Norfolk suddenly won’t answer questions about massive St. Paul’s redevelopment project

Norfolk — The city of Norfolk is starting a massive overhaul of the St. Paul’s area that will ultimately mean moving thousands of residents and demolishing about 1,700 public housing units. But city officials now say they won’t answer questions from the press about any of it — indefinitely.

City spokeswoman Lori Crouch abruptly called off a scheduled interview with The Virginian-Pilot last week, saying staff would not answer questions from the media related to the billion-dollar redevelopment.

The cited reason? City Attorney Bernard Pishko had advised them not to take questions “in light of pending litigation.”

That means a federal lawsuit filed in January 2020 by a group of St. Paul’s residents and other advocates. The suit argues that the city’s plans for relocating residents would run afoul of federal housing rules meant to prevent racial segregation.

But city officials like Susan Perry, the director of the Office of St. Paul’s Transformation, have given regular public statements and media interviews since the lawsuit was filed a year ago.

It’s unclear what changed last week. City Manager Chip Filer did not return several calls between Thursday and Monday seeking comment on the sudden silence.

Mayor Kenny Alexander said Monday he wasn’t aware of the move by city staff and said he found it “overprotective.”

“I think that they should answer your questions,” Alexander said. “We have people who are working on St. Paul’s every day. They should be able to communicate about the work they’re undertaking on behalf of the city.”

Crouch said in an email that officials would continue giving briefings and updates at public meetings — the prohibition against publicly sharing information on the redevelopment effort is exclusive to media interviews.

Crouch said the self-imposed gag order will end when the litigation is over. But there’s no trial date for the lawsuit, and any settlement could take months — or longer — to negotiate.

“By denying media requests, governments are also asking the public to accept only one interpretation of facts and events, which is theirs,” said Megan Rhyne, the executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.

The city’s public statements on St. Paul’s haven’t always told the full story.

Norfolk said it launched an effort dubbed “People First” in 2018 to provide services to residents being displaced. But as The Pilot reported, the hiring of an outside vendor was delayed by more than a year, and city staff didn’t start working with residents until early 2019.

“That’s neither the letter, nor the spirit, nor the intent of what we laid out, and what the citizens and stakeholders were told,” Alexander said after a Pilot reporter asked about the changes.

Rhyne said sometimes governments have legitimate reasons for not making certain information public, and the law allows for that, but “there’s still a whole lot you can convey to the public, through media interviews and elsewise, without running afoul of the government’s legitimate need for confidentiality.”

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The city could, for example, answer questions about some parts of the project while declining to address others directly connected to the litigation.

The cancellation of last week’s interview came days after The Pilot launched an ongoing project, Dividing Lines, that explores the roots of the city’s racial and economic segregation and what can be done about it.

The St. Paul’s redevelopment is perhaps the most consequential city project so far this century.

The massive project aims to tear down three aging public housing neighborhoods east of downtown and replace them with a new mixed-income community. That includes the relocation of 4,200 public housing residents. Norfolk has claimed that any who want to move back after the reconstruction is completed can do so.

The project, long discussed and officially launched at the start of 2018, was initially expected to take more than a decade and cost at least $1 billion. It’s received tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.

But now, three years later, the city apparently no longer wants to talk about its flagship project.

Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com