For the next several weeks, RVA's Got Issues and VPM News are teaming up to bring you special coverage of the Richmond mayoral election.
"Who's Got Your Vote?" takes voters inside Richmond's race for mayor. Host Rich Meagher interviewed each candidate to get closer to the issues and faces that want to shape the future of Richmond.
The RVA's Got Issues series kicks off with Harrison Roday, a leader in the nonprofit and industrial manufacturing space who said his "get things done" attitude, experience in politics under Sen. Tim Kaine and his aptitude for budgeting and finance sets him apart from the other candidates.
You can listen to or read Rich's interview with Harrison Roday here. A longer, video version of the interview is also embedded below.
Find RVA's Got Issues wherever you listen to podcasts — or on the RGI website.
Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited for style and length.
Rich Meagher: Welcome to RVA's Got Issues, a podcast about politics and public affairs in and around Richmond, Virginia. I'm your host, Rich Meagher. On this special election episode, RVA's Got Issues with the Richmond mayoral election.
Five candidates are vying to be Richmond's next mayor. Each one wants to be the key decision maker that will shape the future of the city and the region. We'll sit down with the candidates for an in-depth conversation about who they are, what they plan to do and why they should be the choice of Richmond's voters in November.
We're joined now by Harrison Roday, a nonprofit founder with a decade of business experience in New York and Richmond. Welcome, Harrison.
Harrison Roday: Thanks for having me, Rich. Pleasure to be here.
So what do you think people get the most wrong about you as a candidate?
That's a great question. I've never given it much thought. Sometimes people tell me that I'm taller than they expected. So maybe that's one.
OK, you're too tall. You can't teach height, so that's good.
Let's put the question a different way, right? You were a page in the state House of Delegates back in the day. You have worked on Sen. Tim Kaine's campaigns. You've been a White House intern. What would you say to voters who wonder, though, whether you've spent enough time getting to know the City of Richmond's problems?
I never want to make any claims that can't be backed up. So I always am careful to say, "I grew up in Henrico." The city and Henrico have a lot of things in common, but there are also some important differences — but it's not like I just showed up in our region. I grew up here. I spent first grade through 12th grade here, worked on Senator Kaine's campaign in Richmond over a decade ago.
I started a nonprofit here in the city. We support the community by making loans to small businesses that are run by entrepreneurs that lack access to capital.
So I've spent a lot of time in and around the city. And I think folks will see that it's been done in a partnership-oriented approach that's been really focused on serving the community and impacting our city in a positive way.
So let's get a little into those kinds of specifics, right? You have private equity experience. You have some business experience that's generated buzz.
Can you talk about how your business experience informs priorities that you'd put into place if you were mayor?
Yeah. I'm always very careful to say that anyone who says they want to run government "like a business" I think is wrong and is being intellectually dishonest. But I do think there are lessons that anyone who has helped run a large organization knows that are directly applicable to the challenges that the city faces.
First and foremost, one of the most important jobs of the mayor is to write and execute the budget for the city — and finance is an area where I have extensive experience, and I look forward to using that to make a positive impact for all of our residents, particularly in areas that have been underinvested in the past.
That leads us nicely into what you say is the biggest issue facing Richmond, which is housing, right? It's affordable housing and housing that can be affordable for everyone.
Are you talking about building into codes, into contracts, like requirements for affordable housing? Are you talking about only working with developers who have a commitment and demonstrate that commitment? And how do we do that and how do we track it and enforce it?
Yeah. First let's just talk about the state of housing in Richmond: The majority of Richmonders are renters. Estimates vary between 55%–60%. And I think oftentimes when we start a dialogue in a public space talking about housing, everyone's minds go to "What's being built?" And that is a very fair and genuine place to spend time. And we should be spending time talking about that.
But I would argue that first, we need to spend more time talking about protecting renters, and we need to talk more about stopping evictions. So I think we need to be more clear that taxpayer dollars should be used to support people who are either unhoused or at the risk of becoming unhoused.
And that means having some long-term conversations about how to work with some of our nonprofit partners, how to support the work of Richmond Redevelopment Housing Authority, how to do things that are challenging and correct a lot of the systemic disparities that have existed here for a long time.
And I am all for talking about what our priorities are when we build new housing units. But if we only talk about that, we are missing a huge part of the conversation.
So the talk is good, right? But what can the mayor do in terms of actually making the results of that conversation happen?
Yeah. I think we should do some very simple things like create a tenants' council within the mayor's office — actually elevate the voices of people who are renters, a diverse cross-section of people in the city. We should welcome developers who are doing good work and providing affordable housing and treating their tenants fairly.
