:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/7EB6NUMXQNEI5PKCOFN5CIPUKY.jpg)
Norfolk — The Norfolk City Council kicked at least three public housing residents off an official city advisory committee on the massive St. Paul’s redevelopment, leaving just two seats on the 16-member body for those most directly affected.
It also left one of those residents questioning whether his removal was retaliation for public criticism of how the city is handling some parts of the project. City officials say there was no connection.
LaVonne Pledger, a resident of Young Terrace, has become one of the most prominent and outspoken voices from the community on the redevelopment plan that will demolish three mid-century public housing neighborhoods and displace around 4,200 people.
Pledger said he wasn’t told anything about his term being up until he got a letter dated March 18, the day after he appeared on a BET documentary from Soledad O’Brien that was sharply critical of Norfolk’s handling of the redevelopment.
“I was excommunicated from the St. Paul’s advisory board,” Pledger said. “I have no clue why. Nobody told me anything. All I can do is speculate.”
Pledger also is a member of a group helping sue the city and housing authority in federal court, alleging the redevelopment fails to adequately protect residents from housing segregation under the Fair Housing Act, though that lawsuit has been underway since January 2020.
Councilwoman Danica Royster, who chairs the committee — formally called the Mayor’s Advisory Committee/St. Paul’s Area — said there’s no retaliation and the terms of Pledger and two other residents had expired. The three were appointed in 2018 — along with a fourth who stopped participating in 2020 — when the committee was founded.
City officials say other resident slots added in 2019 and reserved for tenant association heads essentially replace those Pledger and the other two held.
Royster said Pledger was given the full information about his appointment when he first took the seat, including the end date of his three-year term.
“So him being blindsided, I can’t speak to that,” she said.
But Pledger said he doesn’t recall being told the appointment was a one-time thing. It’s routine for people to be reappointed to city boards and commissions if they want to continue serving. And many non-resident members of the St. Paul’s committee — including some who rarely come to meetings — were reappointed by the council with no public discussion.
Typically, City Clerk Allan Bull said he would immediately call board and commission members who had not been reappointed to let them know. Bull said he was told Royster wanted to handle the St. Paul’s committee members herself.
“Being a new council member, I wanted to personally reach out versus this seeming like this is coming down from the city,” said Royster, who was appointed to the Superward 7 seat after Angelia Williams Graves, who’d been on the council for a decade, was elected recently to the House of Delegates.
As for why it took more than a week to notify him after the council had made its decision, Royster said family emergencies tied her up over the past two weeks.
The council apparently discussed the St. Paul’s advisory committee appointments behind closed doors during a February meeting, then voted unanimously on March 9 to appoint or reappoint 48 members to 10 different boards and commissions, including the St. Paul’s committee. There was no public discussion beyond the vote, which did not appear on the agenda.
Pledger said he had no idea of any of this until he received the letter from Royster thanking him for his service and informing him that his three-year term ended Feb. 26.
But he said he participated in the committee’s March 16 meeting as a member, a week after the council apparently had not reinstalled him, and no one objected. He was read out as a member in attendance and even gave a presentation with another committee member about their work with a subcommittee on stopping violence in the community.
At no point did Royster or any other member stop proceedings to say Pledger and another resident in attendance were no longer members. When asked why Pledger continued to be treated as a member, Royster declined to answer and referred such “technical” questions to the city clerk.
The city says it plans to build mixed-income communities in place of the aging public housing being demolished in St. Paul’s over the next decade or more. But some residents worry those neighborhoods will have no place for them. And evidence suggests the city will face an uphill fight in using the redevelopment to foster greater racial and economic integration, as it’s said it wants to do. So far, those moving out of public housing using federal rent vouchers are mostly ending up in other poor and racially segregated neighborhoods.
The start of the St. Paul’s project was very publicly delayed in 2017 over the city’s failure to get enough input from public housing residents. The committee was seen as a response to that, and a way to keep community members engaged in the conversation about how the project was unfolding. The committee meets monthly to get progress reports and discuss how the city should be tackling problems in these communities and to get feedback.
There had been at least six seats on the body for public housing residents, but the removal of Pledger and two others cut that in half. There are members from Calvert Square and Young Terrace, but a seat reserved for the president of the Tidewater Gardens tenant group has been vacant for at least a year and no longer appears on the city’s roster of committee members.
That neighborhood is, for now, the one most directly affected — it’s the only one where buildings have started to be demolished and residents are being moved out.
Asked Thursday about the lack of a Tidewater Gardens member on the committee, Mayor Kenny Alexander said: “That’s probably an oversight. That should be corrected.”
Today's Top Stories
He said his intention always was to have at least one resident representative from every community in St. Paul’s.
Pledger noted he was a more active and regular member of the committee than the tenant group presidents that still have dedicated seats.
Attendance records from 2019 and 2020 show Pledger was a regular attendee, though he did miss a handful of meetings.
The Tenant Management Council presidents, however, appeared rarely. In 2020, the presidents of the Young Terrace and Calvert Square tenant groups both attended a January meeting and didn’t appear again for the rest of the year.
Royster said the committee isn’t the only way for residents to give input on the redevelopment.
“This is a community effort, and everyone’s input is what I’m looking to get. Is your input exclusive to serving on this committee? I don’t think so,” she said.
Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com