One of the few places where the city seems to spend less is educational instruction: $1,141 per capita for Richmond, vs. $1,224 for the average Virginia city — an odd and disturbing deviation when the city spends so much more per pupil than most other localities. Here, the citizens deserve better accountability from the School Board. Its members sit in an enviable position: They can collect several hundred million dollars from the city, and then spend it any way they please, with little to no accountability to those who foot the bill. Where is the money going?

The question pertains to Richmond’s budget in general. Thanks to the complete chaos of the city’s finance department, it’s hard to know with certainty whether allocations match up with expenditures.

But that goes directly to the mayor’s argument, which depends for its force on an unproven assumption: that all other city departments are spending their funds efficiently and effectively. That’s clearly not the case in the Department of Social Services, which has been the subject of multiple scathing reviews. It’s not the case in the Finance Department, either.