This post is a short one about my local news in Richmond, Virginia.
This week, we got a few inches of snow in the Richmond area. Some places momentarily lost power, including the city’s water treatment plant. That brief outage cascaded, and the city’s water supply eventually failed. City officials assured us that water would be restored — likely the following afternoon. But the afternoon came and went, and there remained no water for the city due to a separate equipment failure.
At this point, city residents have been without water almost two days. The state general assembly has even been forced to effectively postpone its first day of session.
But in the surrounding counties, it’s been a separate story. Although they rely on the city’s water supply, their Departments of Public Utilities (DPUs) had set up redundancies that allowed them to maintain water for most of their residents.
I started to wonder why Richmond had no such measures in place, and why the city was instead dealing with multiple points of failure while trying to restore water to its residents. I looked around the DPU websites for the counties and city, and noticed something.
The major surrounding counties’ Department of Public Utilities Directors are all engineers in some capacity. In comparison, Richmond’s April Bingham was promoted after serving as Sr. Deputy Director of Customer Service for the Richmond DPU. She is not an engineer in any way — she has a Masters of Public Administration.
The following chart highlights this. It only shows major counties where I could find information about their DPU Director, but they represent 84% of the metro area’s population.
Listen, I don’t think DPU directors necessarily have to be engineers to be competent. As someone who works in a technical field, I can attest that technically minded people can be terrible managers.
But I do think this is symptomatic of a larger problem — the Richmond City government has run on nepotism and cronyism since time immemorial, and the people in charge of our public services are rarely properly qualified. And I think that this latest disaster, and Richmond’s response compared to that of its surrounding counties, is emblematic of the deeper issues facing the city.
Here’s hoping that our new mayor, Danny Avula, can right the ship. For now, I hope everyone is staying safe.