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Six months ago, everyone was caught completely off guard when “Dry January” took on a new meaning after the city cut off the water to residents (and a lot of people in Henrico and Hanover) because of a two-inch snowstorm which shut down the city’s water plant after years of neglected everything. The discombobulation of those first few hours and days soon turned into bewilderment as people began asking, Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot?
It did not take long to figure out that Mayor Avula, who had taken his oath a mere six days prior, had no clue why the plant failed or what was going on. Not because he wasn’t concerned the state capitol couldn’t provide water, but because his predecessor Levar Stoney, who is currently running for lieutenant governor, had more than likely told him everything in the city was running like a fine-tuned Mercedes when he handed over the keys; all the new mayor had to do was crank it up and hit the road.
Except, it wasn’t — and isn’t — and won’t be for quite some time.
Avula has not said a disparaging word about his friend and predecessor about anything related to the January water crisis, or the implosion of the Finance department, or anything else at City Hall that is now his mess to try and clean up. But everyone also understands that Avula was not to blame for the January water plant meltdown — city residents know it, people in Henrico and Hanover know it, state legislators know it, staff that were in the hospitals that week know it, young children know it. They also know that it wasn’t the fault of former Mayor Dwight Jones.
Jones served as Mayor from 2009-2016, which makes it astounding the Times-Dispatch reported last week that former Mayor Stoney claimed the meltdown of the water plant in January 2025 was the actually the fault of HIS predecessor, who left office eight years ago. Anna Bryson and Samuel Parker reported that Stoney said at a campaign event in Northern Virginia: “This came out of the administration before me. Do we wish that the prior administration would have gotten it done so we didn’t have to deal with it? Obviously, we wish that.”
Stoney added, “But we were the ones who finally got it done,” he added. “It’s a long process to get to completion on a project like that, but we did that.”
Except, he didn’t.
Stoney was referring to a piece of equipment called a switchgear that would have automatically switched power sources when it briefly went out in January and prevented the failure of the pumps and computer software to keep the plant running. The switch failed and staff were not trained (or not physically at the plant) to manually override the process, pressure was lost, leadership was absent, and you know the rest.
Samuel Parker reported in the Times-Dispatch in January the city issued three procurements for the equipment to be replaced, initially in 2016, then again in 2021 and 2022. The October 2016 procurement issue included replacing the switchgear and extensive construction and electrical work and two bids came in at $2.5 million and $2.7 million. However, as the article notes, the Stoney Administration killed the procurement seven months after he took office: “But in a notice dated July 25, 2017, a city procurement officer announced the project had been canceled “in its entirety.” The notice does not contain an explanation for the cancellation.”
Jones started the procurement, but Stoney killed it in 2017 and did not reissue it for four more years. The 2021 procurement issue went nowhere, and when the solicitation was finally reissued in 2022, the winning bid the Stoney administration accepted was from a South Carolina company for just over $6 million. That deal included an 18-month window to complete the project with a deadline by the middle of 2024. However, for unknown reasons according to the article, the project was delayed.
Talk about the art of the deal.
Stoney held firm and said in the article last week, “I was mayor for eight years. We never had a water outage. We took every storm, every inclement weather warning, seriously.”
Mayor Jones, who last week endorsed Sen. Aaron Rouse from Virginia Beach for the Democratic lieutenant governor nomination over Stoney, said, “The city is extremely old and (it is) difficult, in eight years, to fix systemic problems,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that someone would blame a predecessor because you get what you get, and you deal with what you have to deal with.”
No one will ever accuse me of defending Mayor Jones’ record as mayor (nor is this an endorsement of anyone running for Lt. Governor), but Jones is spot on in this case in regard to owning up. Unlike Stoney, Jones understood that the water plant might be an expensive and out-of-sight project, but clean, reliable water is a necessary, core service that can’t be put off for photo ops and big, shiny projects like the Navy Hill boondoggle or the casino (twice).
We all know that Stoney never emulated President Harry Truman who coined, lived, and immortalized the phrase, “The Buck Stops Here.” In this case, Stoney hit back at Jones just because of his endorsement of Rouse, but it’s surprising he didn’t also include Mayor Wilder or Mayor Kaine while he was pointing fingers at everyone else.