When landlords are not doing that, they need to be held accountable. And that is something the mayor can do publicly. The mayor's arguably No. 1 or No. 2 most important job is writing the budget, and we spend millions of dollars subsidizing affordable housing.
As mayor, I will not be spending money subsidizing housing that goes towards the creation of new units that don't create genuine affordability.
We need to spend more time talking about protecting renters, and we need to talk more about stopping evictions.
And so what is affordable, do you think? Do you have a definition of it?
Yeah, I think we need to have our dollars focused on people who make less than half what the median income here is in Richmond. And I would ask people: Hold me as mayor and hold the City Council accountable. Because area median income is easy to say — about $60,000.
But if you actually unpack what's in that calculation, there is a group of people who are earning higher and higher salaries who are doing fine — and a group of people who don't have the opportunities they deserve.
And if you just use an average, you get yourself into a lot of trouble.
Is this going to cost us? And where does the money come from? That's the question that I think a lot of folks have during this whole campaign, right? We've got good ideas coming out. Do we have the money to do these kinds of things?
If we just want to talk about some common-sense math, the general fund for our city is about a billion dollars. We have made critical and important commitments to our workforce in City Hall that they are no longer going to be underpaid, and that's enshrined in a collective bargaining agreement.
The same is true with our teachers at RPS. And I believe all of the candidates running, including myself, have committed to keeping the bus system fare free. If you add just those commitments alone, you're talking about somewhere around $50 million a year of increasing costs. We have to manage our budget well.
If you look at the City of Norfolk, we are roughly the same size in land area, population and demographics. We spend more money per capita delivering almost every city service here. So I do think there are some opportunities for improvement in the budget, but I am not going to promise things that don't make sense.
We need, for example, tax relief for seniors who are homeowners, who are below a certain income, who have seen their assessments go up. There is a program that exists for that. We need to invest more in that program. I would love for the state to allow our city to create real estate tax relief for people who own homes who have seen their incomes go down and their assessments go up.
The best thing we can do is continue to have an economy that's growing so that revenue increases. How do we do that? We do it by investing in our residents, and keeping Richmond affordable, by supporting growth and affordable housing and making sure there's good, living-wage jobs.
People want someone with the skills to address problems, right? And let's say even dysfunction in some of the city's operations. You talk about audits of every department. You talked about a five-year plan with quarterly progress reports. What are we tracking?
Simple goals are the best goals. And the function of government is to support our residents and the folks who live here and who need services. So anytime I would look at a performance indicator or a metric for a department, it's really important.
You have to examine — are you setting the right goal and are you doing it for the right reasons? So we could talk about any agency in the city and come up with some common-sense goals. Some of them are going to be public-facing and address residents' needs.
Some of them, for example — if we want to pick out something where there's been a challenge recently — having a certain number of cases resolved under the meals tax issue relative to the number of cases outstanding to the satisfactory resolution of both parties, that's a way where you can quickly common-sense measure: Are we moving the ball?
With respect to your specific question, I've called for an audit of every department in City Hall so that we can generate real performance plans for each of the agencies. These are things that need to be public-facing documents with genuine goals that say, "Here's what we're going to improve."
For example, according to a recent audit document that was done, it takes 117 days on average for a City of Richmond resident to hear back and get their case addressed from the city when they have a question about their personal property taxes. So someone needs to articulate: "What's our goal to bring that down?"
It's really important to set those goals in a way that is open, in a way that welcomes feedback, in a way that works with people inside the building and outside the building. Because we need to have a City Hall that is responsive to our residents — as well as what people who are looking at the outside in think is required every day.
What would you say? If this had to be fed into a kind of management philosophy, what does accountability look like to you?
A hallmark of a great culture is that accountability comes from within, not from top-down oversight. And my observation would be when organizations are run by leaders who are focused on negative, adversarial consequence-based management, it probably means something has gone wrong somewhere else. And that is not really what we should be aspiring to.
So the perspective that I bring, the way that I was taught is that in manufacturing when you run a plant, you don't just tell everyone what to do. You try and do the opposite. You put your desk in the middle of the plant floor and you ask people to come to you, share their views. You share what you're trying to accomplish, and you work together to accomplish goals.
We need to do that inside City Hall. And we also need to do it in a partnership-oriented mentality with our school board, our city council, and the many stakeholders that are outside the formal city government.
I've called for an audit of every department in City Hall so that we can generate real performance plans for each of the agencies.
Harrison, we want to talk a little bit about education. Now you've been very clear about, you have business experience, you're not interested in running government like a business, but still some of that business experience can help you approach the education issue in Richmond.
How do you apply your thinking about government and form — in terms of accountability, in terms of organization — to something like public education?
First, I'm a big believer that we should be investing in public education and outside of the topic of housing, which I think is the single paramount issue for the future of our community over the next 20 years, it's very clear that our public school system is the No. 1 issue.
