RVA's Got Issues: Meet mayoral candidate Danny Avula

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 continues with Dr. Danny Avula, a pediatrician who was also recently the commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services, a state government agency.  

You can listen to or read Rich's interview with Danny Avula 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're joined now by Danny Avula, a pediatrician who was also recently the commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services, a state government agency. Welcome, Danny. 

Dr. Danny Avula: Thanks, Rich. Great to be here.

You oversaw the COVID vaccine rollout for the state, right? The whole state of Virginia. And that's given you a bit of name recognition.

People know you as the doctor who oversaw that. I think some voters might be wondering, though, about your connection to the city of Richmond and Whether you're up to the task of addressing all the city's challenges. What would you say to voters who question whether you've done the work, getting to know the city of Richmond?

I moved to the city of Richmond in 2000, came here to go to medical school and really decided that we loved Richmond and wanted to plant roots, raise a family and be invested in the city. And so we made a decision, at the time we're transitioning from med school residency to move into the East End.

For 20-plus years now, we've been residents of North Church Hill deeply invested in the city. My wife is a public school teacher. We have five kids who have all gone to Richmond Public Schools. I was the former city's public health director. I served for 12 years in the local health department. And then I actually merged the Richmond and Henrico Health Departments back in 2018.

And so, you know, this has been my home. It's been the place I've loved. It's been the place that we've, you know, given our life to over the last 20 years.

So just some history about your parents: They immigrated to California, was it from India? 

That's right, yeah.

And you've told a story about how education was a huge priority for them — so much so that you graduated from UVA early when you were 19. And you and your wife sent your kids to Chimborazo Elementary, decided that you were going to send your kids to public school at a time when, say, the reputation of that school and really the outcomes weren't super strong.

Why did you do this? This couldn't have been an easy decision for you folks. Why do this? 

Yeah. You know, when we moved into the East End of Richmond, that decision in many ways was motivated by a desire to address deep-seated race and justice issues. That was our sense of call to that community, recognizing that the way that our society typically operates, you are not in places where you can build relationships across race or across class.

And that if you really want to address some of those root causes, you've got to be invested. Yeah.

Maybe one thing you said that does ring true: As somebody who grew up as an immigrant family and education was everything, there was some internal wrestling about what is the priority here, right? Like, I grew up, everything was about get the best grades, go to the best schools, go to the best opportunity.

And so, I think, weighing the reality that for our family, having our kids have the opportunity to grow up and to, to build some of those bridge relationships across race and class, like that was just as or more important than other things.

So let's actually talk about any kind of lessons you might've learned. You're living in the East End, your wife's teaching at Chimborazo. What did you learn about the schools and the community that you lived in? 

Three things. One, that the schools are full of amazing, super passionate, super committed, super generous people. I mean, the teachers that serve schools like Chimborazo and all across Richmond Public Schools pull money everyday out of their own pocket to meet the needs that are in front of them.

And you know, teachers don't get paid well to begin with, you know? So I just really have admiration for the people who have given their lives to this work. Second, in the Richmond Public Schools system, we serve students that have come from, in some cases, like, generational poverty.

And so, for years, and probably still, the RTD will post, you know, the per-pupil cost for Richmond versus Henrico versus Chesterfield, and people will go nuts and be like, "Oh, why is Richmond's so bad at using money? Why? What's going on there?"

And the reality is that what so many of these kids need and what they're struggling with requires way more investment. And so, you know, we could double the per-pupil cost and I'd be OK with that right now. That's not going to happen.

But I do feel like the investment that so many of these kids need around mental health resources around restorative justice approaches around substance use for families around employment skills et that does take investment.

And the third thing: Early on, we really pushed for Chimborazo to become an IB school. And I think that was a mistake, you know, like we did not do enough work listening to community residents and really honoring the priorities of that community before kind of pushing our own agenda.

How would this translate into an Avula mayoral administration? Is it increasing the budget? What should the mayor do to help support RPS going forward? 

Yes and yes. I mean, the primary role the mayor plays in supporting the school system is ensuring that it's prioritized in the budget, right? If I'm elected mayor, I'm going to ask the question every time: Is an investment in something else a better investment than investing in our schools and our kids and our families?

And so we need to have a standard that every kid who comes to the school is going to be either prepared to go to college or prepared to go to the workforce or the career force.

And so you asked, "How do we get there?" The mayor absolutely has to advocate for more funding. In the city's budget, the mayor also has to do the work of the General Assembly, right?

Because we have such significant infrastructure issues in our school, that's not going to be able to come from just the city tax revenue alone. And so there's a real role to make sure the funding formula at the state level is appropriately funding disadvantaged schools, but also the need to advocate for capital dollars to build new schools.

Speaking of large organizations like the Richmond Public Schools, you're no stranger to large bureaucracies, right? We talked about the Richmond City and Henrico bringing those two health districts together. What do you do when you're faced with a problem in terms of prioritizing the challenges you address?

COVID hits, everyone's sort of like, falling apart, right? And you say, "OK, we're going to roll out a vaccine. Let's make it happen." How do you actually figure that out? Like the next step in the plan? 

