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A former part-time staffer in the city of Richmond’s Office of Sustainability filled out a form explaining he also worked for a private company that partnered with that office on a project to put solar panels on dozens of city buildings. 
But the form was never reviewed or signed by any supervisor, according to Mayor Danny Avula’s administration. 
The sustainability office drafted a memo in June explaining how the perceived conflict of interest was handled once discovered. The memo claims the city’s HR director and a high-ranking administrator were alerted to the situation around April 30. However, the Avula administration redacted part of that memo and is now questioning the document’s accuracy.
The controversy surrounding the solar proposal — which the City Council voted down late last month — has revealed a hole in the city’s conflict of interest procedures, one that apparently allowed a disclosure form to go unnoticed until the dual employment became an optics problem for a high-priority project.
The appearance of a potential conflict wasn’t what derailed the proposed solar deal, but it’s one of several unresolved issues that officials are now looking into to better understand how the project was handled.
City policies require employees to disclose any outside jobs in writing and avoid conflicts with their official duties.
The Avula administration said Thursday that the outside employment form for former clean energy specialist Andre Eanes was put in his personnel file shortly after he was hired in January, without the necessary signatures to make it a valid document. 
Eanes disclosed he was also employed as a technical consultant for Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures, the company the sustainability office negotiated a solar deal with this year. Because the city piggybacked off an existing contract between Secure Solar Futures and Prince William County Public Schools, there was no competitive bidding.
The outside employment form, which the city released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, was only signed by Eanes. Three other sections that were supposed to include signoffs by a supervisor, department head and the director of human resources were left blank.
Though Eanes seemingly did the correct thing by alerting the city to his other job in writing, Avula indicated City Hall mishandled the situation.
“My administration continues to support the goal of increasing the use of renewable energy, reducing long-term energy costs and saving taxpayer dollars, and advancing our commitment to a more sustainable and resilient built environment,” the mayor said in a statement Thursday evening. “In the course of working towards that goal, some of our internal processes and systems, like those related to outside employment disclosures and addressing personnel matters, did not work the way I expect them to.”  
The mayor said that, as of Nov. 1, his administration would enact a new review process for outside employment forms instead of having them handled through an “automated onboarding workflow.” The administration said it could not answer questions about whether it’s been standard city practice for outside employment disclosures to be filed away in the HR office with minimal review or tracking.
The Avula administration had been pressing the Council to approve the solar deal quickly so the city could capture the benefits of federal tax credits before they expire. 
The Council was asked to sign off on a 25-year deal involving solar installations on 39 city rooftops. Secure Solar Futures would have installed and owned the equipment, with the city purchasing the solar energy at a lower rate than what it pays Dominion Energy. Over the life of the proposed power purchase agreement (PPA), proponents said, the city could have saved around $20 million in electricity costs.
Some city officials raised concerns the proposed contract created too much legal and financial risk. It was those reservations that led the Council to reject the proposal in a 5-4 vote, before the possible conflict of interest with the low-level sustainability staffer came to light.
The mayor’s office was trying to get the Council to reconsider that vote and salvage the solar project. But after Avula learned of the Eanes situation, he said he would stop pursuing the project and ask Chief Administrative Officer Odie Donald II to look into the matter.
The administration has not yet completed its review, but the legal deadline just arrived for City Hall to respond to an initial wave of FOIA requests.
Eanes and Secure Solar Futures CEO Tony Smith have both said the dual employment was approved by HR. The documents point to a more muddled situation.
City officials told The Richmonder there are no records of any written communication between the sustainability office and HR regarding outside employment for Eanes from a three-month period in the spring when the city was starting to work with Secure Solar Futures. They also said there are no records showing the sustainability office approved the outside employment.
However, the city released dozens of documents in response to a broader FOIA request filed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Those records include a sustainability office memo dated June 4 written to document how the perceived conflict of interest was handled.
The June 4 memo, marked “confidential,” is styled as a communication from Sustainability Office Director Laura Thomas to HR Director Trinija Martin.
“It is intended as a contemporaneous record for accountability and any subsequent inquiry,” the memo says.
The memo says a “remediation plan” was agreed to by Thomas, Martin and Sharon Ebert, the city’s deputy chief administrative officer for economic and community development. The memo says the sustainability office told Ebert and Martin about the situation after it was discovered, and scheduled a meeting with the HR director to discuss it.
Contradicting that timeline, the Avula administration said neither Ebert nor Martin were aware of the memo until “October 2026.”
“The accuracy of the document is under review,” the mayor’s office said.
The disputed memo was signed by Dawn Oleksy, the sustainability office’s energy program manager who supervised Eanes.
The memo says Oleksy “was not aware of the appearance of a potential conflict of interest.”
“It was determined that this was an innocent oversight of Ms. Oleksy as she was unaware of his outside employment,” the memo says. “No information was intentionally withheld and any recognition of Mr. Eane’s former employment and relationship status with Secure Solar Futures (SSF) was deemed irrelevant due to the nature of Mr. Eane’s part-time, temporary, entry-level status at the city of Richmond.”
The memo goes on to say there was “no evidence of improper transmission of documents, materials, knowledge or other matters to the external vendor.”
The document outlines steps taken to address the issue, including restrictions on work assignments and preservation of project documents. City officials redacted two of the five bullet points listed in the remediation plan, saying they were exempt from disclosure under FOIA as protected “personnel information.”
