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You may have missed the announcement that Mayor Stoney kicked off his “Faring Well” farewell tour on Monday that is taking him around the city to show what he boldly proclaims as the incredible progress the city has made in the last eight years.
According to the posts on the Mayor’s social media accounts, the “Faring Well” Tour was set up for “celebrating the remarkable strides Richmond has made over the past 8 years under Mayor Levar Stoney’s administration! Our city is “faring well” and this is our opportunity to celebrate all things good.”
Instead of a band’s tour poster the lists all the cities they will play, the Mayor has put out his own that shows all the stops he will make in the next three weeks to show how much has been accomplished.
The tour began Monday at Ancarrow’s Landing with a stop that unveiled the launch of planning stages to produce a life-size replica slave ship with amphitheater seating and a granite memorial wall that will be part of the larger Shockoe Project.
The tour also includes a Complete Streets site visit, a walk through the soon to be renovated Fox School, the groundbreaking of the James River Branch Trail (planning for which began under Councilman Doug Connor in 2009), the opening of the rebuilt Fire Station 12, a tour of new community centers on Southside as well as the Diamond District site, participation in a Sate of the Region panel, and culminating with a bow for Stoney’s highly anticipated Farewell Address on December 20th.
Some social stops along the tour (that have been occurring decades before Stoney was elected) include the city’s annual Holly Ball, the RVA Illuminates event downtown, and the Christmas Parade.
There are, however, some notable stops missing from the Faring Well Tour that are not faring well at all. For example:
The Faring Well tour does not include any stops at restaurants to celebrate the fixing of the meals tax fiasco because the problems that first came to light en masse back on January 2nd of this year still have not been resolved. The city has been billing restaurants for more than four years and adding penalties and interest on bills they never told the businesses about. The Mayor dodged the issue entirely and left his Chief Administrative Officer to clean it up; at first he said it was only “a handful of cases,” and then admitted it could be as many as 500 (it was 673). The target to have the issue resolved by July was missed and stories are still coming out about mysterious meals tax charges and no updates on resolution from the top leadership. And if you go all the way back to 2018 when Stoney raised the meals tax (the highest in the state) two cents to pay for school construction, he promised City Hall would help restaurants, but that was an empty promise that did not fare very well.
The Finance Department is on the first floor of City Hall but that was omitted from the “Faring Well” tour. That is an auspicious omission because in September
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