Hopewell council approves $988,000 contract with Robert Bobb Group

HOPEWELL – From the outset of the 73-minute presentation, the Robert Bobb Group made it perfectly clear. The time for research on Hopewell’s financial issues has passed, and the time for fixing them is now.

“We are not here as a team to study issues,” group owner Robert Bobb told City Council in a special meeting Tuesday night. “That’s not our role. Our proposal is not a study. We’re here to solve the issues.”

Bobb and his associates assured council that the work would not be done from afar. Staff members would be assigned to be in Hopewell and work side-by-side with city departments.

Whatever was said during the presentation seemed to work. At the end, council voted 7-0 to authorize a $988,000 agreement with the firm to help Hopewell not only with getting its state-required audits caught up but also to implement new financial policies to keep the city’s money house in order.

RBG is no stranger to the Tri-City area. In 2016, the group took over Petersburg when the government was on the verge of financial insolvency and within six months instituted a turnaround that took the city from junk-bond status to a near-the-pinnacle bond rating. In his pitch to the councilors, Bobb admitted that “we had challenges in Petersburg” and while Hopewell is not to the stage that Petersburg was, things could turn bad very quickly if action is not taken.

“When we arrived, they couldn’t even make payroll,” Bobb said of Petersburg. “If state law had allowed it, the city of Petersburg could have been in Chapter 9 bankruptcy.”

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Unlike Petersburg, RBG is not riding in to take over Hopewell government. Instead, the group is planning a two-pronged approach.

One step would be to establish a project management operation that would work with the city, the treasurer and the school system to implement and train employees in processes to get and keep city finances reconciled. The other step would focus on what the group called the “rear-view mirror” approach, which is getting the city’s audits – which date back to 2014 without being submitted timely or properly – caught up. That would be handled by a team separate from the PMO.

The process would amount to the financial equivalent of “tough love.” To be successful, city employees must buy into the cultural change of not doing things the way they were done previously. If not, they should be replaced by workers who would.

“If they’re not on board, they’re out the door,” Bobb said.

Another point Bobb made is that the work would start from Ground Zero with the group’s own policies, not ones suggested by others.

“We’re not here to study nor accept other consultants’ work,” Bobb said. “We appreciate other consultants’ work, we value the work of other consultants, but we’re not here just to accept and to implement what other consultants have provided.

While not specifically mentioned, that comment was an implied reference to the Youngkin administration’s hiring of an outside firm to study Hopewell’s books and make suggestions to put out what the state’s secretary of finance called “a five-alarm fire” that was the way the city handled its money. The administration offered to pay Hopewell $200,000 to bring in a short-term city manager and finance director experienced in government turnaround for six months – an offer council rebuffed last month when it gave the job permanently to interim city manager Dr. Concetta Manker.

“Were we to be contracted by the city, it would be our fiduciary responsibility to drive the processes that are important to the city,” Bobb said.

The unanimous vote included councilors who originally wanted to accept the state’s recommendation such as Ward 1’s Rita Joyner.

“I don’t know anyone who does not want you to be successful,” Joyner said, adding that the refusal to accept cultural change “produced this situation.”

The presentation also was music to Vice Mayor Jasmine Gore’s ears, especially the comments about replacing employees not conducive to change and hiring employees with the skill sets to get the job done. Gore, a frequent critic of past Hopewell administrations, said council never had the ability to dive deeper into financial issues “because the previous administration would not give us the information we needed.”

“We could have had this done a long time ago, but we were falling for false promises,” she added.

Mayor Johnny Partin Jr. asked Bobb how his group would handle any discovery of fiscal impropriety or fraud while implementing the new policies. Bobb said in all instances, those discoveries would result in prosecution and council would be advised – with one caveat.

“If that person was someone who was close to the city manager or to someone on council, we’re not going to tell you,” Bobb said. “We’ll go straight to the prosecutors.”

“I like that much better,” Partin replied.

The $988,000 tab for the Bobb Group work would be paid for with leftover American Rescue Plan Act funds. The work will begin Aug. 16 and continue for the next eight months.

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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 Twitter at @BAtkinson_PI.

This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Hopewell approves agreement with government finance consulting firm