City Council Updates
The Richmond City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to extend the city's Richmond Fund for Children and Youth for another ten years, directing an estimated $99 million toward youth services through 2038.
The vote came after one of the more crowded and emotional public meetings the city has seen in some time, with the main chambers at capacity and an overflow auditorium opened for the spillover group.
The fund was established in 2018, when Richmond voters approved the Kids' First Initiative by more than 76 percent. It directs three percent of unrestricted General Fund revenues each year to community organizations providing mental health services, educational support, violence prevention, arts programming, and basic needs for residents from birth through age 24. The extension keeps that structure in place for a new ten-year term beginning in fiscal year 2028-29.
The night belonged to the young people. They came organized and in numbers, the result of an effort by the RYSE Center. The turnout was built around Listening Campaign 2.0, a follow-up to RYSE's original 2013 Listening Campaign.
With 50 in-person speakers allotted just one minute each, they got up one after another and said roughly the same thing in different ways: adults are not listening, and the burden of proving it keeps falling on the kids. They talked about being surveyed and studied and then watching nothing change. They talked about finding their own ways through music, biking, and time outside. Representatives from youth organizations described their programs as places that held young people together. At one point, two performing arts instructors played music for the council mid-meeting.
Vice Mayor Doria Robinson moved to approve Option 1, reauthorizing the fund without amendment, early in the council's deliberation.
"There are always ways that you can make a program better, make it stronger," Robinson said. "I think we can do that while securing the program today." Robinson also cited the political risk of sending the measure to voters, saying she believed the fund "may fail, considering the environment that we're in and all the demands on people's money."
Patrick Seals, the city's Administrative Chief for Children and Youth, described the fund's structure as deliberately adaptive.
"The power of this measure is that it is iterative," he told the council, explaining that the fund's three-year grant cycles require a new community needs assessment each round.
"We will be able to uplift what the needs are to support residents based on your experience and based on residents' experience." Seals also addressed questions about oversight board meeting frequency, pushing back on the suggestion that the board had fallen short of its required six meetings per year.
"According to our records, we've met seven times on average every year since the board was established," Seals said.
Councilmember Sue Wilson said she would vote yes, but wanted two things on the record. First, that funded programs should be distributed across the city so that kids in every neighborhood have access close to home. Second, that organizations receiving city money should say so publicly.
"I would like to see some kind of requirement that organizations that take this money have to acknowledge that it's your taxpayer dollars at work," Wilson said. "I didn't know that the city helped pay for some of these great programs until I started sitting up here."
Councilmembers worked through eligibility questions and conflicting language across different versions of the charter document, with the city attorney at one point directing members to focus on the most recent version.
Mayor Eduardo Martinez, who had opened the session by calling on the audience to listen even to speakers they disagreed with, acknowledged that the back-and-forth between Councilmembers and Seals had demonstrated exactly why the fund's language needed attention. "I want to apologize if I seemed like I was attacking you," Martinez told Seals. "I was basically just trying to clarify."
When the vote came, it was unanimous, and the room was loud about it.
Seals, who noted that he was born in Richmond and had participated in city youth programs as a child, thanked the council after the vote. "We work really hard," he said, "and have formed, I think, very positive relationships. The work that we do, although it is impactful, we take it quite personally because of the impact that it has in our community, because we're from Richmond too."
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