Williams: Now is no time for Stoney silence (2024)

The cozy and conflict-ridden relationship between City Hall and a Florida-based advertising and consulting company demands an explanation — not the sound of crickets chirping in the 900 block of East Broad Street.

According to reporting by The Times-Dispatch’s Samuel Parker, Cameus Chicoye’s firm has been the recipient of more than $340,000 in city business. Chicoye was a former business partner of Petula Burks, the city’s communications director until she resigned abruptly on July 1 as Parker made inquiries about this relationship, which included the 2023 log of Burks’ city-issued credit card showing nearly $100,000 worth of charges at two firms connected to Chicoye.

All of this raised troubling questions about cronyism, oversight of the city’s credit cards and procurement practices, and the hiring of Burks, who told the city’s former Freedom of Information Act officer to withhold information in responding to FOIA requests, according to a whistleblower lawsuit.

City Hall, hit with questions about this dysfunction and lack of transparency, have stonewalled Parker.

And through it all, Mayor Levar Stoney has been largely silent and invisible.

Yes, Lincoln Saunders is the city’s chief administrative officer. But wasn’t visible and vocal leadership what Richmonders voted for when they opted for a strong mayor?

It’s times like this that Stoney should function like a Richmond Everyman, asking questions and demanding answers on behalf of his citywide constituency. But inconveniently for him, he’s running for lieutenant governor. He’d rather talk about Richmond’s increasingly shiny façade than the shoddy practices within City Hall.

“This has certainly been a place where he has not been as visible, I think, as he should be,” veteran political analyst Bob Holsworth said regarding the Burks situation. “Obviously, this person ought to be in for not just heavy criticism, but I think there needs to be investigation of whether anything illegal has occurred. And I think it would be beneficial for the mayor to be driving that.”

Before her departure, Burks’ city-issued credit card had been suspended for nearly a year after she failed to clear a backlog of charges and accidentally used the card to pay for a personal expense, according to earlier stories by Parker.

A mayor can’t control everything an employee does. But as this matter escalates with each new revelation, it’d be good for Stoney and his administration to be “more assertive and aggressive in decrying what has happened and calling for a full investigation, including to see if any laws were broken here,” Holsworth said. “I think it would be to his political benefit to do so.”

City officials say there will be an independent assessment of operations in the city’s Department of Procurement Services, although it’s unclear whether that will be internal or external. Procurement will be folded into an “administrative turnaround” process that has been underway for three years, but has failed to solve the city’s strange ineptitude when it comes to meals tax bills.

Did we mention that Stoney, and in all likelihood Saunders, will be vacating City Hall in January when the mayor’s term is up? It would have been to Stoney’s benefit to hire a professional as CAO instead of making the political decision to hire his friend Saunders, who had no experience helming a municipality. Perhaps then, the city would not have hired Burks, and the package deal that apparently was her former business partner from Florida. Chicoye had previously done business with the city of Augusta, Georgia, where Burks was chief of staff to Mayor Hardie Davis prior to coming to Richmond, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

Perhaps none of this matters to voters in Northern Virginia when they consider Virginia’s next lieutenant governor. Maybe they’ll visit friends or family who’ve relocated here and be dazzled by our dining, arts scene or river.

Perhaps they know Stoney mainly as the mayor of a city whose Confederate monuments came down on his watch — a level of notoriety that might give him an edge over his Democratic opponents. Through the end of June, Stoney had raised nearly $800,000 in his bid — substantially more than state Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach; state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, D-Chesterfield; and Prince William County School Board Chairman Babur Lateef.

Being the mayor of Richmond looks undeniably more attractive as a political springboard than it did in November 2000, when then-mayor Tim Kaine announced that he was running for lieutenant governor. That Richmond had fewer than 198,000 residents and was three years away from former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder famously calling City Hall “a cesspool of corruption and inefficiency.”

Today, in the final months of Stoney’s second term as mayor, RVA is seen in national circles as a city on the come-up. But closer to home, Wilder’s description still feels remarkably on the nose. And events that have come to light this summer out of City Hall have made running with “Richmond mayor” on your resume more complicated.

It’s a moment that calls for something other than Saunders all but applauding as Burks exited under the most dubious of circumstances. “We are grateful for all the incredible work she has done, from standing up a new Office of Strategic Communication and Civic Engagement from the ground up to helping our city embrace and celebrate its diverse culture,” he said.

Meanwhile, Stoney — who might have expressed concern, alarm or anger at the breakdown of city procurement systems and the abuse of its purchasing cards — played Silent Bob to Saunders’ Jay.

If Stoney doesn’t gin up some outrage, his political opponents might do it for him — especially if more revelations come out. On this matter, he’s dangerously close to looking like an absentee landlord.

“This is where you want to be clearly and publicly on top of it,” Holsworth said. “You don’t want to be seen as turning a blind eye to what is perceived by other people as obvious corruption. And it’s hard to look at this any other way.”

City officials are counting on us to look the other way as they undertake what has all the appearances of a coverup. This silence is not a good look for an ambitious mayor.