In a recent interview, Cityfi Partner Story Bellows had the privilege of speaking with Andreas Addison, whose journey from a civic innovator inside the government to a current two-term member of the Richmond City Council who is now a mayoral candidate for the city, offers a unique perspective on making government work for its citizens. In this candid conversation, Andreas shares insights on his transition from a city employee to an elected official, his views on the evolution of civic innovation, and his priorities for Richmond’s future. Join us as we explore Andreas Addison’s journey, his thoughts on effective governance, and his aspirations for Richmond’s future in this engaging and informative interview.
Story Bellows: First off, thank you for taking the time to do this. We are excited to chat with you and share some of your story, ideas, hopes, and dreams with the followers of Cityfi. I would love to start with a little bit of your history, and then talk broadly about some of the ideas that you are thinking about. Then, specifically, get into a little bit around transit and other areas in the Cityfi wheelhouse. I’m most excited about my last question for you, though. But let’s start with: how did you get your first gig in City Hall? What drew you to this space to begin with?
Andreas Addision: I moved to Richmond in 2004 after I graduated from Virginia Tech with a BA in Political Science. I was hopeful to become a public servant in some capacity. Richmond had just changed the form of government from a council-manager form to a strong mayor and council when I moved here. That was a really big change. In 2007, the City started the process of drafting a downtown master plan, and as the planning nerd that I am, I went to the meetings and thought, “This is awesome.” We’re talking about parks, transit, access to the James River greenfront — all this great stuff. At the last meeting, Mayor Doug Wilder, former governor of Virginia and the first Black governor in the United States, came in and said, “If you liked this process, I am hiring in my administration for people who want to have a vision for a stronger city.” I thought, “Done.” So, I applied. Six or seven months later, I got a phone call while I was working somewhere else asking for an interview. I had actually forgotten about the details of the job I had applied for, so I logged back into the application system, found the job, and thought, “this would be a fun job.” I interviewed and, fortunately, got the job.
The next eight years were spent trying to figure out government — not just in theory, but in actual practice and operation. I was fortunate enough to be in the budget office and strategic planning, so I got to see the nuts and bolts of how the money was moved around and spent. I worked with Procurement, the Department of Finance, Accounts Receivable, and Accounts Payable. I was really thrust into the operations. My first big project was creating a 311 call center because back in 2008–2009, that was the big thing. I saw firsthand how adverse government was to change and how siloed operations were. So, I went to work on trying to really change those silos. That’s how I got thrust into this innovation of government world.
I started reading articles and magazines with some new ideas. Additionally, Twitter was just taking off at this time, and I started meeting people around the country, went to some conferences in DC, and started following this incredible sphere of change innovators in government (you included!). It came to be that I realized the work they were talking about, the things they were doing, and the systemic change in their city, was incredibly inspiring. I went to a bunch of conferences — without a conference budget — by either taking vacation, getting the cheapest ticket I could find, staying on a friend’s couch, or seeing if I could share a hotel room. I just started getting involved.
I applied for the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge in 2011, 2012, and 2013, and got it on my third try. Richmond became one of the 100 cities in the world to work with those consultants. That thrust my career into legitimacy. I was now not just a dreamer; I had snagged an opportunity to apply myself. I realized there were a lot of levers and buttons you could push. I pursued working with a Fuse Corps Fellow on social services and applied for a Code for America partnership — becoming a partner city in 2015. That same year, we launched Virginia’s first open data portal. I checked many of the boxes of things you do to innovate government: 311 call center, open data portal, key partnerships across the country, and bringing resources into your city to help change and look at things differently. That’s where my career in innovation started.
