Parking tickets in Richmond would get a little more costly under the budget proposal released last month by Mayor Danny Avula, which raises the fee for a standard ticket from $25 to $30.

Parking in city-owned space — even if you’re following the rules — would also become slightly more expensive. The charge for on-street parking would rise from $2 an hour to $2.50 an hour. Similar increases are proposed for city-owned parking lots and garages,  which see a $1 bump in the hourly parking rate and a $5 increase for the monthly rate. 

The budget plan envisions the city’s parking enterprise budget — the special fund where parking revenue is collected and spent — to rise from $17 million in the current budget to $18.5 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1.

For a higher tier of parking tickets that involve a vehicle impeding sidewalks, driveways or fire hydrants instead of only exceeding time limits, the cost would go from $40 to $50.

It would also cost more to have workers haul away household trash and recycling, according to the budget ordinance introduced by the mayor.

The recycling fee would rise from $2.99 per month to $4.33 per month. The solid waste charge would increase from $23.75 per month to $24.75.

The higher recycling and solid waste fees — both of which are included in monthly utility bills — would be assessed in addition to planned increases in gas, water and wastewater rates that would add almost $13 per month to the average residential bill.

And while the proposed budget doesn’t raise the city’s real estate tax rate, it anticipates 6% growth in real estate assessments this year. The tax rate would not change, but that growth would translate to higher tax bills for many Richmonders as their property values continue to rise.

At the City Council’s first budget work session on Monday afternoon, interim Chief Administrative Officer Sabrina Joy-Hogg said the “modest” fee increases are necessary to cover the city’s costs to provide trash, recycling and parking services.

Joy-Hogg said the city is “nowhere close” to charging trash pickup fees that fully cover the city’s costs of providing the service. It’s a similar situation with curbside recycling, she said, a service the city contracts out to the Central Virginia Waste Management Authority.

“The city has been charging only $2.99 for many, many years. We are not breaking even with this contract,” Joy-Hogg said.

The rise in parking fees will help cover the costs of maintaining the city’s 10 garages and 11 surface lots, Joy-Hogg said, as well as “parking management across the city.”

The council didn’t spend much time on the fee increases at Monday’s work session, but members offered their initial reactions to Avula’s budget.

Concerns about rising costs and the budget process

Two outspoken new council members offered blunt assessments of the proposal, saying they felt there was much more work to do over the next month before the May 12 deadline to adopt the budget.

Councilor Sarah Abubaker (4th District) urged the administration to take a harder look at how it can keep costs down, saying the city has reached a tipping point where it can no longer ask its residents to keep paying more.

“There is no flexibility in the people of the city of Richmond to take any additional burden,” Abubaker said. “People are breaking under the cost of living in this city.”

Reducing expenses by a few million dollars, Abubaker said, is a “drop in the bucket” within the city’s general fund budget of more than $1 billion. 

Specifically, Abubaker asked for a closer look at overlapping staffing across city departments, noting that several agencies have positions related to civic engagement in addition to the city’s standalone Office of Communications and Civic Engagement. In the budget proposal. In the proposed budget, the communications office is slated to receive $3.6 million in funding to pay for a staff of 24 people.

Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) said she was “frustrated” by the entire budget process. A lack of detailed information and the timeline for reviewing and approving a complex document, she said, minimizes the City Council’s ability to give meaningful input and make amendments.

“There’s a tension,” Gibson said. “I’m sure the administration would like for us to make no changes to it.”

City residents are owed a fuller explanation, Gibson said, of why officials are “painting a pretty scary financial picture” after the city has seen a significant spike in real estate tax revenue.

“It’s hard for the public to trust us if we’re telling them we have no money and yet they’re paying more,” said Gibson, who asked for a broader conversation about how the city can overhaul the budget process.

More experienced council members pointed out that the budget schedule is partly the result of past City Council timing decisions based on when the city would get reliable data about property values.

Councilor Ellen Robertson (6th District) thanked the administration for its work on the “tremendous lift” of preparing a budget in a matter of months that aligns with the vision of a new mayor who took office in January. The first work session of the city’s budget season, she added, isn’t the time to start reimagining the entire system.

“We are a day late and a dollar short to be talking about processes and changing processes,” Robertson said.

The council wasn’t expected to make any major budget decisions at Monday’s meeting. Instead, the session was largely focused on getting more detail on the budget and beginning talks about what topics the governing body and the Avula administration might zero in on over the next few weeks.

Council members had submitted a set of written questions about the budget, and the administration responded with answers in writing Sunday night.

“It takes a while to answer 80 questions,” Joy-Hogg said.

Both Gibson and Abubaker expressed interest in revisiting the administration’s proposal for across-the-board raises of at least 3.25%. They floated the idea of only giving the raises to lower-level employees instead of also spending significant sums to raise the salaries of managers already making more than $150,000 or $175,000 per year.

High-ranking officials who already got hefty raises over the last few years, Abubaker said, may not need another 3.25%.

“To me that’s the definition of equality vs. equity,” she said. “I think that this approach doesn’t get to the equitable solution for how we fund our city workers.”

Councilor Andrew Breton (1st District) asked the administration to offer suggestions for where more savings could be found in the budget.

“You know better than me where to find it,” said Breton, who is serving in his first term along with Gibson and Abubaker.

Avula offers to take out policy changes wrapped into budget

In a brief introductory speech to the council at Monday’s meeting, Avula said he was open to the idea of removing several policy proposals that the administration had wrapped into the budget ordinance. 

Council staff had flagged the add-on proposals — which change the city’s statutory  process of funding nonprofit groups, repeal a rule requiring written, public opinions from the city attorney’s office and loosen residency rules requiring senior city officials to live in Richmond — as potentially not relevant to the business of passing a budget.

In its written responses, the administration insisted the proposals are “germane” to the budget, but some council officials saw the explanations as a logical stretch. 

The provision dealing with legal opinions has a connection to the budget, the administration wrote, because attorneys play a “critical role during the development of the budget.” It makes sense to change the residency rules through the budget, according to the administration’s reasoning, because the positions governed by those rules are funded in the budget.

The council has not yet made a decision on whether to strike those proposals from the budget and take them up separately. But if the council wants to go that route, Avula said, he would be “fully supportive” of doing so.

The council has more budget work sessions scheduled for April 14, 16 and 21.

According to the council’s schedule, the body is supposed to reach consensus on budget amendments by the April 21 meeting.

Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org