Flood City Hall With Sunshine; Missing the Mark + Not Getting the Lesson.

RVA 5x5 - August 24, 2024

No algorithms. No content filters. No A.I. — Honest and insightful analysis from Richmond, VA.

This week check out our stories on:

• City Council quietly pulled the blinds down on transparency at City Hall five years ago, but now a news story is forcing the publication of at least 16 reports from the city’s Inspector General about fraud, waste and abuse that should have been posted online all along.

• Two more stories about the city’s Finance Department, one including a secret audio recording of an internal meeting and another with reaction from City Council members’ reactions to the chaos.
  

STORY #1 — Flood City Hall With Sunshine
Apparently there seems to be a team effort as of late at City Hall to continue pulling down the shade on transparency. Another embarrassing story came to light this week that revealed City Council has complemented the Mayor’s effort to keep the public in the dark as much as possible.

Dean Mirshahi at WRIC reports that the Inspector General’s (IG) Office has not posted any of the 16 or 17 reports it has conducted in the last five years. The last report on the IG web page was from September 2019, even though city code says that the reports must be posted for public perusal since the IG investigates cases of waste, fraud, and abuse within the city bureaucracy. As Mirshahi points out, city code says, Richmond’s IT department “shall maintain” a subsidiary webpage on the IG’s office’s website to provide “an internet location at which all inspector general reports issued since July 1, 2018, are electronically published for public review.”

Yet, according to Council President Kristen Nye, the then-City Attorney waved a magic wand in 2019 and told City Council they could give Inspector General James Osuna “legal guidance” in which Council could inform Osuna the publishing of reports online would be at his “discretion”. It wasn’t an official resolution or ordinance (that would require a public hearing); nor was it made by any one member of Council. Instead, this “friendly advice” was passed along from the nine-member legislative body of the city — which just also happens to hire and fire the Inspector General (not the Mayor). Wink, wink.

That fits right in with Mayor Stoney’s and Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Lincoln Sanders’ allergy to Freedom of Information Act requests and transparency. The city’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) officer was fired in January and filed a lawsuit against the city soon after, claiming that the city was purposely avoiding responding to FOIA requests. Activists Josh Stanfield and Paul Goldman, as well as reporters for the Times-Dispatch and CBS6, have had many FOIA requests ignored so often by the Mayor’s staff that they actually have had to file lawsuits against the city to get them to respond.

City code indeed says the IG reports “shall” be published online and available to public. In the language of government-ese, the term “shall” in legislation is the same as “must.” If it were an optional instruction, it would say “should.” WRIC did not receive a response from the City Attorney when asked if they could point to city