RICHMOND, Va. — After years of "not doing the basics well," Richmond Mayor Danny Avula says transforming City Hall into a better functioning, more efficient entity remains his top priority. With one year down on the job, Avula said he's starting to see signs of improvement.
“It's not where I want to be, but I do feel like we are making progress," Avula said in an interview with CBS 6.
Toward the goal of fixing City Hall, one of Avula's campaign promises was that he would assess the performance of every agency head beginning day one to ensure the right leaders were in the right places.
“Have you completed that evaluation of all key personnel, and if so, what were the results? And are you confident with the leadership that you now have in place?” reporter Tyler Layne asked.
“Yeah, obviously, a huge part of what I've worked on in the first 12 months was building that right team, and it started with the key hire of the CAO. We have hired three other deputy chief administrative officers and a number of directors," Avula responded. "I feel really good about the team that we have in place, but obviously, we still need to deliver."
CAO stands for Chief Administrative Officer, and that's the person responsible for overseeing all of City Hall's operations. Avula appointed Odie Donald to that position.
And since January 2025, seven department directors have been replaced, including in public utilities, human resources, and where Avula said his top priority lies: finance.
“We know that we've had some challenges in the finance department, and we've made a leadership change there. We have started to rebuild that team. It's not fixed, right? I remember a few weeks ago, we sent out a press release saying we got 70,000 tax bills out on time. Right now in most other localities, that's like business as usual," Avula said. "We have to be able to sort of communicate, ‘Hey, we are getting to a place where we can do the basics well,’ because that hasn't been the story for the past months and years."
As CBS 6 has previously highlighted, the finance department has been the subject of many complaints from residents who have expressed frustration in recent years over inaccurate bills, issues with collection practices, overpayments not being credited back to them, and so forth.
Odie Donald declined CBS 6's request for an interview for this story, but in his 100-day report, he said the state of Richmond's fiscal management and controls requires a full investigation and modernization.
He specifically noted deficiencies in the city's ability to produce reliable fiscal reports, risks in contract management, the need for corrective action planning on business personal property tax accounts, weaknesses in the oversight of purchasing cards, and problems with technology and systems.
Donald also found that there with issues with the rollout of RVA Pay, which was largely touted by the previous administration as a solution to tax accounting and collection concerns, which can be traced back to decisions made under prior leadership.
The CAO laid out several proposed recommendations for improvement, which Avula said he would use to hold staff accountable.
“I wish I could wave a wand and say it's done, but I do think priority number one, pillar number one of our strategic plan: a thriving city hall. That's the next seven years of work," Avula said.
In recent months, the mayor has taken heat from some councilmembers and members of the public over a perceived lack of transparency.
In one example, Avula pushed for a more limited version of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) library, which essentially will be an online portal where the city, using its discretion, publishes certain public records. The initial proposal, brought forward by Councilmember Kenya Gibson, would have required a much more expansive collection of records to be published to the portal. In another example, some councilmembers were upset that an apparent $22 million budget surplus in 2025 was not presented to them as they were debating whether to change the real estate tax rate.
"Do you think that you've been as transparent as you possibly could be?" Layne asked.
"First, I think we have made remarkable progress in transparency. The FOIA library that we have put out there far surpasses any FOIA responsiveness of any other locality in the state. And so, the frame shouldn't be, 'Are we being as transparent as we could be?' It's, 'Hey, are we being transparent to the needs of the public?' And I feel like we're leading the commonwealth in that regard right now," Avula said.
He added that scaling back which records get publicly posted, which a majority of the council supported, aims to protect privacy of sensitive information that doesn't necessarily have wide public interest.
More importantly, Avula said he simply wants to ensure the city complies with the requirements of FOIA when people submit requests for records. While FOIA compliance should be an expectation of any government body, the city previously missed key deadlines for providing responses to requesters and applied invalid exemptions in some instances. Those issues are at the center of an ongoing whistleblower lawsuit filed by the city's former FOIA officer, who alleged in part that she was forced to improperly withhold information that should have been made public.
"The work that we're doing to comply with the law, to be responsive to the media, to be responsive to people, I feel like we're in a significantly better place than we were prior to my arrival, around how we execute FOIA here," he said.
On the budget surplus, Avula said, "I understand. If I was in council shoes, I would wonder, 'Why didn't we have more lead time on that?' And frankly, I'm asking the same questions, because we did not know what the surplus number was going to be. And frankly, when we provided that number on November 15, per the council ordinance, it was still a shot in the dark."
Avula said he didn't even have a ballpark idea of what the budget surplus would be until it was presented in November, well after the council had already decided against decreasing the tax rate.
Moving forward, he said he needs to invite councilmembers further into the budget process and "educat[e] council about how this process works and what those numbers are relying on."
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