Some of this comes from medical training, right? Like the way that we're taught to diagnose illness is really to do an assessment.

And it means listening to certain parts of the body. It means running some tests. It means maybe doing an X-ray. And so the analog of that in community work is what is the data? What is the baseline that we're working from? Where is the community? Where are the resources that could be applied to a solution?

And so appropriately framing and diagnosing the problem is where you start. And then there's gotta be a clear outcome that we're working toward.

You know, with COVID when I took over that role as state vaccine coordinator, we were 50th out of 50 states in terms of getting shots in arms.

And so every day we would sit in the situation room where we had monitors all over the walls and we would post: What was our national ranking? How many vaccines had we delivered in the last 24 hours? And what was our plan in the next 24 hours, the next seven days?

And by being really focused on the number outcome there and having a sense of accountability saying, "We're bringing the team together every day to see this." We went from 50th in the country to the top 10 most vaccinated states in about six months.

So I get that. It gets a little more complicated when you're running a city, right? Because then it's not just the vaccines. We have many goals: You've got your housing goals, you've got your school goals, your education goals.

How do you set priorities as mayor to try to figure out which of the many things that you could be targeting ends up on those monitors?

Yeah. Well, part of running for office is basically like doing a six-month community survey — every single day. I mean, even this morning I was out in Fulton Hill.

And what I've heard consistently over and over and over: housing, education, public safety. And that all three of those things really emanate from a need for a higher-functioning, more transparent, more responsive local government. Right?

So I think the work is really framing out: What are the outcomes working towards How much new housing? How much of it is market rate? How much of it is affordable at 80% and below?

And then making sure that we are working towards those numerical outcomes in the Department of Housing. Similarly in the Department of Permitting, if our turnaround time is three months, and we need to get that under one month, we're going to drive to that outcome.

And so I think the role of the mayor — who is functionally, ultimately, the CEO of a $2.8 billion agency with 3,000 employees — you could actually drive to outcomes like that.

Welcome back to RVA's Got Issues. We're with former state health care official and candidate for Richmond mayor, Danny Avula.

Danny, let's talk about trust. There's a sense that certain parts of the city have been left behind: Neighborhoods, maybe the entire Southside in some ways. In your health care roles, you've worked with populations that don't normally trust medicine. How would that work in terms of translating to the work you would need to do as mayor to get communities who are also distrustful of Richmond City government? 

I think there are components to this. It's showing up, actually getting out into communities, listening well, actually spending the time to hear what is important to folks and then following through. And doing that in a transparent way.

You know, even pre-COVID, a huge part of our work at the health department was expanding access to family planning and reproductive health care in some of our lowest-income communities, our big six public housing communities. And so, you know, we were mapping our data for things like infant mortality and such, transmitted disease

And we went to the housing authority and said, "Hey, could we work together on figuring out how to improve health outcomes?" And we just started talking to community members, and it was incredible to sort of hear their desire to engage that their input. And people were like, "If that's an STD clinic, no one's going to show up, right? Like we all know each other's business. No one's going to walk in those doors."

And so we had, you know, residents saying: "I just want a place where I can get my blood pressure checked or to talk about my diabetes and check my sugar." And so you really change the operational model of these resource centers because of deep community engagement and input.

And that built trust.

So following up on this idea of trust, right, I think there's some questions bubbling up on the campaign trail about support you've received from some city leaders who might be characterized as socially conservative. On your website, you say clearly that you support reproductive rights, that you support it, LGBTQ+ rights, but I think this is becoming a topic of conversation on forums and social media.

I wanted to give you an opportunity to clarify where you stand on reproductive rights — on LGBTQ+ rights. 

Yeah, thanks Rich. I appreciate the question. I mean, I've been very clear both on my website and really in my body of work: I am very much and pro–reproductive rights, very pro-LGBTQ+ community.

Um, I have a queer daughter, I've done deep work with the LGBTQ+ community over the last decade as the public health director — really centering racial justice and equity — and things that, you know, if folks sort of looked back, would say, "OK. Like, I get it."

I think it's probably important to say I was originally being considered for likely the state health commissioner role, you know: I'm a public health physician. I spent my entire career at VDH. And that would have been the likely place that I would end up.

During that vetting process, I was asked several questions about my policy stances on things like reproductive rights, transgender rights and gun control. And I was very honest about the fact that I was pro-choice, pro–trans rights, pro–gun control — and unsurprisingly, I didn't hear back for a while.

But very surprisingly, I actually did get a call over a month later and said, "Hey, would you consider, being commissioner of social services?" And you know, I saw that as an affirmation of leadership ability, of effectiveness a— nd for me personally, an opportunity to lead at really significant scale.

So I think that it's a pretty myopic criticism without really taking into consideration the 10 to 15 years of, again, deep work with the LGBT community.

So how do you balance these views with anyone who might be more socially conservative who is supporting your campaign? 

There's a lot of socially conservative folks who are supporting the campaign, but it's not because we agree on some of these social policy issues. It's because they want to see improved effectiveness of local government.

