In accordance with the delay that the state recently granted Richmond, city facilities and operations will not move into Phase 1 of reopening at this time. City offices and facilities will remain closed through May 31. Essential city services will continue, as they have throughout the closure. To view a list of those services, visit the city’s dedicated webpage at richmondgov.com/covid19 or  click here . (The list is available in  Spanish here. ) Interested parties should continue to check the essential city services list, as it is frequently updated with expanded services. Of course, until May 28 at the earliest, any service expansions will still follow the Governor’s guidelines to which the rest of the city is adhering.   City parks are still open to public use, though high-touch or high-density areas such as the Manchester Climbing Wall, playgrounds, sport courts, skate parks, athletic fields and dog parks are closed. Administrative offices, picnic shelters, park house

Mayor Stoney today announced that the city requested and has been granted a local delay of the state’s reopening plan. The city will move into Phase One no earlier than May 28.  “I want to thank Governor Northam for working with us,” said Mayor Stoney. “This step will make Richmond safer as we face this challenge together.” The city has experienced an increase in both positive cases and percent positivity in the past two weeks. Percent positivity speaks to the intersection of the spread of the virus and the recently enhanced testing capacity; the metric represents the percentage of people tested who have been positively diagnosed. The images below illustrate those trends.  The state provided the Stoney Administration with the information on local percent positivity on Thursday morning, which then allowed the city to formally request a delay. The mayor cited that data provided by the state as the key factor in applying for the delay.  “Right now, the data i

“This budget is not the budget we first proposed, nor is it the budget we wanted, but it’s the budget we have to live with in light of these most difficult and challenging times. Amid the uncertainty of this pandemic, we must be prepared to make adjustments as we go, and we fully expect to do so in the coming months.  “To that end, I’d like to express my sincere appreciation to the members of City Council and their staff for all their hard work, cooperation and collaboration with my team, as well as for their commitment, going forward, to meeting the needs of our residents and advance the city’s priorities in a manner that is fiscally prudent and equitable.”  ##

This week the Stoney administration announced the city and state have collaborated to roughly 40 thousand units of personal protective equipment (PPE) to underserved neighborhoods in Richmond.  At the outset of the pandemic, the Office of Mayor Levar Stoney reached out to the state concerned about the evident racial disparities in the infection and mortality rates associated with COVID-19. In response, the state has obtained 20 thousand face masks, 20 thousand bottles of hand sanitizers, and 10 thousand printed public health resources for the city to distribute in its communities most vulnerable to the disease.  The program aims to  increase equitable access to PPE to communities that may be most adversely impacted by COVID-19 in an effort to safeguard them against the virus. Data shows that people of color are dying from COVID-19 at disproportionate rates and that immigrant and undocumented populations are also suffering disparately.  “COVID-19 isn’t singular in its