Richmond officials announce interim DPU director is staying on full time

The interim Department of Public Utilities leader Richmond Mayor Danny Avula brought on in the aftermath of January’s water crisis is staying in that job on a permanent basis, officials announced Wednesday.

The news broke after Anthony “Scott” Morris, an engineer who previously worked as director of water at the state Department of Environmental Quality, was listed only as DPU’s “director” in presentation materials prepared for a meeting of the City Council’s Governmental Operations Committee.

After council members inquired about his job status, interim Chief Administrative Officer Sabrina Joy-Hogg confirmed there had been a change as of Monday, and Morris will be the long-term leader of a city department that’s been in the spotlight for nearly two months.

“We’re very happy that he’s willing to stay with us and work through all of this,” Joy-Hogg said.

In a statement about the Morris news, Avula said Richmond “will benefit from his leadership as we build resilience at our water treatment plant.” 

Morris, one of the first major hires by Avula, replaced former DPU director April Bingham, who had been hired under former Mayor Levar Stoney. The change happened a few weeks after the Jan. 6 failure at Richmond’s water treatment plant that left the city and parts of the region without usable water for nearly a week.

The leadership change at DPU has created some awkward moments as the city works on an outside investigation into what caused the failure and plans to prevent it from happening again.

It fell to Morris to brief the City Council on the initial findings of the investigation being carried out by engineering firm HNTB, which the city hired to conduct the review at an estimated cost of $234,000. 

Under questioning from council members Wednesday, Morris repeatedly said he could not speak to past management decisions, including the overarching question of why the city didn’t shore up its emergency response procedures at the water plant after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency flagged problems with the facility’s emergency planning in 2022.

It remains unclear who, if anyone, will be able to answer that question, which wasn’t addressed in a preliminary report from HNTB released earlier this month. On the day of that report’s release, Bingham emailed the City Council to inform members she hadn’t been asked to participate in the review. 

On Wednesday, Morris said Bingham has since been invited to participate, but declined to do so. In an email to The Richmonder, Bingham said her successor’s comments were inaccurate and she had not declined an offer to participate.

When asked about Bingham's denial, Avula spokesman Julian Walker reiterated that the city had contacted Bingham and asked if she'd like to be involved in reviews by HNTB and the Virginia Department of Health. She indicated "she did not wish to participate," Walker said. Because Bingham's stance has apparently changed, Walker said, "the city is now exploring options to connect Ms. Bingham with those organizations.”

The initial HNTB report verified several basic facts about the crisis. An early-morning power outage briefly knocked the plant offline, the report said, and subsequent flooding and equipment failures ultimately led the plant to stop producing treated water as employees worked to repair the damage.

Morris and Avula have said the city has already taken steps to make the facility more resilient through equipment upgrades, improved training for workers and switching the plant to a more dependable power mode that was previously only used in the summer due to the threat of power loss from thunderstorms.

Some details still fuzzy

Two new members of the City Council indicated Wednesday that the initial HNTB report, which was only 15 pages long, left them wanting more information.

“Frankly, I was a little bit disappointed in its heft,” Councilor Sarah Abubaker (4th District) said as she asked when the city should expect a final report from HNTB.

Morris said the report is expected in about a month and he anticipates HNTB representatives will present their findings to the council and take questions at a public meeting. No one from HNTB participated in Wednesday’s meeting.

Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) said she felt the report was “very technical” but didn’t get at the root causes of the failure.

“It doesn’t get as much to the systemic issues that may have brought us to where we are,” Gibson said. “I think that’s really very critical.”

Gibson also noted the initial report makes no mention of the plant’s backup generators, which were not used during the crisis but are generally seen as a more long-term source of backup power than the batteries that didn’t last long enough to prevent an outage.

“Do you know why that’s missing from this preliminary report?” Gibson asked.

In response, Morris said the goal of the preliminary report was to “to try to drive at what was done and what was not done.”

“My understanding is the backup generators were not engaged,” Morris said, adding that he expects the issue to be addressed by HNTB in the future.

The generator system in place on Jan. 6 had to be manually activated by plant operators. Officials have said a project is underway to upgrade the system so the generators will kick in automatically if the main power source fails.

Because that project won’t be completed until later this year, Morris said, it’s difficult to add up the total costs of the city’s efforts to make the water plant more resilient. He indicated he could give the council an estimate as the city prepares to pass a new budget next month.

Abubaker noted that officials in neighboring Henrico County recently announced their budget proposal includes $50 million for new investments to make the county’s water infrastructure more resilient after the crisis.

“Knowing that we are coming up on budget season, should we as council members be expecting a significant ask in infrastructure investment in the water facility?” Abubaker asked.

Because the city already has some projects underway and is still assessing what its capital needs are for water infrastructure, Morris said he’s not expecting to ask for “any significant investments related to this event.”

Avula has said the city has already spent around $5 million in repairs at the facility, but the city hasn’t released a detailed breakdown of those expenditures.

FOIA issues at state level

Drinking water in the state is regulated by the Virginia Department of Health, which requested several specific pieces of information from Richmond last month as it conducts an inquiry into whether the city violated any regulations in the runup to the plant failure. The state gave the city 30 days to respond.

The city sent its response on Feb. 21. After The Richmonder asked for a copy of the city’s response, VDH officials sent a link to the document posted on its website. But several pieces of information the city had sent — most notably the city’s standard operating procedures for responding to a power outage — were withheld from release.

The document VDH posted indicated the information wasn’t being published because it falls under a Freedom of Information Act exemption meant to protect information that could jeopardize the security of critical infrastructure if released. 

That transparency exemption applies to information about the “electrical systems” of infrastructure facilities. However, state law says the exemption shouldn’t be used to prevent the release of records related to “an inquiry into the performance of such facility, building, or structure after it has been subjected to fire, explosion, natural disaster, or other catastrophic event.”

VDH officials did not provide a response when asked whether the state or the city decided to invoke the FOIA exemption and why the records were being withheld since they surfaced as part of an inquiry into a major infrastructure failure.

The partial city response VDH published includes details of the training Richmond water plant employees received after the crisis. Among other topics, that training covered information on “initiating generator power transfer” and “monitoring generator function.”

The agency also partially or fully redacted “hundreds” of pages of documents related to the water crisis in response to a separate FOIA request from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the newspaper reported in an article published Wednesday. To block the release of those records, the agency invoked a transparency exemption that shields “working papers and correspondence of the governor.”

However, the agency didn’t appear to consult Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office before making the decision to invoke a FOIA exemption reserved for the governor’s office.

“The governor’s office disagrees with how VDH applied the lawful exemption in this instance and has reopened the file,” said Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez.

Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org