‘We’ll see where the year goes’ – Q&A with incoming mayor Danny Avula

Danny Avula

When he’s ceremoniously sworn in next week as the 81st mayor of Richmond, Danny Avula will also lay claim to two other titles all his own: the city’s first Indian-American mayor, and its first immigrant mayor.

Born in India, the 46-year-old pediatrician has called Richmond home for 24 years, spending half of those years serving the Richmond City and Henrico County Health Departments, six years as director.

Following his inauguration on Jan. 11, Avula will lead Richmond as its top elected official, along with a City Council with three new members and an administration with a vacancy at the top, following the departure of his predecessor’s chief administrative officer.

Avula enters City Hall at the tail-end of a tumultuous year that saw several high-profile controversies and administrative challenges ranging from meals tax collections to permitting and plan reviews. A national search for a new CAO is already underway, and Avula’s transition team has started surveying Richmond’s business community about the permitting process and how it could be improved.

BizSense caught up with the incoming mayor to discuss those challenges, why he wanted to take on the task and what he envisions for the city over the next four years of his term. The following is an edited transcript:

Richmond BizSense: You’ve put together a transition team and promised a “streamlined transition process.” How is the transition going so far?

Danny Avula: It’s been great. Both the energy and enthusiasm of people from so many different sectors in the city, and their desire to help and help move the city forward, has been really encouraging.

My initial intention with the transition team was to take a lot of the specific concerns that were raised during the campaign – things like affordable housing or career technical education – and to form transition teams around each of those items and have them do some front-end work to sketch out, “Hey, in the first few months, here are the things that you can do to really accelerate progress in those areas.” Some of those are really massive areas of undertaking that we’re going to be focused on throughout the administration, like housing affordability, and some of them are very discrete issues, like the process of getting a business license.

I talked to so many small business owners who expressed frustration about the lack of clarity of the steps required to get a business license. They felt like the goal post was always moving and it was never really clear what documentation you needed or who you needed to talk to. So, we have a few small business leaders who have come together to survey their community to get input on how we need to redesign the process. Some of that will be just basic process re-engineering inside our organization, and some of it may be that we’ve got to invest in an online platform that makes it much easier to navigate the process.

That’s the kind of stuff we’re working on. Some of the transition recommendations will just be to accelerate our work and some of them will be broader framing for work that’s going to continue throughout the four years.

RBS: We received that survey about the city’s permitting process. Why is that a priority you want to get started on right away?

DA: One of the realities of our city is that we have more needs than we’ve been able to fund, historically, and that will continue to be the case. We’re an old city with aging infrastructure, and no matter how quickly we’re growing and how well the city is doing, which it is in so many regards – Richmond absolutely is on the rise and that’s super-exciting – the realities that we have – close to $600 million of combined stormwater overflow that we’ve got to address; aging schools that need to be replaced; old, crumbling infrastructure that makes every development project much more expensive because of what is under the ground – that reality requires us to be really focused on how do we make sure we’re a good partner to our business community, because they drive the economy here in the city.

The better we can be about being inviting and supportive of small and large businesses alike, the more revitalization will happen in places like the downtown corridor and Southside, and the more revenue that creates for us as a city. I think this in part being responsive to the frustration that I heard on the campaign trail, and in part just understanding that revenue is a huge part of what we need to be focused on to help the city move forward. Ensuring that we’re being supportive of our business community is the main way to do that.

RBS: You’re noting the challenges you’ll be facing as mayor. It begs the question: why did you want to be mayor? Was there a particular issue that drove you to run?

DA: One, we live in Richmond. I came here 24 years ago and have just been incredibly invested in and committed to Richmond’s progress, and I’ve loved it. Watching the city grow over the last two decades has been extraordinarily encouraging – grow from an economic standpoint, we have more residents that are moving into the city; grow from the expansion of parks and other amenities; but also grow from an evolving and changing social (fabric). The fact that we have had such growth over our Spanish-speaking population and we are starting to see greater diversity in the city. And in those 20 years there’s also been a really raw and important and authentic conversation around our history as a city and what that has meant for the marginalization particularly of black families here, and that addressing those wrongs and really crafting a vision for the future of this city that uplifts all people, that’s a huge narrative thread for me that compels me to work for and care for Richmond.

