Keeping Watch

City, county and community meetings are a serious sport for this band of die-hard watchdogs, advocates and volunteers-turned-elected officials

by ,

The Vocal

Raising questions is a calling for these watchdogs

While they don’t often pass out medals for civic activism, badges are another thing.

Chesterfield County resident Bob Olsen started his watchdog career when counseling Boy Scouts on earning citizenship merit badges. “I was teaching a class and telling boys you need to get involved and need to make a difference. And then I looked in the mirror and said: ‘Know what? You need to practice this yourself.’ ”

The suburban Chicago native finished his tour in the Army in 1973 and settled with his wife in Chesterfield. The now-retired heavy-equipment operator assisted with building many of the region’s highways, including the Downtown Expressway and the downtown Flood Wall. He then became involved with designing machines to clean up oil spills, an occupation that sent him around the world. But Olsen’s sense of civic duty propelled him to investigate the causes of shrink swell soil and to campaign for elected school boards — “to get the politics out of it. Instead, it got worse,” he says. And lately, he’s been examining the effect of stored fly ash (a byproduct of coal-fired power plants) on the region’s water system. “I read the minutiae,” he says with pride.

This is how, in 1991, he found himself crawling under houses affected by shrink swell soil in Brandermill and nearby subdivisions with Board of Supervisors candidates Art Warren, Jack McHale and Ed Barber, to examine the impact of shrink swell soil, which significantly expands and contracts. “They got elected,” Olsen recalls. “And we formed a citizens committee to figure out what the problem was in Chesterfield County. And we found that the problem was Chesterfield County. They weren’t conducting inspections properly.”

In 2013, Olsen lent his expertise to discussions in Skinquarter about a rezoning amendment that would have permitted fly ash and automobile shredder residue into a proposed landfill. After a capacity public meeting about the amendment at Cosby High School, supporters of the zoning change met with opponent Olsen. “They asked me, ‘What can we do to get you on our side?’ And I laughed. ‘It ain’t happening.’ And I turned around and walked out.” The zoning amendment application was withdrawn.

Changing State Law 

Mark Hile became politically engaged at a Tea Party rally in Kanawha Plaza on April 14, 2009. Ever since, he and his wife, Anita, have volunteered in campaigns, and he regularly attends the Henrico County Board of Supervisors meetings.

In 2015, Hile also got a bill passed by the General Assembly that requires school boards to present their budgets in line-item form on their websites. Virginia legislators were surprised, Hile says, that such a regulation didn’t exist. “The intent was to have more transparency on what school boards were spending their money on when they submitted to their county commissions or boards.”  He’s heard that “school boards were screaming mad” because by complying with this law, things were exposed that they didn’t want seen.

Hile, a radiation oncology technician, sees his role as holding  elected officials accountable to the greater good. “Sometimes that means raising difficult questions, or sometimes seeing a matter not this way, but that way, “ he says. “It’s about establishing a professional relationship with elected officials so they come to know and trust you. We’re not out to get them but engage in conversation.”

P.S. Hile has no interest in running for office.

Meetings as Cinema

For Richmonder Melissa Vaughn, Richmond City Council is a long-running evening melodrama. And Vaughn and her colleagues at the RVA Dirt website provide commentary in the same spirit as the wisecracking riff artists of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” who watch bad movies and comment on the action, or lack thereof. There is, however, a method to RVA Dirt’s mania. They want more people to follow local government meetings, and they want to act as a clearinghouse for community meetings and events.

A Manchester High and Longwood University graduate, Vaughn first got hooked circa 1990 at around age 11 while flipping channels and finding the public access broadcasts of council meetings when Walter Kinney was mayor. “I watched this stuff and talked about it to my friends who thought I was a nutter. I followed it for years and years  — and then Twitter happened.” And Facebook and Nextdoor.

Vaughn discovered that she wasn’t the only one who followed the broadcast. She partnered with fellow politics nerds Jessee Perry and Francesca Leigh Davis to form RVA Dirt. “We didn’t know it would become popular,” Vaughn says. “We’re just a bunch of dorks.”

Crossing Over

For these elected officials, their journey began with an issue

For Nicole Anderson Ellis, it was the blue sign in a Varina cornfield that said, “Re-Zoning Pending.”

A spaghetti dinner at which School Board opponents of the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts circulated materials denying the viability of the charter school was Kristen Larson’s tipping point.

For Amanda Chase, it was a proposed road expansion near her community pool in Chesterfield County that made her decide to get her feet wet.

