The councilman spent $13,249 in city funds for 43 days of travel, about triple McLaughlin’s travel time and expenses.* Richmond council members receive a $5,000 annual travel allowance. Her two trips were a “Building Livable Communities” conference in Yosemite and, last year, a delegation to Richmond’s sister city in Regla, Cuba with Councilman Tom Butt and two aides.īates has been on five city-funded trips since 2010: Two delegations he’s led to Richmond sister cities in China and Japan, two conferences in Southern California, and a “National League of Cities” conference in Washington, D.C. They are paid for by the same committee, Moving Forward, that has also blanketed the city with other billboards and ads promoting Bates to be the city’s next mayor.Īccording to the city’s expense reports, McLaughlin spent $3,890 in taxpayer money on 13 total days of official city travel since 2010. Several large billboards around town mock McLaughlin as an absentee mayor who ignores Richmond’s problems while traveling the world.
In an interview last week, Bates defended his trips, saying, “You can’t accomplish things staying at home, and not engaging with global community.
(Richmond Confidential)Īccording to City Council meeting minutes obtained from the City Clerk’s office, McLaughlin has only missed one of 152 meetings since 2010.ĭuring the same time period, Bates missed 11, the worst attendance record of all current council members. Chart comparing city council meeting absences by members of Richmond's city council. “Why would we elect her to City Council?”īut an analysis of city documents, invoices, travel receipts and bank statements dating to 2010 shows that McLaughlin has traveled less, missed fewer meetings, and spent less money on the trips than City Councilman Nat Bates, a longtime supporter of the oil giant’s mammoth refinery here and the Chevron-backed committee’s favored candidate for mayor.
A Chevron-funded campaign committee has blitzed the streets of Richmond and the airwaves and Internet in an effort to stop Mayor Gayle McLaughlin’s bid for a City Council seat in November.īillboards line boulevards, mailers stuff mailboxes, television commercials play hourly and a web video shows McLaughlin, who is termed out after eight years in office, skipping onto an airplane: “Gayle McLaughlin ran away when we needed her the most,” a narrator says.
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