Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
The Government Operations (GovOps) Committee of the Richmond City Council met in the afternoon of October 28, 2026, at 2:15 p.m. Eastern. All committee members were present — Chair Jordan, Vice Chair Abbacher, and Ms. Gibson — constituting a quorum. The meeting opened with standard emergency procedures and public comment rules. The committee heard a presentation on the city's HR performance management redesign, considered ordinance 2026-281 (DPU industrial discharge permits), discussed resolution 2026-R043 on the Dominion Energy/NextEra merger, acted on multiple board vacancies, and set upcoming meeting dates.
Ek, Hi, everyone. We'll begin shortly. Are folks here, I believe. Um clerk, is there anyone else for waiting on okay? Let's get started. Thanks. Upon activation of the emergency alarm signal, our 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 areas 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 fence area located between Clay and Lee Streets. Able persons should assist visually in hearing if they're visitors with exiting the building. Individuals wishing to speak during public hearings in the public comment period are generally allowed three minutes to speak. Persons appearing before the committee are not allowed to campaign for public office, promote private business ventures, use the language of a personal nature, which insults the demeans any person, including comments directed at public officials or staff members that are not related to their official duties or address the question staff members directly. All questions are to be directed to the committee chair. Failure to adhere to the guidelines may result in speakers forfeiting any remaining time and further disciplinary action is necessary, which could include barn from attendance at future meetings of the committee for a period of six months. And Madam Chair, all members of the committee are in attendance today, and you do have a quorum. Thank you so much, Madam Clerk. Let's move to public comment. Public comment is now open. The public comment period is now closed and back to the committee. All right, thank you. I believe we have a presentation from our director of human resources. The number of journal entries into the program was was so minuscule that it almost didn't register a percentage or a number, which just tells us that the number of folks that actually entered journal entries were so small that it was insignificant to really try to report out on that. There were 23% of those pilot participants actually had an opportunity to complete the ratings. Upon evaluation of that pilot program and the tools that we were currently using, I we were able to identify there were some structural gaps in that particular pilot program. One no formal job description. So the city today operates off of job classes, which is all this that's a starting point of a compensation job class and position structure, but not the entire full structure that you would want to have in place. So that pilot was designed to feed off of those specs, which are too general that doesn't apply specifically to certain jobs, like a management analyst that may be different in each department. So that was an identifiable gap, which will be closed. That gap should get closed with the class and comp study, which will help us build out formalized job descriptions for the city, which is needed. There's also reporting structure gaps in the original pilot program. So we didn't have a lot of clean, consistent reporting hierarchical data that was reliable, so things were not gonna weren't being routed properly. So these are some things that were identified. And they weren't really built around true identifiable goals. So we applied a more of a strategic approach to a redesign, being limited by existing systems that we have in place today. So we maximize the system that we have, recognizing that the systems that we have are not what I would consider a true performance management tool, but it does have a component that's built as a performance management tool within NeoGov, but not as robust as maybe perhaps we would like for that to be. Some of the goals around the strategic redesign was wanted something that could be built around formalized goals to help shift the narrative from these singular periodic ratings to something that is more aligned with what candidates and employees oftentimes look for, which is more of a continuous feedback. A lot of that design work was rooted and grounded in research. We also implemented an org chart workflow tool, so now we do have proper reporting structures in place. Those things also will be continuously evaluated as you know, people promote up in and out and around an organization. So there will also have to be some continuous tweaks to that piece as well. More frequent check-ins, the structure is designed to uh incorporate that. We did a lot of data structure cleanup of the data, which was a lot of cleanup efforts that we had to do. And of course, the class income study should be underway as soon as we get the RFP out the door. That will help us fully define a better, stronger structure for the city in terms of class comm grade job descriptions. Umplementation timelines. We did some live demos here. Um we launched some many pilots conducted and it's still conducting some citywide trainings, and even in some of those areas we've identified that there are still some areas that we may need to pause and improve upon as well. Um we do we have launched the performance cycles kind of citywide, um, rethinking a little bit on whether or not that needs to be the first this first year to establish baseline that really needs to be more of an entire pilot year, so that we can continue to identify some other areas where there are some concerns that we need to share up some gaps and make sure we have actually the right technologies and some processes in place that we are realizing even now that we still probably need to share up some things.