Downtown Petersburg. (2019 photo by Julia Rendleman)
On the mid-April day when the Virginia General Assembly was voting on whether to give the city of Petersburg permission to pursue a casino, Sen. Lashrecse Aird sent a text message to a top city official saying she needed a document sooner rather than later.
City Manager March Altman texted Aird on the morning of April 17 to tell her he’d send a signed letter of intent saying the city was picking Bally’s as its private-sector casino partner. A week later — after Petersburg got what it wanted from the legislature — city officials declared the Bally’s letter meant nothing, canceled the competitive bidding process they had been following and picked a competing casino developer, Baltimore-based Cordish Companies.
But on the day of the General Assembly vote, according to communications records The Virginia Mercury obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, the letter was treated as important for whatever the legislature was about to do.
Altman told Aird he probably wouldn’t be able to get her the letter until “noon/early afternoon” due to a busy meeting schedule.
“I understand but we gavel in at noon so I really need no later than,” Aird replied.
Eight minutes before noon, Altman told Aird the letter was in her email inbox.
“I understand from Jameson that you’re upset,” Aird replied, referring to her Chief of Staff Jameson Babb. “I apologize for cutting our time short.”
A text exchange between Petersburg City Manager March Altman (dark gray) and state Sen. Lashrecse Aird, D-Petersburg (light gray).
The Bally’s letter transmitted from the city to its state senator that day has sparked dueling allegations of impropriety. Petersburg officials have said they were facing pressure to pick a casino partner in accordance with political demands coming from the General Assembly, which seemed to prefer certain groups over others. Several state legislators have portrayed the letter as an act of deception by a city government that concealed its true intentions and repeatedly shrouded its casino ambitions in secrecy.
Despite the controversy over how Petersburg won permission to host a casino, the city is pressing ahead with its plan to put the issue on the ballot this fall for city residents to give the idea an up-or-down vote.
The text messages, which appear to be an incomplete record due to the city’s scattershot approach to complying with FOIA, don’t definitively prove one story to be true. Instead, they arguably lend credence to both narratives.
‘He is OK with the letter’
A day before his exchange with Aird, Altman sent a text to Petersburg spokesman Joanne Williams saying he had “issues” with the letter but was “directed to sign it.”
Altman didn’t respond to an email asking who exactly directed him to sign the document. However, the text exchanges strongly suggest the Petersburg City Council told him to sign it as part of a closed-door meeting that took place that same day.
A text exchange between Petersburg City Manager March Altman (dark gray) and city spokeswoman Joanne Williams (light gray).
Prior to the April 16 council meeting, Altman texted Williams to ask if Petersburg Mayor Sam Parham had a copy of the letter.
“Yes and he is sending to Council members and making phone calls to line up votes. He is OK with the letter,” Williams said.
That cuts against the Petersburg City Council’s claims in an official resolution that the letter was “never formally authorized by City Council” and was only signed in response to a “demand” that the city sign it or risk losing the General Assembly vote.
In an interview this week, Aird said the letter was essentially the city’s idea.
“They wanted to know how they could provide an indicator to the General Assembly about what their intentions were,” she said. “I still stand on the fact that, at the end of the day, the city came to me and said they wanted me to have something in hand in case questions came up prior to the vote.”
Though the text records show Aird urging Altman to speed up the process of giving her the letter, they don’t show that she told him or anyone else to select Bally’s.
Aird said she kept the Bally’s letter “in a folder” in case she needed it on the day of the vote, but she acknowledged that labor groups were also made aware of its existence. A PAC tied to a hospitality union with a strong interest in the Petersburg casino project spent more than $800,000 last year helping Aird get elected to Petersburg’s Senate seat. That union, Unite Here, had a labor deal in place with Bally’s and several other companies that vied for Petersburg’s casino project, but not with Cordish.
Unite Here had sent a letter to House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, and Senate Finance and Appropriations Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, highlighting the fact that the union had labor deals in place with Bally’s and Rush Street Gaming, the company that operates the Rivers Casino in Portsmouth and was bidding for a second Virginia casino in Petersburg.