And I think what they see in me as a candidate is somebody who is actually actually had a track record of leading large organizations, of building good teams, of improving service delivery, of changing culture. And they see an opportunity for our city to move forward with the right leadership at the helm.

I think that's where a lot of that support is coming from.

Housing is top of mind for voters. You have some broad proposals that I'm kind of curious to get a little bit more specific on breaking the cycle of eviction — which sounds great, right?

Richmond has one of the highest eviction rates in the country: top 10, maybe second. But it's a big issue, but what can the city do?

Yeah. I mean, I think probably the best lever here that the city can work on is with the public housing authority, because that's a huge portion of the evictions that are happening.

And so while the city doesn't control the public housing authority, the city can use its political influence and the fact that City Council actually appoints those board members to elevate the issue and say, "Hey, you know, when we are not providing the degree of service for this resident community, we cannot be evicting people when, when this is already an option of last resort." So I think that's a clear area of focus.

I think another clear area of focus is in strengthening tenant rights. So a lot of that work has to happen at the state level: It's a GA advocacy issue. I as mayor would absolutely be involved in year-round advocacy around that.

And then three: Actually improving access to legal representation for tenants, right? Because, you know, from the clinical lens, so often I would see kids suffering from severe asthma attacks and parents, because their house was full of mold, there were leaky roofs and moisture in walls and parents saying, "I can't really say anything to my landlord because I'll get kicked out."

And so clearly tenants need more support, more access to legal help. And so that's something that we could support.

Some of these things seem like administrative and maybe structural stuff, but access to legal help — like lawyers are expensive, right? The Maggie Walker Land Trust, we need more investment. That's expensive.

Like, where does that money come from? 

We only have so many potential sources of revenue. Now, one huge potential source that is just going to need continued advocacy. It's the General Assembly, right? We talked about the fact that we have such significant capital needs in schools. I think the same is true for our combined sewer overflow infrastructure, and the city coffers are not going to meet those needs.

And so there has to be a role that the state plays in infusing dollars into the city. And that means building a city apparatus like procurement pathways, the grantwriting capacity to be able to maximize what we draw down from federal funds.

Let's ask a more general question here. What do you think people get wrong about you as a candidate?

You know, the things that I hear, one is "He's a doctor, why would he do this? He's taken a huge pay cut. He must have some big aspiration."

And so I want people to just know my story of having chosen to move into the East End, having invested in community, raised our kids in Richmond Public Schools. And for me, you know, this decision is about nothing other than wanting to make Richmond better, because it's a city that I love and I believe in and I want to be a part of its future, right?

So I want people to know that this is really about feeling like my skill set and my passion for the city can help Richmond move forward in its next chapter.

And then I think the second thing we've already talked about is, is sort of the affiliation with a Republican administration and Republican donors in some cases, and feeling like, "He must be a, you know, social conservative, we can't have him leading."

And again, I would just remind people: Not only did I work in a Democratic administration first, but I have a decade of work really centering access, racial equity, addressing root causes and systemic and structural drivers of injustice. Like that has been the work I've been engaged in my entire career.

On a more personal note, what's something not political that you'd want someone to know about you that you haven't been able to talk about on the campaign trail, right? Your first date fun fact that you might share.

I have had this like weird lifelong fascination with the Iditarod, the dog sled race up in Alaska.

And so, one of my favorite trips ever, my wife and I went to Alaska. And got to watch the start of the Iditarod. And then we did our own guided dog sledding trip through Denali, kind of trying to live out my faith.

I was going to say, you have to pretend for a minute that you're on the race. 

That's right.

That's great. All right. So bottom line here: There are five candidates in the race. What specifically makes you best prepared for the challenges Richmond will face over the next four years? 

I think there are two main buckets of what the mayor's role is and what the mayor has to do to help the city move forward.

The first is where the mayor does have real power, which is the internal organization of City Hall, right? And you need to have somebody who understands the context of government and understands that you can't just clean house, right? You've got to invest deeply in supervisors and managers to understand HR policy and to work folks through progressive discipline.

But you also have to be an executive that is going to energize a workforce and make it a place where people feel proud to be a part of an organization. So that is a huge part of what the mayor's role is and where the mayor really has the most power.

The second part of the job is the political and relational parts of the job, right? For us to move forward as a city, we've talked about the fact that we're going to need significant state investment. As someone who has been the commissioner of a $2.6-billion-dollar agency, who's gone through the budget cycle at the General Assembly multiple times, I have both the relationships and the experience of understanding how do you effectively advocate.

You think about things like affordable housing and transit and even the unhoused population in the city. These are not things the city can solve necessarily by itself. And so, it really needs a humble, willing convener for the regional leadership.

You know, when I was the public health director for Richmond and Henrico, I fell into the, uh, sort of de facto regional lead on COVID response. And every week was either in meetings or on calls with the county managers in Henrico, Chesterfield, Goochland, Hanover — and so I built those relationships over time and still have really great relationships with our regional partners.

I'd come in day one with a huge advantage in being able to move the regional conversation forward.

Danny Avula is running for mayor of Richmond. Thanks so much, Danny.

Thank you, Rich.

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