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Today is Part 2 about the unsettling movement away from transparency and shining a light on waste, fraud, and abuse at City Hall. You can read Part 1 here.
It’s not breaking news that City Hall has, for more than several years now, been moving in a less than transparent direction. It’s been a slow drip effort to pull the shroud down on how government operates and the public's right to know how things are functioning or malfunctioning. But it's not just another legacy hangover from the Stoney administration; the most recent example was a weak attempt by Mayor Avula hidden inside his own budget proposal. This year’s proposed budget included a proposal (that had nothing to do with the budget) to remove the requirement to make public legal advice or opinions given by the City Attorney to the Mayor or Council in the conduct of city business. It is required by Sect. 2-110 of city code that “A copy of each opinion shall be kept on file in the City Attorney's Office and shall be made available for inspection of any person affected by the opinion or having an interest in the opinion.”
According to Samuel Parker at the Times-Dispatch, Mayor Avula said about the proposed change that “the language was requested by [City Attorney Laura Drewry] in order to make it abundantly clear that her office can provide confidential advice.” The proposal was removed from the budget after the media reported on it, and when asked about how it got in the budget in the first place, the Mayor replied: “I did not intend for those items to be included in the budget ordinance.”
Sadly, these efforts at obscuring transparency aren’t anything new. There is a trail of bread crumbs that reveal what could be seen as a deliberate (or even intentional) pattern of pulling down the shade to prevent the public from finding out what is going on (or at the very least, making it much more difficult). From suppressing the public posting of Inspector General (IG) reports in 2019 to the controversial “phantom” IG report that was buried last year that allegedly revealed the Department of Finance was not telling businesses if they had a credit on their balance, what is happening is causing a serious erosion of the level of trust people have with City Hall from those who are supposedly running it.
Just a few months after creating the IG office and appointing James Osuna to run it in 2019, City Council then tried to neuter the office they said was needed (and it was — and is) by telling him not to publish his reports. We didn’t find out until the summer of 2024, however, that the Inspector General’s Office had not published any of the reports since 2019, despite being required by city code.
As it turns out, it was a double squeeze play by City Council and the City Attorney’s office. The City Attorney gave legal “guidance” in 2019 (before Drewry led the office) to Council and the Inspector General’s Office to be cautious when posting his office’s reports to help protect whistleblowers and create an environment where they feel comfortable coming forward. Council gave Osuna “discretion” whether or not to publish the reports online, even though then-Council President Kristen Nye admitted to WRIC that it was neither an official or public Council decision and no vote was ever taken to tell Osuna not to publish or remove the requirement from city code. Someone decided it was not a good look for those reports about waste, fraud, and abuse to be made public so they “suggested” they not be posted online. FWIW, City Council appoints both the City Attorney and the Inspector General under the City Charter (wink, wink).
When Dean Mirshahi at WRIC broke the story, Drewry (who became City Attorney in 2023) denied such advice was ever even given to Council even though Nye said it was. Drewry did not even respond to an email from WRIC for that story that simply asked if city code requires reports to be published online. It was only by a miracle that Nye suddenly received new “guidance” from the City Attorney after the story broke and the city would post the reports that city code required (and they were a few weeks later). Nye, who said she was speaking on behalf of the IG’s office as Council president (just like Drewry) did not answer whether Council believed the city code requires the reports to be published online.
When the meals tax fiasco blew up in early 2024 and the Finance Department was not notifying restaurants they were being hit with insane penalties and interest on bills the city never notified them about, the Stoney administration’s initial response was to dismiss it as only “a handful of cases,” when in fact there were hundreds of them. In response, City Council approved an ordinance in March 2024 requiring the finance department to notify taxpayers of credits on any of their tax accounts within 90 days because the meals tax fiasco also unearthed that Finance had not been telling businesses if they had credits other account and were actually owed money by the city.
Jason Roop, former Editor of Style Weekly and now a small business owner (and host of City Council meetings every month on public television) said he accidentally overpaid his business tax in 2022 but was never told he had a $600 credit on his
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