City Council plans push to require more top City Hall officials to live in Richmond
The inspiration for Richmond City Council member Sarah Abubaker’s first major policy proposal came during the January water crisis.
As the entire city struggled for days, Abubaker said in an interview, it was frustrating to know that some high-ranking City Hall officials were at home somewhere else. Somewhere that still had perfectly good water.
Translating that thought into policy form, Abubaker is proposing stricter residency rules requiring 43 top City Hall officials to live in Richmond instead of commuting from a neighboring county or locations even more remote. (See a full list at the end of this article.)
“Accessibility breeds accountability. I have to face the people that I’m serving every day,” said Abubaker, who was elected last fall to represent South Richmond’s 4th District and had just been sworn in when the water crisis hit.
The plan hasn’t been formally introduced yet, but it could come to a vote within the next few months.
Recently, there’s been a push to shorten the list of senior unelected officials like administrative officers and department directors who have to live in Richmond as a condition of working at City Hall. The rationale for looser residency requirements is that it broadens the pool of people who could be recruited for government jobs as the city makes a concerted effort to attract and retain high-quality talent.
Abubaker’s proposal goes in the other direction, applying the rule to dozens of positions within the “senior executive service” employment category. The median midpoint salary for those jobs is around $188,000 per year, according to the salary ranges in the city’s pay plan.
People already serving in those roles wouldn’t be required to move into the city under the council proposal. If approved, the stricter rule would only apply to hires or promotions that occur after July 1.
Richmond’s current residency rule requires a dozen officials to live in city limits and allows them to get waivers if they can show that moving to the city would be particularly difficult due to family issues or financial hardship.
In Abubaker’s view, her legislation presents an opportunity for every elected official who ran on City Hall accountability to make that campaign message a reality.
For department directors to fully understand what it’s like to pay a city bill or request a pothole repair, Abubaker feels they should get firsthand experience by living under the policies and processes they oversee.
“You have to live that system in order to make it better,” she said.
Abubaker has already lined up at least three co-sponsors, which means her proposal has a decent chance to win majority support on the nine-member City Council. The three others backing the change so far are Councilors Kenya Gibson (3rd District), Reva Trammell (8th District) and Nicole Jones (9th District).
Councilor Katherine Jordan (2nd District) said she’s also leaning toward signing on.
“I appreciate Councilwoman Abubaker bringing this forward,” Jordan said. “It’s definitely an issue I care about. I look forward to reading her legislation and I expect I will be signing on.”
The upcoming push could put council members at odds with Mayor Danny Avula.
His administration is moving to continue chipping away at the residency rule that — according to the mayor — creates an unnecessary barrier to recruiting top talent to work at City Hall. Avula’s recently introduced budget proposal drops the number of officials who have to live in the city from 12 to 10 by removing the directors of information technology and social services from the list. It also makes it easier for the remaining 10 to get waivers.
“The existing residency requirements for high-level staff make it difficult to recruit and retain the best and most-qualified candidates, especially when many candidates do not want to potentially uproot their families at the end of a four-year election cycle,” Avula said in a statement last week.
In the mayor’s view, if there’s a highly qualified person willing to serve as the city’s IT director who happens to live in Henrico County and wants to stay there, it’s the city’s loss to forgo that hire over a sticking point that has little to do with their ability to do the job.
Interim Chief Administrative Officer Sabrina Joy-Hogg told the council looser residency rules will allow the city to recruit and grant waivers based on “business need” rather than someone’s personal living situation.
Abubaker's draft proposal removes the waiver process entirely, but offers to restore some flexibility by giving impacted employees 18 months to establish residency in the city instead of the current 12 months.
Abubaker said she recognizes the "complexity of the people part of this."
“There are going to be people who have family issues that require them to live in the counties,” Abubaker said.
The details of any waivers could be worked out in negotiations once a final draft of the proposal is up for review.
When the city is recruiting nationally and bringing employees to the Richmond region for the first time, Abubaker said, the higher salaries City Hall is offering to attract outside talent shouldn’t make it a burden to live in city limits.
“None of these positions should have financial difficulty,” she said.
Abubaker said she was working on her proposal before the Avula administration made its move to change the residency rule through the budget. That was a somewhat controversial maneuver, because the residency rule has little direct connection to the dollars-and-cents focus of a municipal budget.
Abubaker said she intends to file an amendment to strip the Avula proposal out of the budget so the city can have a “full public discussion” on the matter.
“To try to slip it into the budget document was inappropriate,” she said.
Backers of tighter residency rules say that — with all the accolades Richmond receives describing it as an attractive city on the rise — they doubt the residency rule would truly be a dealbreaker for new recruits.
“If I’m qualified and I truly want that role, am I going to let that stop me from applying?” said Jones, the 9th District council representative. “If it is an issue, I would ask the question: ‘Then what attracts you to the city if you don’t live in it?’”
Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org