The mayor can do many things to be supportive of RPS going as early as pre-K — which sometimes, is not technically RPS — and after 12th grade. There are many things we can do to support kids. We can fully fund the school system from a budgetary perspective. The mayor can use the bully pulpit.
I'm looking forward to showing up in school once a month and working with kids. The mayor can fund organizations that are in the city, like Parks and Rec, that support our kids as well as nonprofits that support our kids and out of school time they're not technically a part of RPS. The mayor can be a champion for teachers. These are things the mayor can do.
I also think it's very important, as we continue our citywide conversation about the future of Richmond, that we acknowledge that we have a directly elected school board. The school board is in charge of setting policy for Richmond Public Schools. The mayor — and I will be, as mayor — a very strong partner to the school system.
But I think setting the public up with an expectation that the mayor can act alone to change outcomes in the school system is probably not the right approach.
In terms of leadership and government structure, it's not the same kind of deal with law enforcement, community safety. But do you see the same kind of partnership approach for improving, reforming, whatever the word might be for people's perceptions of community safety?
The partnership approach. Absolutely. The mechanics very different. I've been very clear that we need to invest in violence intervention initiatives, particularly those that impact our kids. And a lot of the resources and people who do that work are not folks who work in law enforcement.
However, as I'm sure most folks know, a major difference in the question that you asked relative to the school system is this is an agency that does report up directly to the chief administrative officer (CAO) and into the mayor's office.
True, right? But it does seem that folks who have been calling for reform of law enforcement feel like there's resistance — that it's hard, that there's a kind of— it seems so tough to change how we do law enforcement in the country and in the city of Richmond.
How do you overcome that resistance, whether it's resistance from within or without?
Yeah, I think I start by, I always try and think to — when you have role models and mentors in your life, what do people you admire, how do they lead? What do they do? I started my career working with Senator Kaine.
I think one of the reasons why he's so admired and respected is he's first a listener. And I think on issues that are particularly challenging, the most important first step is being a convener, listener and partner to communities to work together. Not trying to dictate from on high a set of solutions.
Listening is all well and good, but at some point you need to take action. So how do you take that action, and what if there's resistance to that action?
Let's take the issue of gun violence, for example. I've advocated for what I believe are some common sense ideas — like establishing an office of gun violence prevention within the mayor's office, investing in gun violence intervention initiatives in the form of the budget and using resources, investing in school-based community safety programs and bringing in models that have worked nationally and focusing on incident reviews so we can make sure we're always addressing some of the root causes of what we're seeing.
I think those are reasonable approaches that the vast majority of people would agree upon.
Speaking of gun violence, there certainly is a problem with gun violence in the city, but there's certain areas of the city that seem to suffer from it more, whether it's north–south, whether it's Black–white.
What would you say to folks from neighborhoods that have been traditionally left out of the kinds of discussions or solutions? What do you say to them to earn their trust, right? To say that "These are not just words. These are things that I believe."
It's easy to say words and make promises, particularly when you're running for office. All I asked from people is take a look at the time I've spent in the nonprofit space and what I've tried to accomplish there in a partnership-oriented way that serves the needs of the people who trust the nonprofit are not focused on building up some entity for the sake of itself. This is an idea that is supposed to be of service.
And I think hopefully that track record shows that when I say I believe in things like a level playing field. People can look at that and say, "Actually, this guy is serious, because he's done that work."
Now, that's not going to answer all questions for all people, nor should it.
And I would ask people just to evaluate, particularly as mayor: Where are you allocating the money in the budget? Where are you prioritizing physically economic development opportunities? Are you putting in structures in economic development transactions that the city is involved in that reflect not only the needs of workers who are focused on those projects, but reflect the needs of residents?
Those are things I will champion. And people can judge whether or not on my track record that's something that they think I'll actually do.
I've been a longtime consistent advocate for equity, for women's rights, for equal opportunity.
There are five candidates in this race. What specifically makes you the best prepared of them for the challenges that Richmond is going to face over the next four years?
I would very simply say I am advocating for positive change in the city, a city that works for everyone, a place where we can be affordable and a great place to raise a family.
We can raise the bar for the city. We can be a place where people, whether they're lifelong Richmonders or new to the city, can afford to live here and can build a great life here.
And the reason why I think I'm well-positioned to lead us through that as mayor is because I have a track record of getting things done. I come from a outside approach working with nonprofits and large organizations. I know how to run organizations. I know finance. I know how to manage a budget, and my values match the people of the City of Richmond.
I've been a longtime consistent advocate for equity, for women's rights, for equal opportunity. These are things that the people of Richmond deeply care about. And I think it's really important to have a mayor that shares those values.
