Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Richmond City Council held an informal meeting on October 14, 2026, beginning at 17:00 UTC. The Mayor delivered the annual Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) impact report, followed by council questions and a docket review of upcoming agenda items. No formal votes were taken on substantive items; several matters were continued by consensus.
Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. The informal meeting of the Richmond City Council will now come to order. Madam Clerk, if you'll provide us with the chamber emergency evacuation announcement to start the roll call, and then our mayor will join us for a presentation. Upon activation of the emergency alarm signal, all persons should immediately exit the building. Please use the exits to the left or right front of the council chamber or the north or south stale well outside the rear doors of the chamber. Do not use elevators or escalators. After exiting the building, security would direct everyone down 9th Street to the fenced area located between Clay and Leaf Lee Streets. Abled persons should assist visually and hearing and paying visitors with exiting the building. And Madam President, for the record, all members are in attendance this evening, with the exception of counselors Bretton, Lynch, and Trammel. You do have a call more. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Mayor, I believe you are joining us for a presentation, OCWB annual impact report. Welcome. Thank you, President Newville, Vice President Jordan, members of council. This is our annual update. Every year, the mayor comes before you to speak about the city's comprehensive work in reducing poverty and building wealth. And so that is what I'm here to do today to give that update. And I will say in the past, this report has really focused on specifically the Office of Community Wealth Building and the programs that come out of OCWB. But as you all are well aware, the city's work to help our residents extends far beyond just what OCWB does, right? It is this very complex, comprehensive, integrated approach to supporting low-income residents. And so this year's report is going to reflect more of that coordinated view. And I'll start with just saying, you know, so much of that is embedded in the mayoral action plan. As you look across the seven pillars, as you look at the outcomes and the data that we're aligning and collecting around, the map really does show how each city team and department, how that work fits into a bigger picture and a bigger approach to support our residents. These were not goals that we set uh or even by the prior mayor, but they actually date back to 2012 and were set by a resident-led commission to address the poverty crisis. And so those three goals are here to reduce the number of people living in poverty by 40% by 2030, the number of children in poverty by 50% by 2030, and then to decrease the city's poverty rate uh to below 15%. And you'll see that these were incredibly ambitious, some might say almost impossible goals for our community. Uh but they are were also, yeah, they were they were very aspirational, and we have made good progress in these, and I'll I'll show you that in a second. Uh but I will also say the best part of these is that they are uh they are not ambiguous, right? They are clear. Uh, there was a line in the sand about what we were shooting for. They don't capture all of the nuances of the work and and the complexity of addressing poverty, uh, but they are a goal that we are shooting for and we are holding ourselves to. And here's where we've come during that time. Over the last 10 years, we have seen our uh this this is the 2015 data that shows the poverty rate at that time was 25.5%. You can see why this rose to a crisis when one out of every four residents in the city were living in poverty, and even more so, almost a 40% rate of child poverty. And so uh all the more reason that the city at the at the time and in 2012 needed to come together uh and declare this an emergency and get really focused on strategies to address it. Uh, what we have seen over the last 10 years are some pretty remarkable decreases. We've gone from in raw numbers from 51,000 people living in poverty down to below 40,000, 39.9, uh 22.9% decrease in the number of people uh living in poverty. Our second goal, children living in poverty, a 27.3% decrease. And so in each of these three goals, you've seen we've made uh really significant progress. Um, and and it's important to kind of think about both what's the context, like how do you actually interpret these numbers in the context of other cities, other localities, uh, other parts of the country, uh, but also to start to dig in and figure out okay, what what's driving these numbers? How is this working? Uh so you'll see here just at some high-level comparisons that we are definitely outpacing the country as a whole, the state as a whole, and our surrounding jurisdictions in terms of uh the percent reduction in poverty. Um and I think there are, you know, and even I, when I was initially looking at these numbers in past years, uh, there are people who fear that this decline in poverty is entirely due to displacement, right? It's entirely due to low-income folks who are moving uh from the city into surrounding areas. And I think that as we as we look at the data, it is not that uh it doesn't tell that story, right? There are actually some really significant gains uh in things like income and um and employment and education, uh, but we're also not seeing the poverty rate increase in the surrounding localities. And so it is a pretty complex calculus that has resulted in this.