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It has been obvious for some time now the cesspool of corruption and inefficiency former Mayor Doug Wilder warned us about 20 years ago had returned to City Hall in force. Something very troubling has been unfolding at City Hall in recent years as it seems as if there is a collective effort to derail the train as it tries to get out of the tunnel and into the sunlight. Week after week and month after month, stories emerge that paint a portrait of corruption and lack of desire to do anything about it. You can’t sweep it under the rug or wave a wand and make it go away.
The bigger the stories of waste, fraud and abuse get, the more it seems the people who are supposed to be the watchdogs are instead trying to keep the public from finding out what really happened. It’s hard to find examples of them being vocally concerned and/or interested in rooting it out and showing residents they are doing something definitive about stopping it (which almost always stops others from trying to come up with their own scam). If you want to find and address the root cause of anything, you have to tear out the roots. Instead, City Hall seems intent on removing the gardener.
Two months ago in mid-May, City Council fired the Inspector General (IG) whose only job is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse — without an explanation to anyone. Inquiring minds want to know if the IG was crooked or uncovering too much crookedness or had some other issue, but we don’t know (more on this below). Everyone at City Hall is mounting a collective defense of the battlements to prevent anyone from finding out.
As we wrote last week, Mayor Avula ran on transparency but has not come close to opening the blinds to allow in the sunshine. He has nowhere to go but up from the subterranean bar left behind by the Stoney transparency team, and Avula can’t raise it fast enough. But instead of announcing and demonstrating a new attitude and policy towards transparency, he has been content with more of the same and has certainly fallen short of his campaign promises to date. It’s not hard to change course, but so far he hasn’t (more on this in Part 2).
To add to all that, the current and previous City Attorney has had run-in’s with the Inspector General on several occasions concerning the very purpose of the IG’s mission to uncover waste, fraud and abuse. For example, back in 2019 just after the IG was appointed, someone on City Council decided (there was never a public vote on it) to seek and got an opinion from the previous City Attorney who “suggested” the IG did not have to publish his reports on the city’s web site even though it is required by city code (did we mention City Council hires and fires the IG?).
When that “anomaly” was uncovered in 2024 by Dean Mirshahi at WRIC, the new City Attorney denied such advice was ever even given to Council. Then, miraculously, then-City Council President Kristen Nye suddenly received new “guidance” from the City Attorney to post the reports that had never been posted as required. A few weeks later, the seventeen reports (about embezzlement of city funds, theft of government
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