HOPEWELL – Saying the project has now reached “warp speed” stage, the Robert Bobb Group told City Council that between now and the end of its contract, it will push Hopewell hard to make sure the city’s $2 million investment in rebuilding its fiscal infrastructure will not be in vain.
“At this point, my team knows I’m always not the nice guy when we get into this level of work, so we’re going to be pushing hard,” group founder Robert Bobb said in a special meeting Wednesday night. “Both on our team level and on the city manager and her team. The city has made a tremendous investment in what we’re doing, and we’re very proud of the work that we’ve done.”
Since the end of last summer, RBG has been guiding Hopewell on a complete reboot of its fiscal management system – or lack of it. Critics claimed that processes were scattershot rather than uniform across all city departments because employees were untrained and therefore creating their own methods of entering and tracking public transactions.
As a result, Hopewell’s credit ranking tanked, and the city lost its ability to issue bonds for much-needed capital improvement projects such as a new fire station.
Everything came to a head last year when the commonwealth called Hopewell out for not submitting required annual fiscal audits since 2019 and not having a “clean opinion” on its books since 2015. After rejecting Virginia’s offer for assistance, council voted to make a deal with the Robert Bobb Group, a Washington, D.C.-based government advisory firm that helps bail out financially strapped municipalities.
RBG, which rescued Petersburg from financial ruin in 2016, said from the beginning that Hopewell’s picture was not as dank as its neighbor to the west. But it had the capacity to do so if controls were not put in place.
Since then, RBG has made numerous upgrades and recommendations on future best practices. The group has developed a series of standard operating procedures and trained employees on the MUNIS transaction-tracking system, has gotten Hopewell caught up on late audits from 2019, and has created a network of employee accountability to ensure the SOPs and other processes are followed.
“From this point forward, if you’ve watched the movie ‘Star Wars,’ we’re now into warp speed,” Bobb said. “We’re escalating our work.”
What was the pact?
RBG’s agreement with Hopewell contains three separate contracts with three different sunset dates, each appearing on the horizon sooner rather than later:
- The Project Management Office contract develops the SOPs, employee training and MUNIS system clean-up. That contract ends Oct. 31.
- The Accounting Remediation Services contract takes care of getting Hopewell’s annual audits caught up. That contract ends Dec. 15.
- After City Manager Dr. Concetta Manker let Finance Director Michael Terry go, a contract with RBG brought in Russ Branson as interim finance director at a cost of $37,000 per month. Now that Hopewell has hired former Petersburg finance director Stacey Jordan, Branson’s contract will end Aug. 31, but he will be on retainer through December to assist Jordan with the transition.
Prior to Wednesday’s presentation by RBG, council voted to cancel Branson’s contract and reallocate up to $330,000 in funding to cover new finance-director training and SOP implementation.
A deep-dive and training concerns
RBG principal Heather Ness spent the next 90 minutes on a deep-dive of what RBG has done since last summer. She walked council through SOP development, the retraining on the MUNIS system, security processes that limit access to system changes to a chosen few, and the audit catch-up work.
“We’ve made a ton of changes,” Ness told council.
She outlined work that still needs to be done before the contract ends. Part of that covered training employees on the new expense-reimbursement procedure.
According to RBG, “a significant portion” of employee expense reimbursement is done on paper instead of electronically, “leading to inefficiencies, errors and processing delays.”
The group had hoped to have the new process implemented on Aug. 1, but issues with training delayed that to Sept. 1. Then, when RBG suggested training days in early August to meet the Sept. 1 deadline, most opted for days later in the month due to vacation schedules. As that stands, the implementation for the new reimbursement system will be pushed back to Oct. 1, well after the RBG contract runs out, and that creates a risk of increased employee unfamiliarity that would not be supported by onsite training.
“We can take no more delays,” Ness said.
The employee actions did not set well with Mayor Johnny Partin Jr. Partin said the importance of the training needs to be reinforced among staff members, and if vacations are an issue, then perhaps someone could be designated to attend and then debrief those who could not make it.
“No one’s pushing them to stay home for vacation,” Partin said.
Ness added that the training sessions will be recorded and available for playback.
‘We want to finish strong’
Bobb reiterated to council the need to ensure all city staff is onboard with the changes made and will continue to be onboard once RBG closes up shop in Hopewell.
“The expectations of not only from our team but the expectations to implement what we are putting forward is going to be critical,” he said. “The other component of that is once we leave, then the city manager and her team, they can’t tap the brakes. It has to continue to push forward if the city’s going to become a high-performing city long term.
"We’re rounding the bend in terms of the work [we] are doing,” he added. “We’re at a critical point in this engagement, so from this point forward, we’re going to push the administration hard, and we’re going to push ourselves hard because we want to finish strong.”
Partin later told Bobb that if the group encounters any issues it feels could be detrimental between now and the end of the contract, “I have no problem bringing it up to City Council or asking questions and providing directives.”
Bill Atkinson (he/him/his) is an award-winning journalist who covers breaking news, government and politics. Reach him at batkinson@progress-index.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @BAtkinson_PI.
This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: 'Into warp speed': Bobb Group escalates work on Hopewell finances, stresses future unity
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