Who We Are

"Thank you. I appreciate the very kind introduction and the opportunity to be the first speaker in the 2010 Eyes on Richmond event.

The shared views, ideas, perspective and commentary from Eyes on Richmond make us a richer, more cohesive city, with a core population invested in our long and short term success.

Richmond is a good place to live today, and will be a greater place for our children and grandchildren to live next year, and the years after.

Part of that is what we discuss today...What can we learn from the Past, as we move into the future?

I'm going to make a few opening remarks, then I want to throw this open for questions...questions for me and questions from me to you.

I'm going to address our topic in a slightly different way.

There is a question you hear discussed downtown and uptown, on the blogs in the Bottom and on the Hills...

"What's Wrong with the City of Richmond"? many ask ...so I want to take just a few minutes and address it, because so much of it is rooted in our past and our own perceptions.

What's wrong with Richmond?

Some say it's our schools, yet Richmond has achieved a more than 90% full accreditation rate, with every high school meeting the benchmarks in English, mathematics, history and science. Open High School had perfect marks in English, History, Mathematics and science.

Our four year graduation rate still lags, but it improved more than 10 percent. Three high schools, Open, Community and Franklin, had a dropout rate of zero. And we are building four new schools, the first in more than a decade.

So maybe it's not the schools that are what's wrong with Richmond.

Maybe it's crime. The murder rate is a fraction of what it was in 1995, when 160 people lost their lives. Property crimes, and crimes against people are both running at lower rates. Community policing is putting officers on the streets, where they need to be, and they are getting results. I rarely attend a community meeting in which the police do not have a presence, and across the city, sector officers are always available to the public. Community policing works.

So maybe crime is not what's wrong with Richmond.

Maybe it's the business and development climate...but in the past 12 years we have added more than a billion dollars in new residential construction, largely through the use of the rehabilitation tax credits. Conversions along the river, downtown and in Manchester are creating some of the most innovative, attractive and desirable places to live in the country. I was pleased this summer to be the patron of a measure to extend the tax abatement program indefinitely. Have you taken the loft tour? It's awesome.

If we include the proposed development along the Canal Walk, we have approved or have in the pipeline more than 600 new apartments downtown. After years of population decline, Richmond is on the way back up again. I expect the census will show that our population is about 204,000.
Richmond continues to be attractive as a corporate headquarters as well, with the BioTech Park, the MeadWestvaco headquarters and the Williams Mullen building as examples. In addition, I expect that we are going to see some additional announcements in the near future about additional expansions and new construction downtown and in Manchester.

As a personal note, when I was appointed to the Personnel Board in 1985, the only places to get lunch downtown on Broad Street was a 7-11, a fried chicken take out and a bar.

Today, Broad Street is booming, all the way out to the Boulevard. First Fridays are a huge success along Broad. Who could have dreamed that Broad Street downtown would become restaurant row, with places such as Tarrants, Comfort and others providing new and delicious reasons to come back downtown at night. County folks even come into the city to eat! Who would have thought that would ever happen!
Speaking of the Boulevard, we are host to one of the top ten art museums in the country, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

So it's not our business and cultural climate.

Maybe it's taxes and city finances...except that, for the past six years, the real estate tax rate has come down or held steady, our city budget was reduced substantially the past two years, city real estate is generally holding its value, while values in the counties went down by 10-15%. This year, we are on a course to record about 4,000 residential real estate transactions.

Our unappropriated fund balance remains untouched at more than $48 million. We avoided layoffs. We fully funded tax relief for the elderly and disabled, and funded the School Board budget at levels that avoided the crises we have seen elsewhere. And in these tough financial times the city has reported a 6.7 million dollar surplus for the fiscal yr 2010 ....not bad.

Let's put that accomplishment into a national perspective. In Hawai'i, schools were closed 17 days last year to balance the budget. Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, parked its transit fleet, leaving 8400 workers with no way to get to work, school or home. In Colorado Springs, they turned out the streetlights, laid off police officers, and stopped collecting trash in the parks.

So maybe good fiscal management is not what's wrong with Richmond.

Maybe it's regional cooperation, because everybody knows that Richmond and the counties do not cooperate. But what everybody knows does not always match up with the facts.

Richmond and the counties are working together, through the Planning District Commission, which I chaired last year, and through the Collaborative for a Greater Richmond, a coalition of business and governmental leaders. We are working on an early childhood initiative that will benefit all of us. Collectively, we are cooperating on a workforce development plan, to steady the ship rocked by massive layoffs and business closings.

Regional transportation remains a challenge but, as a region, we are up to the challenge.

The cities and the counties are working together on both high speed rail and direct rail from Norfolk and Newport News, Raleigh and points south, tying into the Northeast corridor.

