Council committee punts on transparency measures after shutting down discussion
With most of the Richmond City Council and several top aides to Mayor Danny Avula gathered in the same room Wednesday afternoon, several officials agreed it was important to have a conversation about transparency at City Hall. Just not now.
Two competing proposals were on a Council committee’s agenda dealing with the city’s failure to follow a 2015 law requiring detailed spending data to be published online.
The committee put off both proposals until June after Councilor Ellen Robertson (6th District) — who chairs the Council’s Finance and Economic Development Committee — shut down efforts by Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) to discuss the issue more fully.
The city is legally required to make financial data available to the public through an online payment register. Officials stopped following the law in 2019 due to concerns compliance was becoming overly burdensome and requiring too much staff time to prevent the release of sensitive information.
In an attempt to make the process more manageable, Avula has proposed a solution that would significantly scale back the scope of the information the city is required to publish.
Gibson is asking the Council to exercise its rarely invoked oversight powers and launch its own investigation into the matter to try to find out if the city is truly incapable of following the original law or simply doesn’t want to.
At Wednesday’s committee meeting, Gibson began to question the Avula administration about whether anyone from the public had complained about sensitive information being found in the payment register. She also started to inquire about how private information like social security numbers would be getting into the city data to begin with.
Robertson interrupted and stopped her.
“Given that this is about transparency, I would like to finish this question so that it is in the public record,” Gibson said.
Graham Moomaw
Robertson said she was cutting off Gibson’s questions because she wanted to allow more time for the Council to have all its questions answered before the proposals come back in June.
“And we’re not going to entertain that today in this committee,” Robertson said.
The payment register proposals were originally set to be heard in a committee meeting on May 4, but that meeting was cancelled because Council members were traveling to Phoenix that week for ChamberRVAs InterCity Visit.
If the Council chooses to make changes to Avula’s plan after delaying the initial committee hearing for another month, the final vote might not happen until July or August. Avula first rolled out his plan in early April.
Robertson seemed determined to prevent discussion of the issue as soon as the meeting began. She initially tried to remove the two payment register proposals from the committee agenda altogether.
That drew an objection from Angela Warner, a woman in the audience who said she had come to make a public comment on the payment register issue and wouldn’t be able to do so if it was taken off the agenda.
Graham Moomaw
The committee then agreed to stick to its original agenda. But after allowing public comment and getting a presentation on the mayor’s payment register plan, the three-member committee again moved to delay both proposals.
The stated purpose for the delay was to allow more time for discussion and questions, even as in-the-moment discussion was being halted.
“I firmly believe more dialogue can be held to get many of those answers,” Robertson said.
The decision to delay seemed to be the Council’s alone. Avula Chief of Staff Lawson Wijesooriya told the committee she was prepared to present the mayor’s proposal. She delivered a presentation that got virtually no response from Council because of Robertson’s move to block follow-up questions.
“I believe that we all agree that both transparency and privacy are important,” Wijesooriya said. “The public deserves both.”
Avula’s payment register plan aims to remove records of payments to individual people that raise privacy concerns, such as social services assistance and refunds on tax or utility bills.
However, the mayor’s plan goes further than that by also excluding proactive disclosure of payments to settle legal disputes. Avula’s version of the payment register would also no longer include invoice descriptions and dates for payments to for-profit vendors, making it harder to use the data to track specifics of city spending.
David M. Poole
Gibson ultimately accepted the move to delay consideration of the two proposals, seemingly with reluctance. She said her proposed investigation is a way for the Council to find out if there are “true barriers” to publishing the data and not “just excuses.”
“The idea is to ensure that before we take action to effectively water down the payment register — given the history of what is frankly fraudulent payments and some sense of corruption in the city — that we do our due diligence,” Gibson said.
Robertson and other Council members on the finance committee said they hoped the delay would give both sides a chance to work toward compromise.
“We owe it to the administration as well as the public and the City Council's oversight to ensure that we’re making the right decisions,” said Councilor Nicole Jones (9th District).
Robertson said she wanted more time to better understand how a Council investigation would work. She indicated conversations about the transparency measures would happen through backchannel talks before the proposals come back for the next finance committee meeting on June 17.
“I’m not suggesting what you do with your own questions,” Robertson told Gibson. “But at the present time we have continued this paper. So I don’t want to continue asking questions as it relates to it.”
Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org
