A decade after hiring him as its planning director and 2 1/2 years after settling a damaging lawsuit, the city of Charlottesville has quietly parted ways with one of its most high-profile administrators, Alexander Ikefuna, while simultaneously dissolving the Office of Community Solutions, the department he led until recently.
The news was delivered in an early June email to members of the city’s Housing Advisory Committee by Deputy City Manager James Freas.
“The City Manager has decided to close the Office of Community Solutions,” Freas wrote. “We will be reassigning staff from this office to other offices within the city.”
While Freas’s letter, dated June 5, asserts that Ikefuna “is no longer employed by the city,” city spokeswoman Afton Schneider put the 67-year-old Ikefuna’s last day on the job as June 11 and the department closure at July 1.
A planning veteran who served such localities as Mobile, Alabama, and Salt Lake City, Utah, Ikefuna was hired in 2015 to lead Charlottesville’s Department of Neighborhood Development Services, or NDS, which oversees urban planning and development. Five years later, Ikefuna was demoted to a deputy position. Then in 2021, when Freas was brought in as NDS director, Ikefuna was tapped to lead the newly created Office of Community Solutions. The office was tasked with tackling some of Charlottesville’s most complex challenges: affordable housing, commercial revitalization and grant-driven community development.
The announcement of his departure marks a quiet end to a tenure that had once placed Ikefuna at the center of Charlottesville’s urban future — and also at the center of what may have been its most expensive legal settlement.
A costly crash
Ikefuna’s time as a city official was complicated by what happened on March 15, 2018, the day he struck a pedestrian while driving a city-owned vehicle near City Hall.
Around 1:40 p.m., then-53-year-old Patrick McKenzie had just left the Market Street Parking Garage and was walking in the crosswalk at Market Street and 6th Street Northeast when Ikefuna, then heading NDS, struck him with a city-issued Ford Escape.
Although Ikefuna prepaid his $94 traffic ticket for failing to yield, the legal implications grew with the ensuing lawsuit that alleged a life-altering injury. The city and its insurer, a pool funded by Virginia municipalities, ultimately paid $5 million to settle the case in December 2022, one of the largest settlements in Virginia that year.
“It had a life-changing effect on our client,” said McKenzie’s attorney Kevin W. Mottley, who described his client’s traumatic brain injury as part of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call a “silent epidemic.”
While the city contended that Ikefuna’s visibility could have been obscured by another vehicle parked in the crosswalk, the plaintiff’s attorneys argued that Ikefuna failed to check for pedestrians before turning. They also revealed the existence of police body-worn camera footage and deposed the city’s finance director, Chris Cullinan, who repeatedly described the intersection as “challenging.”
Ikefuna did not respond to Daily Progress inquiries after the settlement of the suit, and he also declined to respond to questions about his departure.
Despite the crash and the fact that his employment downgrade came one week before the suit was filed, city officials maintained then and still maintain that Ikefuna’s demotion was unrelated.
“There is no connection between what happened then and the lawsuit,” Schneider told The Daily Progess in a recent email. “Similarly, there is no connection to any of that to Mr. Ikefuna no longer being employed by the City now.”
The lawsuit, however, exposed a city on the defensive, with contracted lawyers resisting depositions and unsuccessfully seeking to keep the traffic citation from being presented to a jury.
No changes were made to the intersection after the incident, and the city has described the crash as an “unfortunate accident.”
Office closed, staff reassigned
The now-defunct Office of Community Solutions was formed with a mission to centralize housing and economic equity efforts. According to the city’s website, it aimed “to serve as a catalyst for positive change” through equitable housing access and community reinvestment.
Those functions are now being absorbed back into NDS.
“We believe integration of our Housing Division into NDS will facilitate collaboration between housing staff and planners,” Freas wrote in his email to city officials.
The transition comes less than a year after the city hired Kellie Brown, a former Arlington County planner, as the new NDS director.
Schneider said the office closure was part of a routine administrative restructuring and the department deserves credit for creating a repository for all grants as well as assembling a housing team.
“Now, these employees have been placed on teams throughout the organization that better align with their specific respective job functions,” she said. “This also promotes better cross collaboration and a higher degree of professional efficiency within the city.”
Lingering questions
One datapoint hovering over the early 2020 demotion was the fact that then-City Manager Tarron Richardson, silent about the crash, said Ikefuna’s salary of $139,526 would not change. His salary rose to $152,096 in 2023, according to the GovSalaries database, which aggregates municipal payroll records.
Despite the city’s efforts to move on, Ikefuna’s departure raises questions about accountability, transparency and the long-term fallout of continuing to pay a six-figure public salary after a multimillion-dollar liability.
If anyone in City Hall took a dim view of the situation, they did not air it publicly. By contrast, the city made statements recently attacking public dissent. On May 5, a city councilor criticized a resident for voicing concern about Charlottesville’s former traffic engineer’s refusal to paint more crosswalks on Elliott Avenue, near the place where an admittedly speeding driver killed a pedestrian.
Just 16 days after pedestrian advocate Kevin Cox received a scolding from City Councilor Brian Pinkston for an alleged “ad hominem attack” as he publicly upbraided former traffic engineer Brennen Duncan for refusing to slow traffic, Cox chalked a crosswalk of his own — and was arrested and charged with property destruction.
Cox’s arrest, which provoked headlines in newspapers worldwide, followed a discussion conducted via email between City Manager Sam Sanders and Police Chief Michael Kochis. Cox sees a pattern.
“The city managers put more effort into systematically protecting the staff,” he told The Daily Progress, “than they do in protecting the public from the staff.”
On June 17, voters in the city’s Democratic primary elections declined to renominate Pinkston, the third-place finisher in a contest that picked incumbent Councilor and Mayor Juandiego Wade and political newcomer Jen Fleisher.
However, sitting City Councilor Lloyd Snook asserts that he sides with the city’s traffic staff over Cox on safety because Cox’s chalked crosswalk lies on a sidehill with inadequate sightlines for motorists.
“I have often appreciated Kevin and his efforts, and he has often been right on pedestrian safety issues,” Snook told The Daily Progress in an email, “but on this one, he is wrong.”
As Charlottesville continues to struggle with controversies over planning, housing and road safety, the fate of one of its most ambitious city initiatives — and the man who once led it — may be part of a larger story about leadership, liability and the long shadow of public trust.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com