May 22, 2026

Mayor's Newsletter to Council

Lots of Legislation – Importance of Implementation Planning 

I wanted to acknowledge that there are several pieces of important legislation making their way through our collective processes. I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you are engaging each item. As we continue to consider new initiatives and changing our code, I urge us to work together on the implementation planning with as much rigor as we discuss the merits of any given idea.

We want to lean into the need for implementation planning to be a standard part of how we bring new legislation to life.

The City Auditor's recent review of the former Affordable Housing Trust Fund legislation found that "key elements of the requirements were unclear or not adhered to, in part due to the absence of a documented implementation plan." To address that problem, the auditor recommended that the city establish formal processes for reviewing proposed ordinances and monitoring their implementation. We appreciate Councilmember Robertson observing that "in order to get our legislation implemented, we need a strategic implementation strategy that will define benchmarks, timelines, and exactly what we expect those outcomes to be."

Good policy ideas, and the legislation to operationalize it, deserves a real chance to work. That means thinking through — before a vote — what it will take to bring a law from the page into practice: which departments are responsible, what resources are required, and what success looks like. Without that work, even well-intentioned ordinances can erode public trust in city government and their elected officials.

To that end, we are proposing to agree on a Legislation Implementation Framework developed by the administration to guide efforts that would support moving policy ideas through implementation. We think there are several questions every piece of proposed legislation should be able to answer before final adoption:

1. What is the initiative trying to achieve, and is success measurable? 
2. What resources (staff, budget, tools) will implementation require? 
3. Does the responsible agency have the capacity to execute? 
4. How long will implementation realistically take, and does the ordinance account for that? 
5. What does early monitoring look like in the first one to three months? 
6. What does mid-term assessment look like, and are initial targets still appropriate? 
7. Given that we cannot do everything all at once, what is the urgency (low, medium, high)?  
8. And finally, once the policy has had time to work, did it actually achieve what it set out to do or should it be revisited?

We are asking Council to meet us halfway by building implementation planning into Council’s legislative process as well as reasonable implementation periods into proposed legislation. Council staff, Mayor’s Office, and Administration have a meeting on the books for Wednesday to get practical on what we need to improve in this area and we will report back!

Richmond deserves governance that follows through. We know we can get there, and we want to do it together.