The Richmond City Council voted Tuesday to slim down a 2015 law that required the city to publish an online list of payments made with taxpayer dollars.

Officials had stopped publishing the so-called payment register in 2019 after concerns it was taking up too much staff time and putting the city at risk of accidentally exposing sensitive or confidential information.

Earlier this year, Mayor Danny Avula proposed reducing the scope of the law to make the workload more manageable and relaunch a new version of the payment register.

The mayor’s proposal was unveiled in April. After several delayed committee hearings and a round of amendments, the Council gave it a final thumbs-up Tuesday in a 7-2 vote.

The goal of the revised payment register, according to the Avula administration, is to clearly exclude payments to individual people like tax refunds or social services assistance, while keeping information about public funds being paid to vendors. Reimbursement payments to city employees would still be included.

“I’m extremely proud of our team for working through a long-standing, inherited, and very complicated pain point and finding a path forward that provides proactive public access to the city’s spending data,” Avula said in a news release Tuesday evening.

In the most significant change, the payment register will no longer include an “invoice description” field containing specific information about what was being purchased. An earlier version of the proposal left out more categories of information, such as transaction dates. However, the Avula administration restored some information in a round of amendments made over the summer.

“After a very long period, I think we got it right,” said Chief Administrative Officer Odie Donald II.

Councilor Andrew Breton (1st District) concurred, saying he felt the revised payment register will include essential information while also being “careful” with city data.

“Transaction-level data that has dates and amounts and payees and account numbers is critical for the transparency that we need,” Breton said.

According to the Avula administration, invoice descriptions having the most descriptive detail also made that field the most perilous and time-intensive in terms of review and redaction. In many transactions, officials have said, the invoice description is left blank.

Though the new payment register won’t allow the public to see exact purchase descriptions, the mayor’s office has said it will still include funding codes and cost center descriptions that will give users at least some idea of the nature of each purchase.

The city was able to publish the original version of the payment register from 2015 to 2019 without any major public controversies about confidential information being exposed. When the city revisited the matter this year, officials said some Social Security numbers were getting into the data.

The revised payment register would allow city officials to exclude “any payment that would disclose personally identifiable information protected by law.” Because Virginia law treats many FOIA exemptions as optional, not mandatory, that provision could give officials more discretion over what to publish.

A few Council members had expressed interest in doing an independent Council investigation into why the city was failing to follow a self-imposed transparency law. The call for an investigation — a power the Council rarely uses — was championed by Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District).

At Tuesday’s meeting, Gibson said the revisions to the 2015 law were unnecessary and would serve to add “loopholes.”

“We won’t know what is hidden,” Gibson said. “Because we won’t be able to see it.”

Councilor Sarah Abubaker (4th District) joined Gibson in voting against the Avula administration’s proposal.

The Council rejected Gibson’s standalone proposal for an investigation by a 6-3 vote. 

Gibson said Council members are often “frustrated” by limitations on what they can do, while reminding her colleagues “we have power in these seats.”

“The power that we hold is to ensure that information is provided and that laws are followed as they’re written,” Gibson said. “And if we’re not going to do that, I don’t know who else will.”

Councilor Stephanie Lynch (5th District) voted for the payment register revisions and the proposed investigation into why the city stopped following the law.

The new payment register also won’t include any information about money spent to settle lawsuits or legal claims against City Hall.

The new payment register must be implemented within 90 days of the Council’s vote. The Avula administration signaled it should happen by the end of the year. Once the register is up and running, the Avula administration has indicated it should be able to publish new monthly payment data no later than 60 days after the close of each month.

Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org