Statement on the Proposed Coliseum Redevelopment Plan

Update: This statement was issued Dec 17th, 2018. On Feb 10th, 2020 we won our campaign against public subsidies for luxury developments built by the CEO of a regional fossil fuel monopoly and our state’s largest campaign contributor. We are so proud of the campaign we ran, and we have tremendous love for everyone who stood by us in this fight. When we fight, we win.

Since the integration of Richmond Public Schools a little over 60 years ago, each Mayor and City Council that has taken over the reins of our city has failed to properly fund our schools, perpetuating systemic racism that harms our students as they strive to build meaningful futures for themselves. With each decade that our schools have gone underfunded, the problem has compounded. Today, we find our public school system in dire straits. Our current Mayor and City Council failed to provide any increase to the operating budget of RPS this year, falling millions of dollars short of what the schools needed. They have also failed to provide the $30 million dollars desperately needed for even modest repairs. The one effort made to provide funding for new school construction falls far short of what we need, and despite promises, no additional ideas for where the rest of the money will come from have been offered.

This means educators teaching in such extreme temperatures that kids are wearing coats, gloves, and hats while trying to learn. It means teachers checking rat traps as part of their morning routines. It means a School Board that had to retract a promised pay raise for teachers that make 18% less than the national average. It means school staff working three jobs to make ends meet. It means brilliant children going without access to accelerated classes. It means black mold in our walls, lead in our water, and overcrowding in our classrooms. It means no nurse in the clinic for an emergency, no translator in the front office when you desperately need to communicate, and no counselor to help your child through a mental health crisis. Our district is buckling under the weight of this desperate need, and it often feels like nobody is listening.

The defunding of public services is also not limited to schools. RPS students who live in public housing face the same crumbling infrastructure at home. Children come to school hungry because their families cannot access SNAP benefits. City-wide displacement and school closures push children into buildings farther and farther from home. Bus lines disappear. Children navigate broken sidewalks and busy intersections with inadequate crosswalks on foot.

We are in crisis. Our spending reflects our values, and today Richmond’s spending priorities show unconscionable apathy to people most reliant on even basic services.

When our residents campaign for schools, for housing, and for transportation, we are told that public coffers are empty. When wealthy donors propose the redistribution of public funds for high-cost and low-return development however, suddenly funds are not only available, but abundant.

These misplaced priorities are not new for our city; they are bordering on tradition. In the midst of a crisis in education, transportation, housing, and food security, we continue to fund ‘economic development’ projects that funnel money to those who already have disproportionate wealth only to meet predictably dismal returns: the redevelopment of Centerstage, the financing of Stone Brewing, and the construction of a football training camp. Each of these ventures came at tremendous public cost. They promised high rates of return, but they failed to produce even a fraction of their promised benefits. These trends are predictable not only because the pattern is clear in our city, but because they are echoed nationally. Independent research bears out: public subsidies for private ventures empty public coffers, often forcing austerity measures that further hurt public services.

Like its predecessors, the coliseum development project makes promises it can’t keep, at high cost to all of us. This project promises affordable housing, but it fails to set meaningful standards for affordability, and its placement threatens existing public housing at a moment when our city leads the nation in eviction rates. This project promises high rates of revenue over time, but to meet those predictions would place a tremendous recreational spending burden on an already strained populous. This project promises jobs, but third party analysis estimates city job predictions have been inflated to over ten times their actual number.

Here is what we do know: This coliseum project diverts the tax revenue from some of our city’s highest value properties to private development, ensuring the short term defunding of public services and increasing the likelihood of further defunding over time. After the announcement of this plan was met with a clear public cry for ‘schools over coliseums’, an attempt was made to peddle this as a plan that would help schools. After so much experience, Richmond knows better. Why would we settle for uncertain money decades down the road when our schools are crumbling now?

This is not a plan for schools. It is not a plan for the citizens of Richmond.

We wholeheartedly reject this plan and we recognize that the prioritization of corporate interests—particularly those of Dominion Energy, its CEO Tom Farrell, and all his endeavors including this proposed redevelopment—over community interests negatively impacts many aspects of our lives. We stand in solidarity with the community of Union Hill as it resists the Atlantic Coast Pipeline’s proposed fracked-gas Compressor Station, with the struggle for environmental justice in greater Richmond, as well as across the state. We affirm the inherent right for every person to have clean air, clean water, clean energy, and a safe and healthy environment including where we live, work, and play.

We call upon City Council and Mayor Stoney to invest in real communities, not speculative ventures. We demand a city that prioritizes the needs of its residents over corporate interests. Let’s make Richmond a city that has the political courage to remove the barriers for residents to make it out of poverty rather than pushing them out of sight and out of the city altogether. Let’s have the courage to face the years of neglect that have preceded us, and let’s set a better path for our future.

Issued December 7th 2018, Signed: