Mayor Dwight C. Jones entered City Hall in 2009 amid the worst recession in 75 years. He sought to be “a unifier” who would end the turmoil between the Mayor’s Office, City Council and the School Board and would create a Richmond people were proud of.

Having faced setbacks and criticism, Mayor Jones will step down Dec. 31 from a much-altered city that, despite a continuing high level of poverty, is experiencing growth in jobs and population, attracting waves of residential and business development and winning a national reputation as great place to live, work and play.

While the incoming mayor, Levar Stoney, is promising to reverse the dysfunction he sees in city government, Mayor Jones believes he has led a productive government and is leaving an excellent record for his successor to build on.

“I think we’ve done well,” Mayor Jones said in looking at the changes his administration, along with City Council, have ushered in during his eight years as Richmond’s chief executive.

The 68-year-old Philadelphia native, who came to Richmond to attend Virginia Union University in the late 1960s, offered his views in a wide-ranging interview with the Free Press following the election of his successor.

He spent 15 years in the General Assembly before winning the mayor’s race in 2008 to replace outgoing Mayor L. Douglas Wilder. As mayor, he has earned $149,000 a year, including $24,000 in deferred retirement pay, which is the same salary Mr. Stoney will receive.

Among other things, Mayor Jones believes Richmond has become more competitive with its county neighbors and more attractive to young people during his tenure.

He points to his administration’s success in attracting businesses that will provide hundreds of jobs, such as the real estate data company CoStar Group Inc. and Stone Brewing Co. that is beefing up Richmond as the capital of craft beer brewing.

He has sought to tackle poverty in a meaningful way and is proud of the work his administration has done to include businesses owned by African-Americans and minorities in city contracts.

He also believes the city has gained important payoffs from investments in economic developments, including hosting an international cycling race last year that brought global attention to the city and building a training camp for the Washington NFL football team.

“No one wants to report that the training camp is part of a $40 million development deal,” he groused, that includes a new Bon Secours nursing school to be developed in a former West End school building and a new medical office space to go up near the Bon Secours Richmond Community Hospital in the city’s East End.

Still, he said the biggest challenge he faced will continue to be the challenge Mayor-elect Stoney faces — increasing growth to pump up city revenues that still fall short of meeting the city’s needs on a host of fronts.

During the past year, he heard plenty about “there being a lot of money hidden away. Whoever sits in this chair will have to find ways to generate more revenue because there is no money sitting around.”

He said that “some efficiencies can be found that might bring in more money, and we tried to find them.” But the reality, he said, is that Richmond, which is barred from annexation, is locked into 62 square miles, “and that means you have to use what you have.”

The mayor said that is why his administration has been so intent on bringing development to the 60 acres on the Boulevard where The Diamond baseball stadium now stands.

“This is the city’s premier economic development opportunity to generate more dollars to pay for schools and antipoverty initiatives,” he said.

In his view, the city at some point will need to raise taxes, and he believes his successor will come to that conclusion as well.

“The needs of the city are greater than the resources the city has,” he said. “We’ve been hitting hard at economic development, but, at some point, the city will need to raise additional streams of revenue. The money will have to come from somewhere.”

Asked if those who campaigned for mayor were naïve about the challenges, he said, “You don’t know the real deal until you sit in this chair. Candidates run on what people say is wrong. They run on complaints they are going to solve. It’s a simplistic view of a very complicated position.”

He said his successor will learn what he did — that “it takes a lot of time and energy to get things done.”

What his successor also will find is a city splashed with an array of projects in various stages of completion, ranging from the Maggie L. Walker statue going up on Broad Street in Downtown, to the transformation of the Creighton Court public housing complex into a mixed-income residential development, and the development of a slavery memorial museum on the site of Lumpkin’s Jail, a site where enslaved people were auctioned that later became the founding site for the mayor’s alma mater, VUU.

That doesn’t count all the completed projects, such as the Williamsburg-to-Richmond Capital Trail, a new riverfront park and the T. Tyler Potterfield Memorial Bridge in Downtown that allows people to cycle or walk across the James River.

Mayor Jones can tick off strides the city has made on the environmental and health fronts, including hiring coordinators who focus on boosting cycling and improving the city’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint.

On his watch, the city also has built four new schools and replaced the worn-out jail.

“People may not give me much credit for building a new jail,” he said, “but how can you have a great city when you have a jail where people die of heat exhaustion. We got rid of a God-awful place and replaced it with a modern facility.”

However, his proudest accomplishment — one that grows out of his other role as a Baptist minister — is the work he has done to “significantly elevate the discussion of the 26 percent of our residents who live poverty.”

Leading historic First Baptist Church of South Richmond for 43 years, Mayor Jones said, “I’ve been accused of only wanting shiny things,” but the anti-poverty work the city has undertaken “is not shiny. But you can’t have a healthy city when only 74 percent of people live above the poverty line.”

He said he has pushed his administration to keep the issue of poverty in mind in shaping the budget and in undertaking programs.