Regional cooperation is an area where City Council has taken a lead, with members of council sitting on virtually every regional body.

After a generation of a distant relationship at best, we are proving that the Richmond Region can be more than the sum of its parts.

I cannot overlook one of our greatest successes, and that is our Park system. Richmond is the only city in the nation with Class 5 rapids in an urban park setting.

The only city in the nation to protect a major park from development through a conservation easement. Our park system is the home to the largest and most successful farmers market in the region, and is constantly expanding and refining its recreational offerings to our residents and to an increasing number of visitors. Our parks are a source of pride and comfort to all of us.

I don't want to paint too rosy a picture today. We have had our disappointments.

Our unemployment is still too high, with no real hope in sight for the long-term hard core unemployed young men and women. We have no strategy for training and employment for them.

There are lessons to be learned from the past.

For 38 years, we have invested almost all our Community Development Block Grant federal dollars into the same neighborhoods. These neighborhoods still have the highest incidence of poverty, the highest crime rates, the highest levels of one parent households, and the lowest achievement rates for our schools.
At any moment we have about 2,400 vacant, blighted or abandoned houses and they are tightly clustered in just a few neighborhoods. The need is so great in those areas that we have focused all our attention, and our dollars in those neighborhoods, but in the meantime other threatened communities, like those south of Hull and west of Jefferson Davis have gone un-noticed.

The old ways did not work, and it is clear we need new strategies for these old and persistent issues. It is the height of insanity to think we can do the same old things and expect different results.

The health of the city can be measured by the health of our neighborhoods. We cannot and will not forget those at the bottom of the economic ladder, but we must also remember those climbing the ladder. They also need our best efforts to provide safe, affordable, desirable housing in revitalized neighborhoods. We have affordable housing stock and we must make it attractive to today's home purchasers.

At City Hall, we have been six years without a cohesive economic development program, and we are largely absent in regional, national and international efforts to attract new businesses and investment, and to create jobs through private sector opportunities. We are still seeking a professionally trained Director of Economic Development, who would coordinate our marketing and recruitment efforts, building our private sector tax base. We have had five or six directors in six years, but no director for the past year or more.

This is the place where we create jobs and opportunities, where we retain existing businesses and attract new ones, building wealth for individuals and the city alike, and yet we still have no professionally trained director. We are at a competitive disadvantage with other major cities and with the surrounding counties in recruiting and retaining business. Recycling public dollars is not an economic development strategy.

This shortcoming applies to the Fortune 500 companies and to the smallest of fledgling new businesses . The private sector, large and small, creates jobs. Our economic development director and department must have as its focus the recruitment and retention of those who can provide employment for our residents.
I met recently with a minority businessman, who has been in Richmond for 25 years. He could not remember the last time he received a call from the Department of Economic Development, checking on his needs and his insights into the city.

We will not be a Tier One city without this effort. We must keep sight of the fact that government cannot, in the long run, create jobs - the private sector creates jobs.

A Tier One city must have a climate that allows businesses to prosper, to grow and expand in our tax base and our employment base.

Our policies and our practices must create a business friendly atmosphere for the private sector, an atmosphere that includes recruiting, permitting, retaining existing businesses, and creating a sense of welcome for all our businesses, from the smallest to the largest. We are working on this. Just Tuesday I attended the opening of our new and improved permits and inspections offices. but we still have a way to go.

We know that we live in a wonderful city, and we are proud to show this city off to visitors. Yet our tourism effort is not capturing our charm, is not capitalizing on absolutely unique attractions...is simply not telling our story effectively. If I asked you "Richmond is known for?" what would be the answer? Even our visitor center sits in a building where you must pay to park so you can get the information. Even then, it is a regional center...not Richmond city tourist center.

But those are problems we are working on, and that's the key point. Richmond business leaders, elected officials and the private sector are committed to cooperation, and that's the best news of all. This is a lesson we have learned from our past; this is our hope for the future.

There may be one more lesson from the past that we need to un-learn.

Maybe it's time to stop thinking of Richmond as a poor city. Richmond is a rich, vibrant successful city, which has poor people, too many poor people in it. But it is still a jewel which we cherish.

So finally, back to the beginning..."What's wrong with Richmond?" Maybe what's wrong is that sometimes we are too close to see what's right with Richmond, maybe we are too attached to the old labels to see our new successes. Maybe we are not doing a good job of telling our story, our story about our history, our story about our schools, our story about all of what we have to offer.

Maybe parts of our history make us unable to be proud of our heritage, proud of how we have overcome great obstacles, proud of our successes, proud of our accomplishments and the promise of our future, because from where I stand, there is a great deal right with Richmond. In the end, our past should inform us, not constrain us. Our future should be a challenge, not a threat.

Thank you."