Avula served six years as director for the Richmond City and Henrico County Health Departments. (File photo courtesy MCV Foundation)

To get a little more practical, as the public health director, my work increasingly over the years started to bridge from more traditional health lanes to the connection between health and housing, or health and greenspace, or health and bike-walk infrastructure. Because the understanding of what actually creates the conditions for health and healthy communities is not solely whether you have a doctor or not; it is much more about the built environment, about the opportunities you have for living-wage jobs, about your economic health, because those are the things that drive physical health. Increasingly in the 12 years I spent at the health department, the vision for how you actually improve the health and well-being in communities broadened, and that’s a big part of why the opportunity to serve the city as mayor and to really help drive that philosophy more was really exciting.

Lastly, I’ve been a 20-year resident of the East End and have seen really great and encouraging development in so many ways in my neighborhood, but that growth and development has happened without the proper protections in place for long-term and low-income residents. Over the last eight years in particular I’ve seen the mass displacement of my long-term neighbors. Families who had lived in Church Hill since the ‘40s and ‘50s, a couple or three generations of their family living in this community, can no longer afford to pay their property taxes because they’re elderly and on a fixed income. Or the rental rates, the market, has increased and that has pushed folks out of the neighborhood. There’s a huge part of my life experience living in the East End and the beauty that I’ve experienced of having a really diverse community that has eroded because we haven’t invested enough in affordable housing or in protecting long-term residents.

RBS: Are you still a practicing pediatrician?

DA: I am. I’m boarded in pediatrics and preventative medicine, and throughout my career – I started as the deputy health director in 2009 – while my day job has largely been organizational leadership and policy and administrative work, I have always kept one toe in the clinical world. For most of my career, I have spent one or two nights a month working an overnight shift as a pediatric hospitalist.

RBS: Do you anticipate maintaining that during your mayor term?

DA: I’m going to have to feel that out. I would love to, because in so many ways it’s a part of my identity, it’s a part of how I connect with community, it’s a skillset that I don’t want to lose. I’ll take a little break and, as I start this new role, just weigh is it possible to keep up a once-a-month overnight shift as a way to stay connected to that part of me.

RBS: You’re also conducting a search for a new CAO. How do you see that process playing out?

DA: We have retained a search firm (Robert Bobb Group, working with PoliHire) and we have already submitted a list of qualifications that we’re looking for. We are soliciting input from a number of different partners and stakeholders like City Council and the school superintendent and community business leaders. We’re putting that list together now to make sure that we have representation across a bunch of different sectors to be able to weigh in on what the priorities are for the next CAO.

I suspect that we will be ready to put that job description out in early January. I imagine that most candidates who would compete for this job are sitting in a current role and would have at least a couple months before they could transition out, so I don’t think we will have somebody in the seat until April at the earliest. But the process has begun and we’re going to move pretty swiftly through it.

Avula with predecessor Levar Stoney at a press conference in November. (BizSense file photo)

RBS: One big-ticket item that remains from Mayor Stoney’s administration is the City Center project. What are your thoughts about that project and where it stands and how you plan to see it through?

DA: It’s an incredibly high priority for me. Back to our earlier conversation about revenue for the city, one of the huge unrealized revenue opportunities for us in the city is maximizing the use of the convention center, and that what has held us back is not having adequate hotel space in walking distance of the convention center to really drive that kind of traffic. I think we missed out on about $200 million of convention center bookings this past year because of just not having enough hotel space, so it is a clear priority both to revitalize our downtown area and to really take advantage of a revenue stream that we’re missing out on.

As I understand it, it’s in the final stages of contracting. It’s just taking a little longer than expected. But we should be able to roll out an announcement in January.

RBS: You’re joined by three new members on City Council, and we’ve heard there may be resistance if not opposition to economic development in general as a priority for the city. What are your thoughts on that and how do you plan to work with this City Council?

DA: I recognize that I can’t do any of this work without City Council, so making sure that we have a clear vision for how we’re moving forward together as a city is top priority for me. I have already met with all of our City Council members; many of them I knew just from my past roles for years and have a decade-long relationship with, but I’ve met with all nine in the last couple of weeks.

I think we, like everybody, may have slightly different ideas of what the role of economic development is, but I think everybody recognizes that to be able to meet the needs of the residents of the city, we have got to be focused on revenue streams, and at the same time there’s a significant resistance to any kind of tax increase in a city where we’re already paying much higher taxes than our county partners. I think there’s just got to be a learning process together, as mayor’s team and council, to figure out: okay, we all are aligned around how we want to invest in and care for the residents of this city that’s going to require more revenue, and where does that come from and how do we get there.

I’m excited for the conversation. I feel like we’ve gotten off to a good start in terms of just building some relationship, and we’ll see where the year goes.