The one thing I’ve always said: The people who run this town know how to throw a damn good meeting.
I’ve attended lots of sit downs and seminars, and participated in many a public forum and charrette, since Save Richmond came online more than four years ago — most of these officially-sponsored or assembled gatherings were pleasant and interesting and informative and often even illuminating. And sometimes I was so bored from covering old ground that I would sit and make paper airplanes.
One of the first meetings came in 2003, on a Monday morning at 8AM in the back breakroom of a Ukrop’s supermarket, a few weeks before the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation would push a 1% increase in the city’s meals tax through city council. Along with Andrew and Ewa Beaujon, I sat around a table with many of Richmond’s biggest business movers and shakers and discussed the Foundation’s scheme to fund a regional performing arts facility out of the mouths of city residents. It’s still one of the most surreal experiences of my life: Here we were, discussing and arguing city tax policy and the future of the region’s performing arts companies in the back of a grocery store while employees begged our pardons to get more potato chips.
Then there was the series of meetings convened by Church Hill artist Lisa Taranto and Councilman Bill Pantele in late 2003. The purpose was to address Richmond’s schizophrenic relationship with its burgeoning arts community — issues involving economic development and common sense that we are still grappling with today. As Andrew reported on the event in Save Richmond:
Last month we went to the meeting [Lisa Taranto] organized under the auspices of unindicted city councilman Bill Pantele. He didn’t, uh, show up for it, but it was an excellent meeting all the same. We met a lot of other artists and arts professionals concerned about the same things as us, and we had a good old bitch session about the city and what needed to change. Then we had hors d’ouevres, provided by the good folks at Richmond Renaissance. Who says this community-action lark is without reward?
Last night was the second meeting, organized with the intention of turning our beefs into actionable items for the city. This time Pantele showed. There were lots of concerns about city funding for artists addressed, but our point, which we think we made successfully, was that what the city needs to do for the rest of us is just get the hell out of our way. This means loosening nightclub restrictions. Dismantling obscenity laws. Reworking building codes, parking requirements and zoning laws so that they make sense. And, of course, pressuring the ABC to lighten the freak up on local establishments. Pantele even mentioned that he thought the ABC needed to recognize the difference between nightclubs and restaurants. That’s totally true, and the fact that this is a radical idea, one even we haven’t bothered to propose, shows how completely messed up things are in our commonwealth.
So it looks like a few things are going to happen.
- Pantele’s gonna explore the idea of establishing an office of creative economy for the city, a place that’ll be an advocate both for nonprofit and for-profit artists.
- Possibly through the city’s office of economic development, the zoning and building laws are going to be reexamined.
And finally–and we’re a bit proud of this one–there’s going to be a task force studying entertainment as an economic issue. This could lead to the city lobbying the General Assembly to change the ABC. Also it’s going to reexamine the nightclub laws and compare Richmond’s approach (if such a term is even warranted) to nightlife with that of other cities.
Nothing ever happened with this action plan, devised charrette-style by a diverse crossection of Richmond’s indigenous arts community. Bill Pantele soon turned his attention to other urgent artistic endeavors — like funding a censorous war on fun through “the Party Patrol.”
The meetings and seminars and discussions didn’t end there. Oh no. As we’ve noted on these pages, Richmond’s business leaders have invited a star-studded lineup of visionary “New Leadership” figures to town over the past few years. These trendspotting consultants have come at a high speaking price, and have clued us into cerebral concepts like “the creative class,” but the assessments they have left behind have the same gist: Richmond needs to change. It needs to let new ideas and new leadership in. And now. If that message wasn’t already clear enough, there was the Young and Restless Study, which city business leaders commissioned and then just as quickly shelved.
And those are just the meetings and action plans formulated around Richmond’s creative community. Local voices have spoken out in other areas too. The Richmond PTA and a coalition of parents have formed “Build Schools Now” to spur local leaders to put away the power games and focus on education; an earlier idea floated by the “business community” to end the public election of the Richmond School Board has met with considerable public opposition, as has Mayor Wilder’s wasteful and disgraceful “Black Friday” move of the school administration from City Hall.