At this time, I was also getting frustrated because my leadership didn’t want to change. It seemed like work. They didn’t want to change how departments were organized or how they communicated. They were apprehensive about using technology to do things they weren’t sure they wanted to do or what the outcome could be. In 2015, I had a decision: do I leave for a place that would want to do the work I wanted to do or do I run for office and try to change it from the other side, where I could make the changes from a budget, policy, and leadership perspective as a call to action? I decided to quit this dream job that I’d created, ran for city council, and won by literally 213 votes — which out of 15,000 is a really narrow margin. I learned a really important lesson my first two years on council: there was no me on the other side. There was no innovation leader because I left that role. There was no one doing that work now on the other side. I then had to work across Council, nine districts, and the mayor’s administration — which was harder. I still made a lot of progress, and that’s where I saw the need to build on the work I did as an employee for eight years. My last eight years on council made a lot of good investments, and I want to finish the work I started. The way to do that is to run for mayor. And that’s where I’m at today, as a candidate for mayor on this Fall’s ballot.
SB: Awesome! As you know, you and I were involved in the civic innovation space nationally when it was pretty nascent. I’m wondering, staffing aside, how you see the civic innovation mandate, both in Richmond and nationally. How has it evolved since the good old early days when we were just little pups in this space?
AA: I think civic innovation, just as a title by itself, is really intentionally nebulous and vague, but also, I think it can get misconstrued as to what it is. Right now we’re rolling out a participatory budgeting initiative. Even if it’s only a couple million dollars for the city to start with, I think this is one of the good ways to engage communities. We’re getting into challenges that deal with flooding, water safety, or unsafe circumstances that people otherwise wouldn’t address because they don’t realize we’re the place to solve that problem. They just accept it as it’s always been that way. I think we’re starting to see now that we can engage at multiple levels.
Civic innovation is really coming to a place of equity. I think about my conversations with Mitchell Silver, when he was parks director in New York City. He would say everyone wanted access to parks until they realized that when everyone had access to parks, they were very different parks. You can’t call a park the same when it’s my little pocket park versus Central Park. You have to think about what a park means, what it looks like, and what it feels like. Civic innovation is now creating equity. To me, that’s where I see the conversation evolving. It’s not just about what you have or don’t have, or what you need. It’s now about people wanting to see action and own the outcome. They want to see that they helped make this better.
Civic innovation in government is now making government work in reverse. The people are making the requests and demands, and we’re making sure government can follow through and deliver. That’s where I’m starting to see big improvements. The most recent one I’m passionate about is the universal basic income conversations across the country. We did a pilot here in Richmond. My students at UVA, where I teach social entrepreneurship, marvel at the big cliffs of benefits eligibility across the spectrum. When you think about economic decisions for a family, it almost makes more sense to turn down a job or not work because you give up so much in healthcare benefits, food benefits, or housing benefits. If you make that cliff harder, it’s easier to back off. I believe universal basic income should be the enabling tool to empower that family to keep going, bridge the gap, and support the continuation of those benefits even when the federal or state government cuts them off. A city can say, “Here’s $500 a month because I know you just lost those benefits, but I want you to keep your job, build on that wealth, and continue to believe in yourself and support your family.” I want to support that upward mobility. Civic innovation can now look towards breaking barriers to success and growth potential. I’m really interested to see how we can look at cool tools that are not complicated or expensive but are completely transformative. That’s where I think we’re going.
SB: As a mayoral candidate, you have to care about everything, but pulling from your early budgeting nerdy innovation days, what is an issue that has stayed really close to your heart and your priorities?
AA: One of my early projects was around trying to break generational poverty cycles. I remember sitting in a room surrounded by city leadership, talking about poverty and its characteristics for many families, such as: WIC, TANF, SNAP, food stamps, kids on free or reduced lunch, dependent on maybe a Social Security check or some other income subsidy. I remember thinking, “I grew up with that.” I grew up on free lunch, getting SNAP benefits or food stamps as a kid. I didn’t realize my family was poor or lower income. I was glad we had that, especially when my little brother was born; it helped us make things work. But then I realized my experience was completely different from what we’re dealing with in concentrated poverty neighborhoods like public housing. When I looked back at my high school, maybe 10–15% of us were in that free lunch space. In some schools in Richmond, it’s 98% free lunch. That’s a completely different situation, and that’s persisted ever since I learned about it. It’s not a policy thing I can change with a budget perspective as council. But we need to find ways to change that gap.
