RICHMOND, Va. β Friday morning on the first floor of Richmond City Hall, Mayor Danny Avula was joined by Richmond Police, members of city council and other community stakeholders to officially reveal the details of their crackdown on illegal vape shops popping up across the city.
The initiative known as Operation Vaporize has been active for the past several months. It's a multi-departmental effort from the mayor's office and Richmond Fire Department, in addition to the city's planning and code enforcement officials and the finance department, which involves compliance check sweeps of dozens of vape shops suspected of illegal activity such as illegally selling marijuana to minors.
"Our communities have been asking for more attention, for stronger enforcement, and for us to act in ways that actively curb these illegal activities and absolutely our communities deserve that," Mayor Danny Avula said.
Richmond Mayor Danny Avula says these shops in many cases weren't just operating illegally, but were themselves becoming hot targets for robberies.
"They have certainly become hotspots for crimes," Avula said. "This year as we look back over our data we have seen remarkable improvements in major crimes, but one of the areas where we have actually seen an increase in our crime data has been commercial robberies."
"Often these are really violent kind of takedown style operations that often include firearms and many of the efforts that we have been engaged with over the past couple of weeks have yielded 31 firearms," Avula said.
Over the summer, Richmond City Council took action with an ordinance restricting the retail sale of tobacco and hemp, effectively barring new vape stores from setting up shop within 1,000 feet of schools, places of worship, parks and libraries in an effort to protect places where young people are gathered, but it doesn't account for existing shops open before the ordinance went into effect.
"We are working to make sure that operators are compliant with zoning code, compliant with building code," said City Director Dr. Kevin Vonck. "We're also bringing in our partners from finance to make sure that you are paying your taxes."
Vonck says over the past two weeks the city visited 30 vape shops, tagging 18 of those shops with orange placards identifying them as unsafe structures.
Vonck says the city found that eight of the vape shops did not have a certificate of occupancy which essentially certifies whether or not a building is safe to operate in. Vonck says a building only gets that certification after it is reviewed by the city zoning and commissioner of building agencies.
"We also found additional ones that maybe had the certificate of occupancy but we found additional violations," Vonck said.
In total, the city planning department identified as many as 274 violations during their two-week sweep of Richmond's vape shops:
- 175 violations were associated with the Department of Planning and Review
- 88 violations were found by the Richmond Fire Department
- 11 violations were through the Finance Department
According to Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards, a large part of enforcement includes holding property owners accountable for their tenants. Edwards says the city is able to do that through Richmond's Drug Blight Ordinance. So far Edwards says they have already reached out to one property owner of Pop's Smoke Shop on Chamberlayne Avenue where illegal activity within the vape shop persisted.
According to Richmond Police, during the compliance check, four firearms were recovered including one with a Glock switch, in addition to $10,000 and over 20 pounds of marijuana.
"We conducted our investigation and continued to see the behavior unabated. This week we met with the owner and talked with him about that. He has 30 days to abate the problem, maybe an extension for another 30 days should he need it," said Edwards. "We're committed to working with the owner of the structure to ensure that lawful conduct is taking place on his property."
Throughout the summer, Edwards said RPD conducted 19 search warrants seizing over 100 pounds of bulk marijuana and illegal weed products, recovered 31 illegal firearms and seized $60,000.
"We also participated with our partners in the three surrounding counties, Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover, and our detectives executed searches for them on nine separate search warrants. They had investigations in the counties that linked back to the city and that happened for us," Edwards said.
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