Race? Class? Is there no more important issue in the city than affordable housing? A new study, Connections and Choices: Affordable Housing and Smarter Growth in the Greater Richmond Area,” was recently commissioned and seems to be quite clear on the pressing need to make affordable housing a priority — and for stressing the building of neighborhoods rather than the planning of more development. Any takers?
And if “business leaders” want to hear from a broad range of voices about the future of downtown, they should read the Downtown Plan (and follow its progress at Buttermilk & Molasses). The last time the plan was updated, a handful of connected people collaborated on it. This time, it was a cast of hundreds. Hungry for change, business leaders? Here is 180-odd pages worth of change, waiting for action and community support.
Or is that not quite the “change” our Captains of Commerce were looking for? Analyzing the new plan, Snoopy pinpoints the startling difference between the old vision and the new over at River City Rapids:
The one thing I thankfully did not see in the Downtown Plan was a focus on a big marketplace, convention center, or arts complex as the savior of downtown. What? How can that be? We have been conditioned since the early 1980’s to believe that a gargantuan project is the ONLY way we can save downtown!!
Which brings us to James Crupi. When I first read his original 1993 report, I was fascinated by it. Not because it was a local version of the Magna Carta, or some miraculous cure-all for everything ailing the city, but because it was saying much of the same things about change that we had been discussing on this blog, albeit from another perspective. And because Richmond was still struggling with the same problems Crupi outlined, it was striking to read how little had really changed in a decade’s time.
Through his interviews with key business leaders, Crupi’s work (past and present) provides some valuable insights into a subculture that, while seemingly hungry for change, is also deathly afraid to let new ideas (like transparency) take root. But the consultant’s solutions to the problem are only as good as his source material, and Crupi’s earlier study has a lot to answer for. For one, the expanded Convention Center, which has thus far been both a financial bust and a historic travesty (parts of the historic Jackson Ward area were razed to make way for it); it can be traced to his 1993 study.
Crupi’s new goals for active area leaders are little better. They include: Fixing-up the convention center so it is more appealing — talk about putting lipstick on a hog — and forming a Sports, Entertainment and Tourism Authority that would, presumably, lobby for public tax dollars. Given the city’s disasterous history with cooperative regional plans (we always pay, the counties don’t) and quasi-governmental bodies of connected business leaders (Richmond’s politicians write blank checks, ask no questions), these notions are pure sitcom. And, curiously, Mr. Crupi neglects to update us on the progress of our daily newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, or touch upon his earlier, pressing subject of Richmond’s alternative media. These are major omissions, and telling ones — showing that there are still some hard truths about segments of Richmond’s status quo that we are not allowed to scutinize.
Flaws and all, Crupi’s latest work is still a strong affirmation of what we already know. It joins a mountain of previous studies, seminars, conferences and workshops that have drawn the same conclusions over and over again, stating the cases in different ways and from different vantage points. So the problem isn’t that people haven’t been talking, or planning, or brainstorming, about what this city should and can be. And the problem isn’t that the business community hasn’t been inviting people, and ideas, to the table on selected issues — and when it suits them to do so (sometimes there is even potato chips). The problem is that the powers-that-be haven’t been listening, or acting, once they get up from that table.
We can continue to “talk” about these things until we’re blue in the face, but arguably the time for talk is long past. It’s time for action — to put up or shut up. When the next citizens committee is formed to tackle an important civic problem, who will sit at that table? When new ideas are needed, who will be invited to solicit thoughts and action plans? When a tight-knit coterie of businessmen hatch the next plan to raise our taxes to give us something they think we all need, will they call for public meetings before or after they strongarm local politicians? Will those in control continue to employ vast armies of out-of-town consultants to program and plan for us, or will we start to look within ourselves for our own answers? Those juries are still way, way, way out.
From the back breakroom of the Carytown Ukrop’s to a “Public Square” event in Hanover County — for some that might seem like progress. While I’m genuinely happy to hear that our Titans of Industry are eager to continue talking, what else is there to say that hasn’t been said? From the parents to the artists to the young people to the poorest of the poor to — now — the business community itself, Richmond has spoken loud, often and clearly.
It’s time for real change, not just lip service at town hall meetings. Whether our biggest wigs want to admit it or not, they’ve already heard us. They just don’t like what we’ve been saying.