Raj Chetty’s work on opportunity insights shows where the changes for opportunity are. We need to focus on elevating the children. That’s where I broke my cycle. I was encouraged and supported by people not in an income-dependent situation, who said, “Hey, my dad’s a doctor, lawyer, chiropractor, VP at a bank.” I never knew what that looked like. My stepdad worked maintenance at a building an hour away in Winchester, Virginia. I didn’t know what that looked like. That connection and experience have persisted for the last 16 years. That’s where I want to drive my passion and experience from a mayoral position.
SB: One of the things you’ve done as a city councilman is serve on the Board of GRTC. Can you talk about your priorities in that leadership role over the last few years and some of the biggest successes you’ve seen in the transit space?
AA: In 2017, the governor of Virginia approved funding for our bus rapid transit (BRT) line, which transformed the transit frequency problems we were dealing with and created a backbone to build our network around. It changed a lot of the infrastructure for public transit. I remember riding the first Pulse trip (GRTC’s BRT). I met with the mayor, and we rode it a couple of stops, visited a couple of restaurants, went all the way to the end, got off, looked at the sunset, had a few drinks, saw some friends, and came back. I thought, “This is great. I can walk to this bus stop and get to City Hall.”
We recently changed our board membership from being comprised of only residents and concerned citizens from the public to elected officials, mostly because of a project I spearheaded in the region. Previously, we didn’t have centralized transportation funding, only locality funding, which caused limitations for the city to keep up with the needed funding. I lobbied across the region and built what is now the Central Virginia Transportation Authority. This allowed for direct investment by localities in infrastructure, increased our funding for transit by 50%, and supported the increases we want to see moving forward. This is why we have fare-free access to our buses citywide and are seeing an expansion of our bus routes into the counties. They’re seeing the benefits of investing in transit. I’m most proud that we have one of the most successful bus rapid transit routes in the country. We’re at pre-pandemic and even pre-ridesharing levels of ridership, which is incredible considering those are still in effect today. We still have fare-free for the next two years at least, looking to extend it beyond 2030. We’re providing these opportunities for every family across our city, and I’m proud of that growth and maturation. Most importantly, seeing regional leadership and county leadership prioritize transit shows we’re growing and maturing around transit.
SB: Since we are talking about fare-free transit, I was on the Kansas City streetcar a few times a little while ago, and adore that piece of free infrastructure from the rider perspective. Please share the trade-offs needed to support fare-free transit. What’s in that equation for you? What are some of the impacts and outcomes you hope to see from a fare-free system?
AA: My biggest priority is seeing more choice riders — people who might not have ridden the bus before because they didn’t know how to figure out the fare, get the ticket, or understand the route. We now have the transit app, making it incredibly easy to find how to get where you want to go. It’s really accessible. You can just get on the bus, and it is fare-free. There’s no fare box, so there’s no potentially confusing interaction when you get on the bus. It’s simplified and streamlined. I’m happy to see our ridership growing for all routes. We’re putting in new routes, and the one that goes to the county south of us has been the most surprising for regional leadership. They didn’t think they had riders who wanted it, but it’s seen double-digit increases in ridership every month since it started. People want to get into the city who would otherwise be driving. The future of transit will focus more on transit-oriented development, specifically on key corridors. As a region, we need to decide where those corridors and routes are because a bus shouldn’t know where the county-city line is. There should be no separation of routes. It should be, “I’m going from point A to point B. If I want to go to work here or shop there, the bus gets me where I need to go.” That’s what I’m excited to see happen as our transit system matures.
SB: Unusual partnerships are really important in the innovation space. One thing I see in individuals with a background in innovation is that they see potential partnerships where others might not. Do you have any good examples of a creative partnership you’ve made or would like to highlight, either as a council member or in finding support for your mayoral campaign?
