For those who have followed the ongoing machinations over a proposed minor league baseball stadium in downtown Richmond, recent events have to leave you more perplexed than ever before.
There’s a group backing a privately financed stadium on the current Boulevard site. Unless there isn’t. It was to compete with the plan favored by Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones that would put city taxpayers on the hook for bonds covering the costs of a new stadium, mixed-use development and a slavery museum. Or maybe it was offered as a favor to the Mayor and his backers if they ran into trouble selling their idea.
No one really has a clear picture of what is happening, let alone why, except that it appears as though Richmond city government is reverting to its old dysfunctional ways.
Which means that behind all the slapstick and buffoonery, a tight cabal of city officials and their friends are looking to make a lot of money. Not for the city or its residents. But for themselves.
The rest of Virginia would, and normally should, ignore all this and let the locals fight it out. But nothing in Richmond is entirely local, and things are no different with the mayor’s baseball stadium/slavery museum/mixed development project.
Owing to an earmark in the stalemated state budget, Virginia taxpayers are committed to providing several million dollars worth of funding to the slavery museum portion of the development. Setting aside the merits of such spending, one would think that the manner in which Richmond’s political class is trying to ram the baseball stadium down resident’s throats would raise a few eyebrows. It hasn’t, and that is both a missed opportunity and a shameful dereliction of duty.
Mayor Jones and his fellow stadium backers have decided they will fund the entire project through economic development bonds. According to my Washington Post writing partner Paul Goldman, this looks and smells bad:
When the General Assembly allowed Richmond and other localities to create an EDA, they didn’t intend for the EDA to be used to get around Section 2.2-4305, a fundamental bulwark in the state’s highly regarded competitive bid process on projects using state money.
The General Assembly recently confirmed my view in passing Chapter 382 of the Session Laws for the 2010 General Assembly. The intent of this state law is crystal clear, if more than “$50,000 in the aggregate” of state money by any means is used in a project, THEN ALL THE CONTRACTS ON ALL PHASES OF SAID PROJECT must be awarded by “competitive sealed bidding” or “ after competitive negotiation” as such is defined in Section 2.2-4303.
In short, Jones & Co. intend to run millions of dollars through the economic development authority and its bonds in order to avoid having to put anything relating to the project up to open, competitive bidding.
Shady? You bet it is.
But here’s where the General Assembly comes in:
Thus Mayor and his posse on one hand promote the African-American Heritage/Slave Trail as fundamental to their Shockoe Stadium/Development project for political purposes in clubbing the City Council WHILE at the same time trying to lay a paper trial to claim it to be a SEPARATE PROJECT for purposes of state money funding!
Or put it another way: Virginia taxpayers are on the hook for millions of dollars that will be spent on a slave museum, essentially, in secret.
That is unacceptable.
At minimum, Central Virginia’s legislators ought to be asking Mayor Jones and city officials why they are playing a shell game with the slave museum money. Is it the project you told us it would be when we appropriated the money or isn’t it? And if it is, why is the Mayor insisting on using a financing mechanism that keeps taxpayers, and Assembly members, in the dark as to how the money is being spent?
I realize this is a lot to ask of some local General Assembly members. But asking basic questions about how these millions of taxpayer dollars will be spent and in what manner is part of their job.
It’s long past time for them to get busy doing it.
And if they need additional prodding…this is also a political opportunity. Jones is the head of the Democratic party. He’s Terry McAuliffe’s hand-picked guy. Jones is also rumored to have statewide elected ambitions. Connect the dots, fellas…this is your chance to have some fun and do some good.
