As City Hall veteran, Andreas Addison says he’d be mayor who could ‘actively deliver’

When he first got to Richmond after graduating from Virginia Tech in 2004, Andreas Addison hopped around a variety of jobs working as a bartender and a waiter. That changed after he went to a city master planning event with former Mayor Doug Wilder.

“He came up with his cowboy boots and his bolo tie and said, ‘Hi, there everybody. If you love this kind of work, we're hiring,’” Addison, 42, said in an interview. “So I applied.”

That was the start of Addison’s long career at City Hall, which he’s now trying to take to the next level by running for mayor. To succeed, he’ll have to overcome a sizable fundraising disadvantage and do what no one has been able to do so far: Jump directly from a City Council seat to the mayor’s office.

In his pitch to voters, Addison — who owns a gym in Scott’s Addition and has represented the West End’s 1st District for almost eight years — is presenting himself as the candidate loaded with urban planning ideas, inside knowledge of how City Hall works and the willpower to shake things up.

“We’ve had two mayors that came in with no clue how to do this job. And we’ve gotten a little bit out of it. It’s time for Richmond to look for what we really want to see as mayor. It’s not just the vision… But who can actually, day one, actively deliver on that.”

The city can’t afford to wait, Addison said, for a newcomer to learn the bureaucracy and dynamics of City Hall.

“Richmond doesn’t have time for that,” he said. “Too many families are being displaced because of inaction by our city leadership to understand what their problems are… I’m not a candidate here to wait.”

Before winning a council seat in 2016, Addison’s jobs at City Hall focused largely on technology, innovation and improving city processes from within. On the campaign trail, he talks about his firsthand frustrations with some of those processes after going through a lengthy wait for a permit to open his gym, Pure Fitness RVA.

When he first got to City Hall, one of the first projects he worked on was helping set up the city’s 311 call center. He also handled initiatives focused on improving Richmonders access to health care, reporting for local projects funded with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding and the creation of a tracking system for Freedom of Information Act requests sent to City Hall.

“By the way, it worked until a couple years ago,” Addison said of the FOIA tracker. “Doesn’t seem like it’s being used at all any more, but that’s another part of the story.”

Addison said it was frustration over seeing good ideas stall out — driven by a lack of vision and poor coordination on who’s responsible for a specific issue — that led him to leave his former City Hall role and run for elected office.

Some of that frustration has continued into his City Council service. Addison said he thinks the city government is still too reliant on citizens complaining to identify problems instead of proactively finding ways to make Richmonders’ lives easier and better.

“I really think getting away from that complaint-driven interaction is going to be a shift we need to make,” he said.

As the only current officeholder in the race, Addison has also highlighted government successes, particularly the ones he played a key role in such as the creation of the Central Virginia Transportation Authority and the fare-free policy on the regional bus system. He has said he intends to continue his transportation focus by creating a new Department of Transportation to beef up the city’s efforts to design safer streets.

“I’ve overwhelmingly delivered on things that our city has asked of its elected leaders,” Addison said.

Addison’s push for the city to adopt a land value tax  — a shift that would involve taxing the value of land at a higher rate than the buildings on it — may be the closest thing to a signature policy proposal in the five-person mayoral race. Addison said that concept, which has run into skepticism at City Hall, could ease the tax burden on some homeowners seeing their property assessments rise dramatically while incentivizing developers to build densely on empty lots.

“This is the kind of idea we need to bring into our city, because we have over 1,000 vacant, empty, blighted parcels,” he said. “We have vacant land owned by the housing authority that should be housing.”

Addison said he feels his own working-class roots set him apart from some of his opponents.

Born in Northern Virginia to a waitress who divorced his biological father and later remarried a maintenance worker, Addison grew up in rural Shenandoah County, where he qualified for free school lunches and food stamps.

He started working at 14 to make extra money, and ultimately went to Virginia Tech with the help of a Pell Grant.

“My parents encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to, but they were never big on college,” he said. “They themselves didn't really go to college or graduate, so this was a chance for me to kind of figure myself out.”

He saw firsthand how government programs can assist those who need it. At college, his passion for government grew, and he now jokes that he’s the rare political science graduate who actually uses their degree.

To describe what type of mayor he’d be, Addison tells a story about a screen he saw in the office of former Boston mayor Marty Walsh. That screen, he said, showed real-time data on what was happening in the city, like what roads were being paved, where police were being requested and what calls for service were coming in.

“That's what I'm going to bring to the office,” Addison said. “Understanding what's going on every day in every channel we're doing.”