City Council again delays action on financial transparency measures
Richmond officials stopped following a City Council-approved transparency law seven years ago. After an earlier delay on proposals to address the issue, the Council still hasn’t decided what to do about it.
On Wednesday, a Council committee discussed the possibility of initiating a formal investigation into the city’s failure to publish a monthly payment register. That proposal has been put forward by Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District), who regularly pushes for more outside oversight of city operations.
This week, the Council’s Finance and Economic Development Committee voted to put off the investigation request until its July meeting. In May, the same committee chose to put off the matter until June.
Councilor Ellen Robertson (6th District), who chairs the finance committee, said the suggestion to investigate was “very serious.”
“This is very important legislation,” Robertson said. “And I think we need to get this right.”
The Council voted in 2015 to routinely post the register online to allow the public to keep tabs on city spending. The city published the data for several years, but stopped in 2019 due to concerns it was taking up too much staff time and creating too much risk of inadvertent disclosures of confidential information.
Mayor Danny Avula has proposed changing the law to allow the city to resume publishing a slimmed-down version of the payment register.
The mayor’s team has said his proposal would still provide more transparency than what currently exists, without overburdening the city by having staffers review large amounts of data to find and redact potentially sensitive text like social security numbers or the names of people receiving social services payments.
Graham Moomaw
The mayor’s proposal was also on Wednesday’s committee agenda, but the administration asked for it to be put off until July.
The Council seems to prefer to take up both proposals at the same time, though the body could conceivably choose to investigate the issue before deciding how it wants to proceed with Avula’s plan.
Gibson contends an investigation would help the Council better understand the validity of the administration’s concerns about publishing the payment register and give the elected body a firmer understanding of what type of information city officials want to redact.
“The Council would have additional visibility and could ensure that ahead of voting to reduce what is publicly available — essentially reducing the transparency — that we would do our due diligence in reviewing the documentation,” Gibson said Wednesday.
Council Chief of Staff RJ Warren explained that, if the body wanted to do the investigation, it would go through the Council’s Organizational Development Committee. All nine members serve on that committee, and could decide what documents and testimony was needed to understand the payment register issue. If the Council’s informational requests were denied, Warren said, the Council could then invoke its subpoena power.
During a public comment period, one speaker urged the Council to support Gibson’s call for an investigation.
A city “striving for excellence,” said Northside resident Almonte Canselo, shouldn’t choose less transparency just because other local governments don’t typically publish financial data as detailed as what the Richmond law requires.
“If we welcome accountability, it would only make sense to make it as easy as possible to find this information,” Canselo said.
The two proposals will come back for the committee’s July 15 meeting.
Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org
