The Richmond Mayor’s Real Amazon Opportunity
This is a story about schoolchildren, corporate welfare and a mayor with big ambitions.
First, the kids.
Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney has a proposition for the City Council: Approve a 1.5 percent hike in the city’s meals tax and the city can begin work renovating its dilapidated public school buildings.
Paul Goldman and I have written about Richmond’s schools in this space many times. The buildings are old and tired. Some are downright unsafe.
Stoney’s tax increase would generate roughly $9 million more in meals-tax revenue each year. The extra revenue would allow the city to borrow up to $150 million – money that would go exclusively to fix schools.
That’s not chump change, but it’s not enough to cover the school board’s $224 million construction wish list.
Realizing that, the mayor said he’s open to other tax hikes, as well. That’s asking a lot of residents who are already taxed to the hilt to fund city operations.
Then again, the city’s schools, like those in other parts of the commonwealth, are in horrid condition. Fixing them requires hard, expensive choices, the kind of choices decades of earlier city administrators and councilors refused to make.
Which brings us to the corporate welfare.
Whether it was white elephant projects such as the now-demolished Sixth Street Marketplace, or more recent adventures, such as the pricey deal bringing the Washington Redskins training camp to the city, or the millions spent luring Stone Brewery to the city, the local Babbittry has eagerly chased project after project in hopes of reviving the city’s fortunes.
And let’s not even start on the failed attempts at building a minor league baseball Xanadu in downtown Richmond. Those were just plain embarrassing.
There is one other item to add to this list: the Richmond area’s failed attempt to snag Amazon’s new corporate headquarters.
