City asks court to throw out water crisis lawsuit filed by former DPU director
Richmond Mayor Danny Avula didn’t defame former Department of Public Utilities April Bingham when she was forced out of City Hall in the wake of the 2025 water crisis, the city’s lawyers are arguing in response to a lawsuit Bingham filed in January.
If anything, the city contends, Avula’s post-crisis comments about Bingham were “complimentary.”
The response filed April 29 by Deputy City Attorney Wirt P. Marks says the lawsuit should be dismissed because Bingham didn’t point to any specific comments city officials made about her that could be viewed as defamatory.
“The Plaintiff’s defamation claim fails because the statements quoted in the complaint constitute opinion, were not false at the time they were made and are not defamatory,” Marks wrote.
Bingham’s $1 million lawsuit against Avula and the city essentially claims she was unfairly blamed for the failure of the city’s water treatment plant in January of 2025, when the city and parts of the greater Richmond region had to go without water due to a catastrophic power failure and flooding at the city’s water treatment plant.
The lawsuit claims city officials created a misleading public impression that the outage was Bingham’s fault by seeking a leadership change at DPU in the immediate aftermath.
All Richmond Circuit Court judges have recused themselves from presiding over the case, leaving it to the Supreme Court of Virginia to appoint an outside judge to hear the matter. The judge has not yet been identified in publicly available court documents.
Bingham also alleges her termination amounted to unlawful retaliation because she had disagreed with Avula about testing protocols the city had to follow before telling the public the water was safe to drink.
Graham Moomaw
The city’s response argues that a disagreement over how to interpret state drinking water regulations doesn’t rise to the level of wrongdoing that could trigger government whistleblower protection for Bingham.
“Internal debates are common in the workplace and do not make every employee who challenges or disagree with another’s decision a whistleblower,” the city wrote.
Avula characterized Bingham’s departure from the city as amicable and publicly praised her performance, while emphasizing the engineering credentials of new DPU Director Scott Morris.
Bingham alleges Avula defamed her by making false statements about the communication timeline during the crisis and falsely characterizing the circumstances of her departure. She claims Morris defamed her by inaccurately telling the City Council she had declined an offer to participate in the city’s after-action review of the crisis. The city itself committed defamation, Bingham claims, by allowing a “false narrative to stand” that she didn’t care about correcting problems at the water plant.
The city initially offered Bingham a separation agreement with severance pay. She agreed to the deal, then backed out a short while later. After she rejected the offer, the city terminated her employment on Jan, 23, 2025.
City Hall’s legal filing argued nothing Avula said about the water crisis timeline cast blame on Bingham specifically.
“Whether or not it was an amicable separation is also an opinion that cast the separation in a positive light and was complimentary of the plaintiff,” the city lawyer wrote.
Morris’s comment that Bingham had declined to participate in the after-action review isn’t defamatory, the city said, even if Bingham were able to prove it wasn’t true.
Any statements city officials made during and after the water crisis, the city argues, were protected commentary on “matters of public concern.”
Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org
