Richmond’s own laws require city officials to post financial data online allowing the public to track specifics on how tax dollars are spent.
But the city isn’t publishing that data on its website. The City Council can’t get it either, even after one member floated the possibility of using the Council’s rarely invoked subpoena power. When The Richmonder filed a public records request for the information, the city sent back a bill for thousands of dollars.
On March 10, The Richmonder filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy of the city’s latest yearly payment register. Under the city code, officials have to keep a log of payments the city makes to outside parties, and the FOIA request sought the exact document the city is supposed to publish.
In a response two weeks later, the city provided no records and said it would cost The Richmonder at least $5,732.40 to proceed with the request.
A few hours before that FOIA response, Mayor Danny Avula’s administration released a less detailed subset of the data The Richmonder requested. The financial data the city released doesn’t list the names of companies being paid with public funds or specifics on what the city was buying.
For example, the spreadsheet shows city police spent roughly $590,000 on an “Equipment And Other Assets Expense” in the fall of 2024. But without the name of the payee and the invoice description — information required to be in the register under city code — the dataset doesn’t offer a clear view of what the city purchased. The mayor has acknowledged to Council members that the two missing fields contain the most relevant information that makes the payment register useful.
The city has been legally required to post the data since 2015, when the City Council passed an ordinance requiring the payment register to be published and updated on a monthly basis. That proposal mirrored an earlier move by the Richmond School Board to publish a similar financial log for the school system online.
The city stopped publishing its payment register in 2019 during the first term of former Mayor Levar Stoney. The school system has continued to publish its payment register, which remains available online.
The idea behind both payment registers was that publishing the information would reassure residents tax dollars are being spent wisely by giving them a tool to see where money is going. Before the city stopped publishing its payment register, its search function was a resource journalists and community activists could use to keep tabs on how much money was being spent with specific companies and which for-profit entities were being paid for which services.
The Avula administration — which has said technical and staffing issues have made publication of the payment register too burdensome for the city to do — framed the limited release of data as an incremental step toward a bigger transparency fix.
“Good policy only works if it can be implemented,” Avula, who made transparency and accountability two major themes of his successful 2024 mayoral campaign, said in the news release. “We’re taking a clear-eyed look at what hasn’t been working, fixing the gaps, and putting in place processes that consistently deliver accurate, accessible information to the public.”
City Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) has been pressing the Avula administration to move faster to comply with the decade-old law requiring the payment register to be available to the public. She referenced the possibility of using Council’s subpoena power in a memo to the Avula administration earlier this year, and she said Friday she still intends to pursue a subpoena as it’s become clearer the Avula administration won’t release a complete payment register.
“I’m not surprised that the city is proud to have published a payment register that omits the names of the payees, but frankly — it’s embarrassing,” Gibson said. “The Richmonders I know won’t be fooled to believe that this is what being transparent looks like.”
Gibson also questioned the FOIA charge the city sent The Richmonder.
“I just can’t accept that the city’s public information team requested payment in exchange for data they are legally required to publish,” Gibson said.
After getting the steep FOIA bill Thursday, The Richmonder requested a more detailed breakdown of how the city estimated the cost. Officials said the dollar amount was based on “the estimated time it would take for city staff to review and redact an estimated 2,000 pages of records.”
The Richmonder has not paid the amount charged, and the city said it now considers the FOIA request to be on pause. The city took 12 business days — the maximum allowed under Virginia law before a FOIA response is unlawfully late — to provide the cost estimate.
The FOIA request sought a copy of the fiscal year 2025 payment register as defined in the city code section that requires the data to be published online.
Though officials have previously said technical challenges were preventing routine publication of the data on the city website, the FOIA response shows the city also won’t do a one-time compilation of the data without charging thousands of dollars.
The Avula administration’s release said the law requiring publication of the payment register “has not functioned as intended.”
The Council unanimously approved the payment register law in January of 2015, with a launch date set about six months later on July 1. A policy memo at the time said ongoing publication of the data would have no fiscal impact on the city.
“There may be some additional staff time needed to review the register for compliance with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act,” the 2014 memo said. “That review should be the only manual time needed as the city’s financial system has a standard payment register report that can be run at any time.”
The city Finance Department, which provides the data for the payment register, has struggled for years with staff turnover, vacancies and dysfunction. Those problems also existed in 2015, when the payment register was launched.
More than a year into Avula’s term, his administration says it’s evaluating how it can comply with the 2015 law.
“To still be in evaluation while this law is not being followed does give me some concern,” Gibson said at a recent budget work session as she asked whether any new money was included in the budget to allow the city to relaunch the payment register.
In a March 10 memo to Gibson, Avula said publication of the payment register “historically required a highly manual extraction and data-inspection process.”
“Significant staff capacity was used to extract payment data from the city’s financial system and review it to ensure confidential information (e.g. social security numbers, names of foster parents, residential addresses) was appropriately redacted before publication,” Avula wrote.
Gibson had asked for a copy of the FY25 payment register for the city budget talks that are currently underway. Avula told her that if the city staff had to review and redact 200,000 records without sacrificing other core financial processes, it would probably take until the end of October to finish.
Chief Administrative Officer Odie Donald II has said the city has broader efforts underway to modernize both its financial system and technology. Resolving the payment register issue, he said, is part of that long-term work.
“There has to be a little bit of an expectation that it will take some time for us to get it right,” Donald told Gibson at the budget meeting.
Avula said he intends to introduce legislation to the Council to modify the payment register requirement, but details of his proposal are unclear.
The mayor’s release said the upcoming proposal “will align disclosure requirements with regional practices and state law, as well as update workflows and identify necessary technology improvements to reduce reliance on the labor-intensive manual processes.”
Officials have said they’re unsure how much it might cost to bring the city back into compliance with the 2015 law.
Gibson noted that Richmond recently received a “City of Darkness Award” from pro-transparency groups Muckrock and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which hand out tongue-in-cheek “Foilies” awards that “recognize the worst in government transparency.” Explaining the Richmond award, the groups cited the city’s creation of a FOIA library that still gives officials discretion to decide what the public should see and the ongoing lawsuit against the city brought by former FOIA officer Connie Clay.
“Richmond looks better in the sunshine, so we’ll continue to fight for the transparency Richmonders deserve,” Gibson said.
Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org