City Council’s apparent $50K budget boost for Michelle Mosby’s nonprofit was an error, official says

As the Richmond City Council wrapped its budget amendments Monday, members had $50,000 in taxpayer money remaining that hadn’t been dedicated for any particular purpose.

In public, the council agreed to set that money to the side and figure out what to do with it later.

But when the council published a document online this week formalizing its budget decisions, the spreadsheet indicated the $50,000 would go to the nonprofit run by former mayoral candidate Michelle Mosby. 

Council President Cynthia Newbille (7th District) had filed an amendment to give a $50,000 funding boost to Mosby’s Help Me Help You Foundation, which helps formerly incarcerated people re-enter society. 

That expenditure wasn’t one of the 22 general fund budget amendments the council approved, but it later showed up on the final list as if it had passed.

On Thursday, Interim Council of Chief Matthew Slaats said the apparent funding for Mosby’s group was a mistake. The council staff didn’t catch it, he said, until The Richmonder asked about it on Wednesday afternoon.

Slaats said the council staff was not instructed to allocate the $50,000 to Mosby’s organization.

“I think it was an error in the drafting,” Slaats said.

Newbille didn’t respond to a request for comment.

After The Richmonder asked about the appearance of funding the council didn’t approve, the spreadsheet on the council website was altered again. In the revised version, the $50,000 allocated to “Increase funding for Help Me Help You Foundation” had been changed to a seemingly generic placeholder, saying “increase funding for council amendment.”

The apparent error wasn’t in an early rough draft of the changes the council was making to the budget. It was on a spreadsheet used at Monday night’s meeting to formally amend Mayor Danny Avula’s pending budget ordinance to reflect the end result of the council’s monthlong budget process. That council is set to approve that ordinance on May 12.

Mosby is a former City Council president who served alongside several of the body’s current members. She has defended her nonprofit as providing essential services to former inmates who need help restarting their lives, but the public funding the group receives has occasionally drawn scrutiny given Mosby’s status as a local political figure with influential allies. Last year, Mosby said that if she won the mayoral race she would hand control of the nonprofit to her daughter.

On Thursday, Mosby said she was unaware of what was going on with the on-again, off-again funding increase from City Council.

“I know the amendment was put in,” Mosby said. “And that’s all I know.”

The council’s budget process didn’t involve any recorded votes on which amendments were approved and which ones were rejected. Instead, Newbille was determining which items had consensus and which did not based on the vibes she was getting from her council colleagues.

The council ended up with the extra $50,000 as it reached the end of its final budget work session Monday afternoon. Members briefly discussed possible uses for it, but eventually agreed they were too tired and out of time to have a lengthy discussion about a relatively small amount of money.

“I think $50,000 in the scheme of things is too much discussion right now,” Councilor Ellen Robertson (6th District) said at the meeting. “We could easily find a way to spend that.”

Council leaders have said they intend to rework the budget process for next year to give the legislative body more time to review the city’s spending trends and make the process more efficient and easier for the public to follow.

It remains unclear what the city plans to do with the $50,000.

Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org