Is Danny Avula The Right Mayor For Richmond? Part III - Is Richmond Getting A Full-Time Mayor?

 

Richmond has full-time problems. The question is whether it has a mayor giving them full-time attention.

Forget the speeches.

Forget the plans.

Forget the press conferences announcing the next initiative.

Richmond has problems that need to be solved.

Utility customers have spent months dealing with problems following the rollout of the City's new billing system. The City acknowledges continuing customer-service, billing and payment issues and says it has added staff and implemented fixes.

The Diamond District remains a work in progress.

The Richmond Coliseum has been closed since 2019.

City Hall is still trying to improve basic government operations.

Code Refresh is consuming enormous political and administrative attention.

And Richmond continues confronting the everyday issues residents actually experience: taxes, schools, infrastructure, economic development and whether City Hall can reliably deliver basic services.

Which brings us to a question that deserves an answer:

Is Danny Avula focused enough on solving Richmond's problems?

And underneath that question is another:

Does Richmond effectively have a part-time mayor?

Avula Still Works at Chippenham Hospital

This isn't speculation.

The City of Richmond's own biography currently says:

“Danny is a pediatrician and works as a hospitalist at Chippenham Hospital.”

That sentence deserves more attention than it has received.

Before taking office, Avula told Richmond Magazine that he was generally working as a hospitalist about once a month and expected he would have to reevaluate that arrangement once he became mayor.

So what happened?

Does Avula still work once a month?

More?

Less?

Does he work three days per week, as has sometimes been suggested?

I have found no reliable current documentation establishing that three-day figure, so it should not be repeated as fact.

But that makes the solution remarkably simple:

Tell us.

How many hospital shifts does Richmond's mayor currently work?

How many hours?

How many days each month?

And has that schedule increased or decreased since he took office?

This isn't an accusation.

It's a basic transparency question about the person Richmond elected to run its government.

Because This Is Not a Ceremonial Job

Richmond's mayor isn't cutting ribbons and shaking hands for a living.

Richmond operates under a strong-mayor system.

The mayor is the city's elected chief executive.

That means the mayor establishes priorities, appoints the Chief Administrative Officer, proposes budgets and ultimately bears political responsibility for the performance of the executive branch.

And this particular executive branch has plenty on its plate.

The question isn't whether Avula can technically hold another job.

The question is:

Should running Richmond leave enough professional bandwidth for another significant job?

Look at What's Happening

The utility billing rollout alone should command enormous attention.

The City acknowledges that problems followed the May 26 launch of its new customer-service systems, including billing and payment-processing issues. Months later, DPU's own account-update page continues tracking billing, payment and customer-service problems.

That's not abstract policy.

That's government failing at one of its most basic jobs:

sending people an accurate bill and properly crediting their payment.

And it comes after Richmond's January 2025 water crisis placed the reliability of basic city services squarely in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Avula is pushing major initiatives such as Code Refresh, which his administration describes as a transformation of Richmond's decades-old zoning code.

Code Refresh may be good policy, bad policy or something in between.

That's not the point here.

The question is one of focus.

Why does City Hall sometimes appear more capable of developing ambitious new policies than reliably executing the basic functions it already has?

Fix Richmond Before Trying to Reinvent Richmond

That may be the defining question of the Avula administration.

Richmond doesn't lack vision documents.

It doesn't lack studies.

It doesn't lack consultants.

It doesn't lack plans.

It doesn't lack announcements.

It lacks confidence that City Hall can consistently execute.

Even Avula has acknowledged the importance of getting the basics right. When Richmond successfully issued its real-estate tax bills in December 2025, he said that basic functions are central to public trust and that his job is to identify what isn't working and fix it.

Exactly.

So apply that standard everywhere.

Fix utility billing.

Get the Diamond District moving.

Develop a coherent downtown strategy.

Resolve the Coliseum question through serious economic analysis and competition.

Improve the delivery of basic city services.

Demand accountability from department heads.

Strengthen economic development.

And demonstrate that Richmond City Hall can execute before piling another transformative initiative onto its desk.

A Mayor Cannot Personally Fix Everything

To be fair, Avula cannot personally repair every broken city system.

Nor should he.

Richmond has a Chief Administrative Officer, department directors and thousands of employees.

Delegation is part of executive leadership.

But delegation is not the same thing as detachment.

When problems persist, the mayor should be asking:

Why isn't this fixed?

Who is responsible?

What's the deadline?

What went wrong?

And what are we changing so it doesn't happen again?

That is executive leadership.

The mayor doesn't have to turn every wrench.

But he should know why the machine keeps breaking.

So Is Avula a Part-Time Mayor?

We don't yet have enough publicly documented information to answer that fairly.

And that's precisely why City Hall should provide the information.

Avula's official biography says he still works at Chippenham.

Fine.

How much?

If it's one hospital shift every month or two, say so.

If it's several days a week, say that.

If he has largely stopped practicing medicine since becoming mayor, update the biography and settle the question.

Transparency would turn speculation into fact.

And Richmonders deserve facts.

Because the mayor's outside employment becomes more relevant when residents are simultaneously being asked for patience while City Hall works through major operational problems.

The Richmond Chronicle Bottom Line

This isn't about Danny Avula being a doctor.

It's about Danny Avula being mayor.

Richmond elected him to lead a city with enormous challenges and enormous potential.

The job comes with a budget measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, major infrastructure responsibilities, economic-development decisions, public-safety obligations and a bureaucracy whose failures can directly affect people's homes and bank accounts.

That is a full-time responsibility.

So City Hall should answer two simple questions:

How much time does Danny Avula currently spend working outside his mayoral duties?

And then Richmonders can decide the larger question for themselves:

Is their mayor sufficiently focused on solving Richmond's problems?

Because Richmond doesn't need another plan explaining what City Hall hopes to become.

It needs City Hall to work.

It doesn't need every problem studied indefinitely.

It needs problems solved.

And it doesn't need leadership whose attention is spread too thin.

Richmond's problems are full time.

The mayor's attention should match the size of the job.

Brian K. Telfair
Publisher & Editor | The Richmond Chronicle

Independent commentary and investigative analysis on Richmond government, public spending, economic development, and the decisions shaping the city’s future.

The Richmond Chronicle
Asking the questions City Hall would rather not answer.