If you follow the transitive property of politically passing the buck, Stoney perfected it during eight years in the mayor’s office. So clearly, Mayor Jones is also therefore responsible and culpable for all these other messes that took place at City Hall in recent years (not really, but let’s go through just a few of them):
A 2023 City audit showed the
StoneyJones administration was responsible for the utter disarray and incompetence in the city’s Finance Department because in 2022 they sent more than 66,000 incorrect car tax bills with erroneous penalties and interest to people (out of a total of 235,000 bills sent - a fail rate of 28%).That same audit found the
StoneyJones Finance Department took an average of 118 days (4 months) to respond to billing errors in 2022, and some residents waited almost 200 days (6 1/2 months) for a response/correction. TheStoneyJones Administration said at the time the errors were an “unfortunate glitch.”Besides the water plant meltdown, perhaps the biggest failure of the
StoneyJones administration was the meals tax fiasco that lasted throughout 2024 after it was discovered the city had been charging eateries thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in penalties and interest since 2020 on tax bills but never informed the restaurants. TheStoneyJones administration pretended the problem was limited to a “handful of cases” when in fact there were hundreds.In January 2024, the
StoneyJones administration fired the city’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) officer as the media was trying to get information about the meals tax fiasco. That fit the pattern of theStoneyJones administration stonewalling as other local reporters and government watchdogs have also had their FOIA requests ignored and had to take legal action against the city just to even get a reply.Mayor
StoneyJones declared a child care crisis in the fall of 2023 and promised a special child care fund would be established — but only if the second casino referendum was approved. He didn’t mention the crisis after that.There were so many stories about the
StoneyJones administration and insane water bills, long customer service call times, and billing affecting thousands of customers from Public Utilities with charges for $500, $1,000, and even a $23,000 water bill. There was one story last summer about a customer who got a $2,000 water bill that ballooned to $8,491 as it accrued late fees and penalties because they couldn't resolve it. Some bills are sent to people who moved out of the city months or years prior but still got charged; most every story includes how hard it is to get the billing disputes resolved.The
StoneyJones administration ignored the maintenance on the 225-foot Texas Beach pedestrian bridge in James River Park for years and closed it in September 2022; they did nothing even though federal funds had been allocated to repair it. In May 2023, theStoneyJones administration announced it would open in the summer of 2024, but last year finally admitted it would not reopen until December 2026. So it takes twice as long to replace a short bridge than to build a new baseball stadium.The
StoneyJones administration went through three police chiefs in 11 days, firing William Smith, installing interim-chief Jody Blackwell, promised to do a national search and immediately broke the promise and hired Gerald Smith (no relation) on July 1, 2020. At the time, the press secretary said MayorStoneyJones “…made the executive decision to hire Chief Smith. He stands by this decision, and he expects the public to judge it by the results the new chief delivers.” Two years later, theStoneyJones administration concocted a phony July 4th mass shooting hoax in 2022 to garner media darling status, which failed spectacularly and earned two Guatemalan immigrants one way tickets out of the country.The
StoneyJones administration signed a $100,000 contract in December 2023 to advertise on 21 billboards across the region for six months that the city’s water was “Clean, Safe, Reliable.” At least one billboard (see picture) was still running last month during the second Boil Water Advisory in late May. After the story flooded social media and appeared in the Times-Dispatch, the city asked the billboard company to remove the ad.
Picture of a billboard on May 29, 2025 on Broad St. in Henrico near Horsepen Rd.
Mike Kropf, Times-Dispatch
The
StoneyJones administration also stopped publishing the legally mandated open data portal with the city’s check register in 2019 (which actually started under Jones) because Stoney’s CAO said maintaining it was “a security risk and too much work” (yet, Richmond Public Schools continues to post their register every month).The RTD also recently uncovered that a former city employee set up three home based businesses that received $2 million on city credit cards and purchase orders between between 2021 and December 2024 during the last few years of the
StoneyJones administration. One of those purchases was a $74,648.06 purchase order for eight sets of custom vaulted cabinets.That story came after Mayor Avula finally issued an in-depth review of the city’s credit card program, cut off the use of hundreds of cards, and restricted cards that remain active because of questionable use after the
StoneyJones administration had issued hundreds of cards but apparently forgot to monitor them. MayorStoneyJones would never answer repeated questions about the credit card abuse but claimed it was well-managed and monitored closely.
There are numerous other examples (sadly), but the point is clear. At the February 2022 State of the City speech and for weeks after, Stoney boasted repeatedly, “We are about the fix.” Clearly he was not referring to the plumbing, or anything else. In a VPM News interview from August 2024, he was asked what his top three achievable priorities were on leaving. One of those was to “to leave the next mayor in a better place than when I received it. So when the next mayor gets the keys on Jan. 1, they have a City Hall that is humming on all cylinders.”
What he left behind, though, were not keys to a Mercedes, Toyota, or a Ford, but a 1980’s Yugo, which was voted “The Worst Car in History” and the subject of jokes like: “What makes a Yugo go faster? A tow truck.”
Mayor Avula took the keys but forgot to check the cylinders under the hood. The car needs serious work and has a lengthy list of issues requiring a real fix, not just empty rhetoric from a speech. He now knows more clearly than he did before there are a lot of major issues — and nothing more important than the water — but results need to come sooner rather than later; because, while everyone knows who left him the keys, he now has the title to the car and he is the driver.
Even so, it is unlikely that Mayor Avula will spend time blaming others because he hasn’t done that so far, he doesn’t have any time to waste, and it’s not really in his nature to do so. One can hope that Avula is exhibiting and/or familiar with the attitude and mentality of the great UCLA basketball coach and motivational wizard John Wooden, who once said:
"You are not a failure until you start blaming others for your mistakes.”
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