School superintendent

Wilder, speaking off-camera, said Jewell-Sherman is too shy. Earlier, during the interview, he said a superintendent ideally should be forceful.

"Who speaks and who pushes and who does the work?" asked Wilder, who declined to say whether the superintendent should be replaced.

"The school system can't be run by a hundred cooks in the kitchen," he said. "If you've got a good superintendent and the board starts messing around with that person unduly, the public would run that board out, [and] say, 'don't bother with that superintendent for he's doing what we want.'"

Jewell-Sherman, who was in Washington giving a speech at the invitation of the Aspen Institute on improvements made in the school system, could not be reached for comment through her spokeswoman and did not return calls left last night.

City of the future

Wilder said he hoped Richmonders soon would see signs of work under the $300 million "City of the Future" program he announced two years ago. That plan called for building or renovating 15 schools, work on key cultural facilities, and improvements to parks, streets and sidewalks.

"We're moving along with a couple of things, but it is slower than we'd like to see," Wilder said. "But as far as schools are concerned, there's no need to mislead anyone -- nothing's been done."

Wilder blamed the school system for that. In one of several sharp attacks on the system's leadership during the interview, he said school officials have been unwilling to give him the detail he needs to free funds for construction and renovation projects, brushing off lists of 15 schools they proposed closing or a newly updated facilities plan submitted to City Council.

"No one has made a proposal to us," he said. "If you would close a significant number of schools and then make application or an understanding that we could build, would we build the schools? We'd move ahead with it. But we haven't seen anything like that. Nothing."

Appointed school boards

Wilder declined to say whether the city should return to a system of appointed school board members, as was suggested by about two dozen community and business leaders last year.

"I don't care. You still need to have the person at the top. That's where the buck stops," he said.

Still, he said, "Qualifications should be measured before popularity." And he went on to address a chapter of the city's history, stemming from its annexation of part of Chesterfield County, that he said has contributed to what he views as a dysfunction of the present elected school board system.

"First you have white flight. Then shortly behind that you had everyone who could afford to leave left. African-Americans and anyone else," he said. "So what did that leave? That left you people in districts where popularity was the measure of whether you would be selected, elected, or not. And so you had to be elected not based on qualification necessarily, or professionalism, but on popularity."

Reserve or debt?

Wilder said he wanted to set aside as a reserve some of the money he had planned to borrow to pay for building and renovating schools.

"I'd like to borrow from that sum 10 percent of $200 million to make people know that they won't have to worry about their taxes being raised or services being curtailed," Wilder said, referring to the portion of the City of the Future program originally promised for schools.

"That money is there for construction and for City of the Future purposes but if we needed to use it for these purposes we could," he said.

"The 10 percent of the $200 million -- that would be set aside for whatever, capital or operating," Wilder said. "I'm certainly not going to talk about building anything new when we're in a recession, when people are not having the services. We're going to raise their taxes? No. We're not going to do that under my administration."

A second term?

"I don't know that it's going to be all over next January," Wilder said. "There are so many people who don't want me to stop."

He added: "I think the average person who knows me understands that I'm not doing anything for me. I don't have a child in school. I don't need this job. I didn't run for this job for popularity or for image nor for legacy," he said. "I love the city. I want to do the best I can for the city."

Wilder said he has sought change where others have not.

"Richmond is a difficult place to change. I don't care who proposes it. It's a difficult place but because this is how we've always done it. And with that in mind, sometimes you drag, sometimes you push, sometimes you pull."

Legacy as mayor

Wilder said he hopes his legacy will be to show that "the buck has to stop on someone's shoulder," adding he ran on such issues as public safety, education, economic development and regional cooperation.

"My legacy I hope will be that I started it. That the dialogue is open, that people are beginning to see that they can participate in their government."

Asked to grade himself, he said, "Still trying. I wouldn't give myself an 'A' on anything; I wouldn't give myself failure on anything."

The Braves

"Tell me what we could have done, or what I should have done, not we, what I should have done. I think the Braves made up their minds some while back, early on, that they wanted a new stadium." he said. "If someone would tell me what it is I should have done, I'd like to know. No one has yet told me."

Wilder again pledged that Richmond would have a minor-league baseball team in 2009.

He emphasized that baseball is a regional effort and said he doesn't think the Braves situation has led people to question his ability to close big deals: "I don't think it's a question of whether I can get a big deal done. The question is whether I got the Braves done. And I don't think that the public associates the Braves with every other thing that's been done in this administration."

Contact Kiran Krishnamurthy at (804) 649-6810 or kkrishnamurthy@timesdispatch.com.

Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or dress@timesdispatch.com.

Staff writer Michael Martz contributed to this report.