While these three women may not come from the same place politically, they are all wives and mothers who at one point looked around and said: Nobody else is going to do this but me. And now they are all new-school elected officials in a region that often prefers old-school approaches.

Pushing Back

“One of the challenges of my adult life is recognizing that my elected — quote unquote — leaders don’t always want me to be involved,” says Ellis, who went from being a planning advocate to an elected member of the Henricopolis Soil and Water Conservation District. “So one thing we have to overcome as active members of our democracy is the pushback from City Hall or county government; the idea that it’s inconvenient to have people’s opinions on the table. Leaving resident input to the end of a process, too, puts both officials and the public at loggerheads. “They say we’re bringing out the pitchforks,” Ellis says. “If we’d been in at the start, we all wouldn’t be in this counterproductive offensive-defensive position.”

With a slight laugh, Larson, who won a seat on the Richmond School Board in 2012 and moved on to City Council after November’s election, says that she doesn’t measure herself against traditional political expectations. In her successful runs, she says, “There are people who want to be the rainmakers. They will tell you, ‘You can’t run for this position, it’s not your turn.’ ” The mother of two also was advised to cast herself as “the soccer mom.”

“And I just felt like, I just need to be me,” Larson says of her first race. “If people don’t like that, then they have four other candidates to choose from.”

State Sen. Amanda Chase wanted to be the least annoying candidate in a three-way race in 2015. She practiced retail politics. “I didn’t do robo calls. I went door-to-door myself. I tried to have the personal touch.” The graduate of Monacan High School possessed the advantage that in many cases people knew her, or they had mutual connections of friends and family. When Chase advised Republican candidates before running for office herself, she told them to just be themselves. “And if that resonates with your constituents, great; if not, it wasn’t meant to be.”

Larson sees two kinds of people who seek a position in public service. The one group is hardwired from the get-go. “From kindergarten, they know they want to run for office. They go through law school, work under other politicians, all because they want to be public servants. That was not me. I had no experience.”

Ellis says that political involvement requires you to talk and sell yourself. “Cool people don’t want to prattle on about how great they are. And so you can end up with people in office who are less concerned about the issues and the concerns of people and more about their own personal advancement.”

Doing the Work

Ellis came to advocacy through family. Her mother, Eugenia Anderson-Ellis, was active in the Church Hill Neighborhood Association and Scenic Virginia. Ellis’ work in Varina evolved into the Route 5 Corridor Coalition, which halted plans to transform that scenic and historic road into a four-lane highway, worked on applying more sensible standards to subdivision construction and campaigned for the completion of the Virginia Capital Trail.

Larson didn’t know how controversial Patrick Henry charter school would be. Then, once she started, there wasn’t any going back, and she found her public relations experience and communications skills useful. One of her goals is accountability. “Transparency is a word that gets thrown around these days,” she says, but, for good reason. When she joined the School Board, the members received three hulking budget binders, each a foot and a half thick. “If I’m overwhelmed by the amount of paper I get, what about my constituents?” During her term, the board began using shareable and searchable software.

During Chase’s second week in the state Senate, she established a Transparency Caucus with Del. Mark H. Levine, D-Alexandria. This meant video recording of proceedings involving bills they sponsored.  She co-patroned a bill by state Sen. Scott A. Surovell, D-Fairfax, that sought to require the closure of coal-ash ponds by July 1, 2020. Her support put her on the other side of the aisle from Dominion Virginia Power, which had supported her campaign. The issue was important to her constituents, though, and an assessment of contradictory water-quality studies gave her enough reasons to support the bill. “I’m here to represent the people who voted and put me here.”

Neither Larson nor Chase know how far they’ll pursue their political lives. Chase, for example, supports term limits. She’s got her own radio show, “Cut to the Chase With Sen. Chase,” on AM 820. Ellis doesn’t think she’s designed for further political life. “I like to curse. I forget people’s names. And I’m very sensitive and my feelings get hurt. I like being an organizer, I like being a watchdog, but I’m not trying to climb up anywhere.”

Change Agents

These advocates began with their passion

Grassroots Literacy: Hassan Fountain

A couple of years ago, Hassan Fountain was clearing out the closet of his son, a recent high school graduate, when he came across a few dozen books and set them aside. As the son of a teacher and librarian, Fountain says, “I don’t like to throw away books.”