AA: There are a couple of good examples, but I’ll pick a specific one related to transit. A lot of middle schools don’t have the same after-school programs. There’s a group called NextUp, a nonprofit funded by businesses and other organizations, providing incredible after-school programs. I adamantly funded and requested the implementation of NextUp programs in every middle school. They did, but then came the surprise: “If you keep these kids after school, how are they going to get home?” I thought, “That’s not a problem; that’s an opportunity.” At the time, things fell apart for a second, but I wanted to focus on changing our city. We realized different neighborhoods have different needs, and the jurisdictions for each school dictated what was possible for transportation. The barrier to the program’s success was getting the kids home safely, costing $100,000 in overtime. We looked at bus routes and drivers and realized we should make them more of an asset for our city. Since then, we’ve expanded our bus driver responsibilities for public schools to include two routes in the evening — one at 3:00 and one about 5:00, because we want to support after-school programs. The next question became, “what about high school kids?” We’re now looking at high school kids using our public transit with our GRTC routes. I wanted to use that example, because in bringing a resource to our children of after-school programs for middle school kids, it created this transformation of how we view transportation for kids and how we’ve used that as a reason not to progress and invest in the right programs for our kids. I think it’s great to see that we’re now looking holistically at, well, what else can we add? What else can we make available? How else can we expand our transit routes? Do our bus routes go to the right places, specifically to help support kids? I think that partnership has been one that’s been very interesting, because what started as a request to bring it to every school, all of a sudden thrust us into a discussion making sure every kid can get home safely. I believe the benefits have been huge.
SB: I think that’s a great one. As we talk about on-demand transit and other forms of mobility, we don’t need to offer the same service in the same place all day long like we have traditionally done. We can use data and new systems to be able to manage demand more effectively. It’s great to see that you all are thinking that way. Before I ask my last series of questions, I would like to know what else you would like the Cityfi newsletter/blog reading audience to know about you and your candidacy.
AA: What I love about this world of government and civic innovation is a lot of times we see technology as how things happen, but I’m a firm believer it’s actually more the human side. It’s the design thinking elements of empathy, building and truly understanding the problem from the perspective of those impacted. When I opened my business in Richmond three years ago, I went through a horrendous process with building permits and inspections. What should have been a 3 month approval process, became 9–10 months to put in two bathrooms and an ADA ramp. I was just completely deflated because I blew through a lot of free rent and had to go through a lot more cash. The cost of my project significantly increased because of the process and the delays. I realized that I’m a sitting city council person and this process was really hard. If it’s hard for me, it’s probably hard for most others, as well.. When I talked with other people, I realized that contractors would turn down work because it was in the City of Richmond, where they didn’t want to deal with the headache. I also had contractors quote an upcharge for any work in the City to cover the costs due to extra time for administrative work. I guess the old saying that you have to eat your own dog food is apt. I hate that saying, but you’ve got to be a customer of what your services are. You’ve got to understand from the ground level what the experience is like. When you see problems in government, and you experience them firsthand as an elected official, it really opens your eyes to understanding that it’s really a customer experience problem. Are we designing systems for bureaucracy and for the simplicity of how we’re organized as a department, or are we trying to organize ourselves around the benefits and streamlining it for the process of our customer? That could be a resident dealing with paying taxes or parking ticket or renewing a license, etc, or a business just trying to invest in your city. If you don’t understand what that looks like, then you’re going to continue the problem. My time as a resident for twenty years, an employee for eight, a business owner who went through the process, and now a sitting council person for two terms in eight years, I see so many changes needed in the culture of City Hall just by being a customer of what we already do. Go through the process, fill out that form, try to open a business, see how hard it is, learn about the headaches and the issues. Talk to business owners, and from there, you realize we already know the answer. We already know what needs to be done. We just hadn’t been listening, right? That’s what I think has been the biggest issue in my campaign — applying that story to what I’m running for.
SB: As someone who worked on government procurement innovation from the inside at the start of my career in government to now running a small business, and thinking about it from that perspective, I certainly have learned a lot through that experience. It’s been fun. All right, we are now at the last round of three questions for you! The first is: when did Messi score his first goal of the 2015–2016 La Liga season?
AA: Whatever that first Saturday was in August, I’m not sure.
SB: Wrong, September 12! Who was at that game?
AA: Were we?
SB: We were!
AA: That was the game against Atletico Madrid, and Neymar scored that amazing free kick!
SB: Well, that was going to be the bonus question: who scored the other goal for Barcelona? You are good! It was great catching up and thank you for your time and insightful responses to my questions!