The union sent the letter to Scott and Lucas on April 14, a few days before Petersburg officials signed off on the idea of signaling to the General Assembly that they were picking one of the companies that had a deal with Unite Here.
‘Won’t make a difference’
The text messages indicate Petersburg officials saw Scott and Lucas as key decision-makers that could determine the casino’s fate.
After Williams sent Altman a local news article on April 11 about prospective casino developers preparing to make public pitches at an upcoming town hall meeting, Altman texted back: “Won’t make a difference.”
“That’s correct,” Williams replied. “I still think Lucas will tell LA it must be Rush.”
The “LA” appears to be a shorthand reference to Aird.
As the Petersburg casino bill made its way through the legislature early this year, it hit a snag in the House of Delegates. A clause was added to the legislation requiring the bill to be reapproved a second time. That was widely seen at the Capitol as a way to give the legislature more leverage over the process by stalling the casino and requiring final go-ahead from the state later this year or next year.
On April 17, the General Assembly was voting on a recommendation from Gov. Glenn Youngkin to remove that clause and free Petersburg to ask its voters to approve a casino this fall.
As voting got underway, Aird sent Altman a photo of the Senate voting board showing the Petersburg casino bill had passed the chamber 32-8.
“Now Don’s world,” Altman replied as the two awaited the vote in the House, which approved the bill 80-19.
No text messages from the mayor
The Mercury requested email and text communications related to the casino project or the legislation enabling it involving Altman, Williams and Parham. The timeframe of the request was April 11 through April 18.
In response to the FOIA request, city officials only provided text messages from Altman’s phone, some of which showed text exchanges between him and Williams.
Asked why texts weren’t provided for all three officials identified in the FOIA request, city officials relayed that the mayor said he had no text messages related to the casino from that week. Documents show a city official texted the mayor to ask if he had any text messages responsive to the Mercury’s FOIA request, indicating he deals with at least some public business via text.
For the city’s FOIA response to be accurate, the mayor would have neither sent nor received any text messages related to the casino during an 8-day period when the city held its casino town hall, had a closed council meeting on its casino plans and won the General Assembly’s permission to proceed with the biggest economic development project in the city’s history.
When asked by other city officials to provide emails responsive to the Mercury’s FOIA request, Parham sent back numerous documents that were outside the date range specified. For example, the mayor provided records related to a different FOIA request made by the Petersburg Progress-Index on May 14.
Other city officials noticed that some of the records the mayor was sending didn’t align with the parameters he was given.
“Please ensure that this is what was requested,” Tangi Hill, executive assistant to the city manager and clerk for the City Council, wrote to city FOIA officer Shaunta’ Beasley. “It appears to be outside of the dates requested.”
Records show the city’s FOIA officer asked the city manager, city spokeswoman and mayor to send over emails and text messages they felt were relevant to the Mercury’s request. City officials didn’t answer questions about what steps they took to verify that the responses were accurate and complete.
Many emails the city provided were completely redacted under a FOIA exemption for attorney-client privilege.
Williams, the city spokeswoman, initially said she had no casino text messages that weren’t already provided in the exchanges pulled from Altman’s phone. However, in those records Williams mentions a separate text she received from Babb, Aird’s chief of staff, which shows she had at least one casino-related text message that wasn’t provided.
After being asked several times to explain the discrepancy, on Wednesday evening city officials provided some additional text exchanges between Williams and Babb, nearly a month after the Mercury first sent the FOIA request. Those messages weren’t particularly revealing, showing brief remarks between the two when the casino bill passed.
The text messages also show discussions about who should be identified as the source of the Bally’s letter, which came from Aird’s office, as it was being circulated among city officials.
“Jameson asked that I take ownership of writing the letter,” Williams wrote to Altman on April 16. “That’s fine with me. I did proof and make suggestions.”
When the Mercury asked for a copy of the Bally’s letter two days later on April 18, Williams offered the city manager her thoughts on how it could be kept under wraps even though a top city official had signed it and sent it to a state senator before a key public vote.
“Not answering the VA Mercury inquiry,” she wrote to Altman. “We have no completely executed document. At the most, we would not have to produce any documents, if there was a completed document, for 5 days under FOIA.”
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