He said many in the city are unaware of the economic divide that makes Richmond, like many localities, “a tale of two cities.”

Begun with an advisory group, the effort has morphed with City Council support into the creation of the city’s anti-poverty initiative, the Office of Community Wealth Building that tries to tackle poverty issues by creating wraparound services.

The work of the office has included projects involving reading and job readiness, and programs to train welders and chefs in seeking to increase access to good jobs.

This kind of effort is a must for this city, said the mayor, or else “Richmond will continue to be divided, continue to have the same kind of problems that dovetail into crime and all of the social issues and ills.”

“One reason for failing schools is failing families,” he said. “To have children do well in school, you have to have children who are ready for school. That means day care, transportation, health care, all kinds of stuff. And it means good jobs, which is why we have put our job readiness program next to Social Services.”

While he acknowledges the Office of Community Wealth Building and its work are still in their infancy, he believes “we’ve laid a heck of a foundation” for the next mayor to build upon.

Dr. John Moeser, a retired Virginia Commonwealth University professor of urban studies and planning and a senior fellow at the University of Richmond’s Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, agrees.

“Mayor Jones’ greatest accomplishment, and it was a significant one,” Dr. Moeser said, “was the creation of the Anti-Poverty Commission, the development of implementation plans for each of the commission’s recommendations and the establishment of the Maggie L. Walker Office of Community Wealth Building, the only one of its kind in the nation.”

As the city’s top executive, Mayor Jones has struggled to keep agencies on track, including the Finance Department, which pays bills and collects taxes. He went through several chief financial officers and finance directors. Just getting an audit completed has been a struggle in recent years.

With help from a trusted aide, David M. Hicks, now a Richmond judge, the mayor overhauled the Juvenile Detention Center and the Department of Social Services, which ran into trouble over its protection of vulnerable children.

Still he brushes off suggestions that he engaged in cronyism in the hiring of top executives who also belong to his church.

Last week, the mayor was exonerated following an extensive 10-month investigation of claims that he allowed his work as mayor to illegally overlap with his church, particularly during the church’s development of a satellite sanctuary in Chesterfield County. No evidence was found that he or any member of his administration had used city resources to benefit the church, according to a report from Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael N. Herring.

Asked about the fact that five of the 58 members of his executive management team are members of his church, he said those who were hired “were fully vetted” on their qualifications and went through the regular interview process.

“Out of 4,000 employees at City Hall and a church that has 3,000 members, there obviously is going to be some overlap,” he said. It happens in other large organizations, he said.

Perhaps his biggest setback was City Council’s repudiation of his plan to create a new baseball home for the Richmond Flying Squirrels, the San Francisco Giants Double A affiliate, in Shockoe Bottom as part of a larger development of apartments and a grocery store.

Mayor Jones said that everyone forgets there was no pro baseball in Richmond when he took office as the Richmond Braves had left.

He was able to work with the Eastern League and persuade the Flying Squirrels to move from Norwich, Conn., to Richmond. Replacing The Diamond seemed to be part of the deal.

He said that cities across the country have built stadiums in their downtowns to stimulate economic development. And he saw it as enabling the city to gain the maximum development out of the Boulevard property.

However, “the possibility of a big-time development in the Bottom did not get the public support it needed, so of course we needed to go to Plan B,” he said. The good news, he said, is that Virginia Commonwealth University now wants to build a new stadium for the Squirrels and its college team in the area of the Boulevard, but off the 60 acres of city property that are to be developed.

“So we have made lemonade out of lemons,” he said.

There are many who give Mayor Jones high marks for his efforts and think the African-American community has benefited from his being in office.

“Many would claim that he did little for black people. I believe he has done more for black children than any mayor in the past 30 years,” said Arthur Burton, a community activist who founded and operates a self-help group called Kinfolks Community in Mosby Court, an East End public housing community.

Along with building new schools and replacing an inhumane jail that serves a largely black population, Mayor Jones also stabilized recreation and began to deal with the dysfunction in Social Services, Mr. Burton said.

In addition, the mayor sought to “preserve and honor the history of the black community,” Mr. Burton noted, including removing asphalt from the slave burial ground, upgrading slave trail markers and honoring the first black mayor and first majority-black City Council with street signs.

Mayor Jones created difficulties for himself, Mr. Burton said. “He didn’t trust the community with his vision for the city and didn’t feel the need to explain what he was trying to do, so he came off as arrogant, aloof and unreachable.”

If Mayor Jones has a regret, it is that he could not do more to work with Richmond Public Schools on improving education, which he regards as a key to fighting poverty.

“We have talked about school buildings, but we have not talked about education,” he said, including the decline in school accreditation, the percentage of students who are not passing the state Standards of Learning tests and the low graduation rate.

The popular cry “to give money to schools has been so overwhelming,” he said, that it has drowned out concerns for accountability on how the money is spent.

Now counting the days until he leaves office, Mayor Jones is not saying what he might do next.

He said he plans to “relax, refresh and think about what comes next.”