A March email shows Eanes coordinated a phone introduction between Oleksy and Secure Solar Futures CEO Tony Smith.
“I’m glad I was able to introduce you two over the phone earlier – thanks Tony for
sharing your insight on the municipal projects SSF has worked on and helping clear up some questions that Dawn had,” Eanes wrote in the March 11 email. “I know she and many others at the city are excited to fast-track as many municipal solar projects in the near future as are feasible.”
From his city email address, Eanes asked Secure Solar Futures to send over contract materials for projects done in other localities, saying they “would provide incredible insight for the City of Richmond’s own procurement and development processes.”
Smith asked if the two sides could “start sharing data” and take a “maximum teaming approach” to the upcoming procurement and contract negotiations.
In an interview, Eanes said the sustainability office was aware he knew people at Secure Solar Futures and was already exploring a procurement process with the company regardless of his introduction.
Other emails show Eanes passing project documents back and forth between his two employers. On several occasions, he emailed documents from his city email account to his Secure Solar Futures email account. One of those documents was titled “PPA Site Approvals.” In another exchange, he shared a document titled “DPU Questions” with Maggie Davison, the solar company’s chief operating officer.
On Aug. 19 — after the sustainability office memo said the remediation plan was enacted —  Eanes sent a file to Secure Solar Futures from his city account with the heading “roof warranty folder.”
It’s not clear if sharing those documents violated any rules.
“The developer didn’t get any information that they wouldn’t have already gotten from the city,” Eanes said.
On the outside employment form, Eanes checked a box saying his work with Secure Solar Futures wouldn’t create a conflict of interest with his city position. 
The supervisor portion of the form includes a certification that the city’s rules were explained to the employee. Because that section was left unsigned, it’s unclear if anyone did that with Eanes.
The Avula administration declined to answer several specific questions. Asked whether HR and Ebert were informed about the situation as outlined in the memo and whether the information ever made its way to the mayor’s office, Avula spokesperson Mira Signer reiterated that the entire matter is still under review.
“There are still important questions, including what you’ve raised, and it’s important to allow the administration the time needed to fully understand what occurred,” Signer said.
Other records related to the solar project show the effort was halted around the time the sustainability office memo says the outside employment issue was discovered.
Backers of the solar project were initially pushing to have it approved by June 30, a significantly tighter deadline than the Sept. 30 date the Council was later given.
According to a project timeline, the city’s procurement department told Ebert and Thomas last spring that, with all the “outstanding issues left to resolve,” it wouldn’t be possible to execute the deal contracts by the end of June.
“Project was officially paused until further notice,” the May 1 entry on the timeline says.
The next entry, on May 28, showed there’d been a change of heart.
“Mayor asked the team to ‘get to yes’ on Solar PPA,” the timeline says, adding that Avula aide Sarah Carpenter would now “quarterback” the proposal from the mayor’s office.
Donald, Avula’s appointed CAO, told the Council he was comfortable with the project presented to the body for approval. However, emails from over the summer show he felt speed shouldn’t be the driving factor.
“I’d caution everyone from letting the time crunch determine our risk tolerance or ultimate path forward,” Donald wrote in a June 29 email to Avula and his inner circle.
As officials pressed ahead with trying to get the proposal introduced to the Council in September, a dispute over how the solar panels would be insured caused another holdup. The mayor’s office seemed taken aback by the resistance, saying in several emails they were under the impression the insurance issue had already been worked out. 
According to a June 5 email, city Risk Manager Donnell Stewart said the city’s insurance carrier “will add the panels to the city’s coverage,” but asked for more documents to be provided.
City Attorney Laura Drewry refused to let the Avula administration introduce the legislation at the Council’s Sept. 14 meeting. She said she needed written confirmation that the city’s insurance carrier would insure the solar panels as the contract promised. 
Because she didn’t have satisfactory proof of that, Drewry wrote in a Sept. 14 email to the mayor and CAO, she was pulling the project from the list of legislation to be introduced at the Council meeting that night.
Drewry made clear her opposition was broader than legal technicalities. Even if the insurance arrangements were deemed legal, she wrote, it was her office’s advice that it was an “irresponsible allocation of risk.”
“Taxpayers should not be asked to insure a private company’s equipment or to use the city’s own insurance to protect the company, the system owner, and their unnamed investors,” Drewry wrote.
Under the proposed contract, Secure Solar Futures would have covered extra costs associated with adding the solar equipment to the city’s property insurance. But some officials stressed the city could still be on the hook if anything happened to one of the buildings that had the company’s solar panels on the roof.
During the back-and-forth, the mayor’s team pointed to a Sept. 10 email from the city’s insurance broker, Aon, that said adding the solar equipment to the city’s insurance “is not uncommon for this type of arrangement.” Though Aon indicated it didn’t have any major outstanding concerns, the broker specified it wasn’t giving official legal advice.
In an email on Sept. 13, Stewart, the risk manager, said his office “is not an obstacle to finalizing the agreement.” His role, he said, was to highlight possible risks so leadership “can make an informed decision.”
The eleventh-hour holdup over insurance was a factor in the project’s downfall. Delaying introduction of the deal gave the Council only a week to publicly review it, without enough time to consider amendments.
Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org
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