Last summer, the 40-year-old Fountain decided what to do with those books and the 8,000 others he’d collect or buy in less than a year: create small lending libraries for children living in Richmond’s public-housing neighborhoods. While running for City Council’s 3rd District seat and knocking on doors, Fountain heard a lot of concerns about schools and reading, and that’s how the Fountain for Youth Foundation started.

Since January, Fountain has launched libraries at Gilpin Court and Fairfield Court in Richmond, and he planned to open another in May at the Blackwell Community Center, near where he lived as a child. Fountain has plans for others in Creighton Court and east of Richmond in Newport News and Halifax County.

While Fountain placed last in his City Council race, he found a calling — creating a reading culture in some of Richmond’s most underprivileged neighborhoods. “This is my passion,” he says. “The books are gold.”

Hassan Fountain asks anyone interested in donating books or supporting Fountain for Youth to contact him at 804-687-6802.

Families of Children with Disabilities: Dana Yarbrough

As new parents in 1994, Dana Yarbrough and her husband felt overwhelmed. Their daughter, Brooke, was born 13 weeks early and weighed only 2 pounds. She would spend her first year in a hospital and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, poor vision and intellectual disabilities.

Some days, when dealing with work, doctors’ appointments and other challenges, Yarbrough was lucky to have time for a hot shower.

With more than 100,000 Virginians living with disabilities, many families have found themselves in a similar boat. That’s what has propelled Parent to Parent of Virginia, a Richmond-based organization that connects these families for one-on-one support.

“Our job is to hold the hand on the roller coaster,” says Yarbrough, the organization’s executive director since 1996.

Parent to Parent USA started in the 1960s, and Virginia’s chapter began in the 1980s. Although access to basic services has improved since then, families still face challenges in navigating education, health care and social services.

Brooke, who turns 23 soon, is now a Varina High School graduate and has a dog-boarding business. She lives independently and also speaks to groups about owning a business.

“Other parents opened my eyes to dreams,” Yarbrough says. “Kids will rise to expectations.”

Learn more about Parent to Parent of Virginia at ptpofva.wordpress.com.

Transit: Ross Catrow

As the founder of RVANews, Ross Catrow often wrote about transportation, but he couldn’t really get into the weeds as much as he wanted because his site needed to cover other news.

However, with RVANews’ shutdown last year as an active website, Catrow has now taken on two different roles: as an employee of advocacy group RVA Rapid Transit and writer of the Good Morning, RVA daily e-newsletter.

“Our goal is regional transportation,” says Catrow, who travels by bus and by bike from his North Side home. The Pulse bus rapid transit line on Broad Street, which is scheduled for completion in October, is an exciting addition to the GRTC system, but what Catrow’s organization would like to see is transit from Rocketts Landing to Short Pump and Ashland to Petersburg.

Richmond’s public transportation has multiple shortcomings, he says. Many transportation access issues date back to the era of desegregation, Catrow says, because wealthier Richmonders wanted to keep the poor (mainly African-Americans) away from their neighborhoods. Also, none of the region’s community colleges is accessible by bus. Catrow says that communication has improved today, particularly between the city’s new administration, GRTC and community organizations — and even Henrico County. “Public outreach is something Richmond is traditionally bad at,” he says, but there’s room for hope.

Learn about RVA Rapid Transit at rvarapidtransit.org, and sign up for Good Morning, RVA at gmrva.com.

LGBTQ+ Rights: Sarah Law

A senior at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, Sarah Law — nicknamed “Slaw” — experienced some bullying from other students in middle school, but things have improved in high school. As co-president of Maggie Walker’s Gender Sexuality Alliance, Slaw also is making things better for students who will follow.

The 17-year-old builds awareness and support for students who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and non-binary (people who identify as neither masculine nor feminine and use “they,” “them” and “their” as pronouns.) Slaw also started the Governor’s School GSA Conference for students in Central Virginia in 2015 and organized a second conference in 2016.

The city is pretty tolerant, Slaw notes, but conditions differ elsewhere. Students from Louisa and Goochland counties who attended last fall’s conference said they faced bullying from other students, although teachers were understanding for the most part. Some school systems don’t allow students to start similar alliances.

Since eighth grade, Slaw has taken part in youth groups at Side by Side (formerly ROSMY), a Richmond nonprofit organization that supports LGBTQ+ youth.

Feeling a sense of belonging and community is key, says Slaw.

To find out more about Side by Side, visit sidebyside.org. For information about the Governor’s School GSA Convention, go to gsgsac.weebly.com.