mayor and Council), and is currently paid $335,000.

The consultants did not hold back on the warnings and intimations that changing anything would lead to devastation at the city. Burke warned, “What a lot of leaders want to do is break everything. They think that, if you move people around, it’s going to change things. It’s not. What it’s going to do is … create a slower response, (and) tie up hiring decisions.”

“A lot of time has gone into hiring good people,” he said. “I would not recommend changing anybody on the decks right now.”

“Turning a ship around like that, in our experience, especially in government where bad memories tend to linger, requires at least five years. Add into the mix a pandemic and one is truly facing an uphill battle. It is our estimation that the city has many of the right people in place and is now turning a critical corner.”

What convenient advice for the new mayor. Burke said at the press conference last week that he was surprised at how much collaboration they found among department heads: “As I mentioned, the collaboration has been very good. We heard that people are having sometimes just getting together, having hard conversations.”

“The vibe that you get at City Hall is different from the one you experienced in 2017,” he said. 

Of course, there are 49,500 reasons why the 2024 report oozed with harmony and kumbaya and warnings not to change anything — the methodology of the 2024 report was a joke and tailor-made for the response that had been requested.

The methodology of the original 2017 report gathered information using multiple methods including focus groups, electronic surveys, and interviews with over 1200 city employees (about 25% of the workforce) in 19 agencies that report to the CAO and Mayor. Leadership interviews were also conducted, but surveys and focus groups were confidential and done without management or directors in the meetings. Stoney wanted (and was correct) to hear from employees so they could speak openly and without fear for their job; they were able to speak about what was wrong or right within their respective department and offer suggestions for fixing what the employees on the front lines in City Hall and out in the streets saw every day and not just what upper management reported to their higher ups.

The methodology of the 2024 kumbaya report, however, gathered information by talking to each of the department directors on Zoom calls and/or in interviews after filling out surveys. In the 2024 report, each current department director received a copy of the 2017 report and was asked to report on the progress made on each of the recommendations from 2017 (you might think they would have received a copy of this report when they were hired, but it’s not clear that was ever the case).

Since hardly any current directors were in those same positions in 2017, they were asked to provide as much history as possible and do “the best they could historically.” As the methodology section of the 2024 report admits: “This document relies upon the self-report from the Directors and, in some cases, their teams.” Furthermore, the directors’ bosses (the Deputy Chief Administrative Officer’s (DCAO)) were asked to review the director’s responses.

In other words, the report drew its “conclusions” by gathering information from the department directors who directly report to their DCAO and the CAO. So, it’s hardly a stretch to believe that if the directors want to keep their jobs in a new administration, then they don’t dare report bad news — they share a direct interest that their boss keeps his job, too. The mayor is term-limited, but if the directors go to the bat for the CAO and say everything is wonderful, then maybe everybody gets to keep their job — which, coincidentally, is exactly what the consultants recommended.

Samuel Parker at the Times-Dispatch wrote:

Asked what he would recommend to the next administration, Burke said it would be a good idea to hold a “culture survey” to test his and Pierce’s latest findings. He also urged Richmond’s next mayor to consider pumping the brakes on staffing overhauls.

Stoney also said at the press conference:

I think every mayoral candidate, if you are lucky enough, honored enough to be mayor, needs to put their impression on city hall, right? I think you have to listen to what [consultant Jim Burke] just stated and it was take the time to to review the leadership we have here today and, are they qualified, worthy to be a part of a future administration? That’s going to be the work of the next mayor.

So, the city’s outgoing Mayor hired a consultant and spent $50,000 of city money to tell the next mayor to keep his best friend and everyone they hired in place and that all is well.

It would be foolish to think that whomever gets elected mayor tonight will not want their own people to work with that they trust to get the job done. It’s perfectly normal for a newly-elected officeholder to bring in a team for posts like a chief of staff and assistants and policy advisors, etc. Unless that new mayor is eager to dive head first into a shallow pool, you might think they will (hopefully) want key new people with experience in day-to-day municipal government and best practices with proven track records of getting things done and not have to rely on an expensive “study” to just claim that things are getting done.

One other convenient omission from the 2024 kumbaya report was the lack of any mention of previous Service Efforts and Accomplishments (SEA) reports. The 2017 Performance Review noted:

Comparison of two Service Efforts and Accomplishments (SEA) reports, an annual review of residents conducted by the City Auditor, reveals a stark decline in citizen’s satisfaction with City government in the last eight years. In the 2008 report, 81% of respondents said the City was moving in the right direction; that number had plunged to just 34% in the 2016 SEA report.

The 2024 report made no mention of the SEA report from 2008 or 2016. That might be because there was a 2022 SEA report which revealed those who believed the City was “moving in the right direction” totaled just 45%, which is better than it was under Jones’ 34%, but still underwater and not exactly bragging territory.

The 2008 SEA report found 44% of residents felt they received a good level of service in relation to the taxes they paid; the 2016 report that number fell to 31% and the 2022 report showed it had ticked up to 35%. The “overall feeling of safety” question received a 57% favorable response in 2008; the 2022 report shows that number was down to 35%. The 2022 SEA report also asked other questions not covered in earlier iterations and showed that the vast majority of the public is not at all satisfied:

Please rate the following categories of Richmond government performance. (% excellent or good):
40% — Treating residents with respect
34% — The job Richmond government does at welcoming resident involvement
31% — Informing residents about issues facing the community
30% — Treating all residents fairly
30% — Generally acting in the best interest of the community
27% — Overall confidence in Richmond government
25% — Being honest
22% — Being open and transparent to the public

So, it’s not a surprise at all to see the 2024 kumbaya report omit any and all mentions of these reports and certainly the results of the 2022 SEA report (and it’s clear why the Mayor and CAO didn’t do a 2024 SEA version). If you pay $50,000, you should get a report to say whatever they want it to say and not bother finding out what the people really think.

Even though Stoney pushed his report on what he thinks the next mayor needs to do to ensure City Hall continues running so “efficiently,” he still did not find anyone he considered bold enough to support as his successor. As noted, Stoney chose not to endorse because, he said, “I have not heard anyone lay out (an) audacious vision for the future of the city of Richmond.”

Let’s hope whomever is elected this evening rises to the tall task that awaits them and that their “audacious” vision is one rooted in problem solving, transparency, honesty, engaging and informing the citizenry of the city, fixing the problems instead of pointing the blame, and getting things done. That’s the kind of vision Richmond has been lacking and is sorely needed — let’s hope the new mayor does not need a vision prescription or a $50,000 study to focus on it and deliver it.

Jon Baliles is a former Richmond City Councilman. This column has been republished with permission from his blog, RVA 5×5. It is posted here with permission.