Good morning, RVA! It's 55 °F, and I’ve got some personal news.

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Bittersweet news: This is the last edition of Good Morning, RVA for the foreseeable future! I’ve taken a job with the City’s Office of Strategic Communications and Civic Engagement—which I’m incredibly stoked about—and I think this professional transition marks the perfect time to press pause on this, Richmond’s premiere zoning and rezoning newsletter.

The last time I had to write a post like this it was for dramatic and sad reasons: Closing down RVANews because I couldn’t find a way to financially support a newsroom of multiple people doing good work in an industry that was (and still is!) struggling to figure out how to make ends meet. This time, though, I get to write a see-you-around post (very different from a so-long post) with a much better perspective: Making a proactive choice to do something new. I’m excited to move on, interested in exploring new projects, and, without a doubt, looking forward to getting a little more sleep each morning—because, to answer a Frequently Asked Question, I do (did!) write everything fresh each morning, waking up at 5:15 AM (another FAQ) to make tea and read the news.

Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F already, and that’s about the temperatures you can expect today, with highs creeping up a tiny bit to 70 °F by lunchtime. At that point it’ll probably start to rain. Deal with it, though, because come tomorrow morning, the sun will come out, and we’ll be headed into a long stretch of really beautiful weather.

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Part of the official GMRVA process each morning includes checking the City Auditor’s website for fresh, hot-off-the-presses audits. Today, I found two new documents—the first for this year and the first from the City’s new auditor Riad Ali:

1. Non-Audit Services: Meals Tax Delinquent Notifications

2. Citywide - Continuous Auditing

Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and if you can squeak past this morning’s chance of light rain, I think you’ll have a warm and dry day. Expect highs in the upper 70s and lots of clouds. For me, I’m definitely riding my bike in slip ons with one pant leg rolled up—my final form.

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The City posted the video from this past Monday’s third budget session, and I’ve gone ahead and put it up on the Boring Show. This is when I make the joke about listening at 2x speed—which, for me, is not a joke and definitely what I actually do, and to hear Councilmembers speak at 1x speed when I see them in real life makes me feel like I’m dodging bullets in The Matrix. Anyway, this week’s episode clocks in at just over three hours, so you’re gonna want to set aside some serious time if you plan on listening. I’ll most likely permit it to pass over and through me during a couple bike rides and laundry foldings—you should do the same! If you’d rather just scroll through some slides, make sure you grab all three decks: the operating budget, the City’s revenue, and its compensation and benefits plan.

Good morning, RVA! It's 58 °F, and today looks cloudy but with amazing highs right around 80 °F. You can expect cooler temperatures over the next couple of days—with each a little cooler than the last—but nothing that’ll make you break out your big shirts and wool socks. I think we did it! We finally turned the corner, and spring is here to stay!

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In accordance with the timeline set out by state law, the Governor has “completed action” on all 1,046 pieces of legislation the General Assembly sent his way. Head over to the State’s legislative website to find the full list of bills he signed, amended, and vetoed.

The budget sits in that middle bucket of amended bills, and Graham Moomaw, Charlie Paullin, and Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury report that Governor Youngkin has sent the budget back with 233 suggested amendments. That’s a lot of amendments, and I have no idea how successful the General Assembly will be in sorting them all out. Are they designed like dominoes, where if the GA rejects one amendment the rest of them cascade into dust? Is the budget still even balanced? I guess we’ll find out in the coming weeks; legislators return to Richmond on April 17th.

Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and today looks absolutely lovely. Expect clear skies for most of the day and, after lunch, highs in the 70s. Other than some rain Thursday evening, this week’s weather look great. I hope I’ll see you out there!

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Reminder! We’ve got a partial eclipse (of the heart) today! The astronomical party starts at 2:02 PM and runs through 4:31 PM, but peaks right at 3:19 PM. Schools have changed schedules, business will have rescheduled meetings, and people will probably stare up into the sun while driving their cars. Enjoy, because the next eclipse visible from the Commonwealth will take place on May 11th, 2078.

Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and temperatures bottom out today and tomorrow (as much as they can “bottom out” in the middle of spring, I guess). You should expect highs in the 50s, some sunshine to warm things up a bit, and a forced return to your sock drawer. Sunday, things start to warm up again, and then, by this coming Tuesday, we’re back to the springtime 70s. We’ve got plenty to enjoy before then though, so throw on an additional layer and spend a bit of time outside with these sunny skies!

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Yesterday, GRTC announced they’ve won a big $750,000 grant from the Federal Transit Administration to help kick off some very important land use planning. Specifically, the money will “plan for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) on Chamberlayne Avenue in advance of GRTC’s future North/South Pulse Bus Rapid Transit Line.” I imagine the final product will look something like 2017’s Pulse Corridor Plan, which helped the City figure our the proper land use and zoning around Broad Street ahead of actually building the Pulse. Spend six seconds driving down Chamberlayne Avenue and you’ll see a corridor with industrial sections that need drastic upzoning and sleepy sections of old single-family-home street-car suburbs. It’s a complex corridor and will need a thoughtful planning process to figure out the best way to build great transit that’s supported by great neighborhoods.

Also, did you catch that GRTC called this north-south BRT the “Pulse” too? I think that’s the first time I’ve seen “Pulse” used when referring to this new potential line. That makes the most sense to me; we don’t need to have cute names for each and every bus rapid transit line we build. We will, however, need some sort of way to differentiate these lines eventually—by color or number or something. Cardinal direction won’t work when we have a bunch of these things running diagonally across the region.

Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and whoa it rained hard up here on the Northside last night. Today, you can expect highs in the mid 50s, so I hope you didn’t pack away all your flannels and big shirts (what my house inexplicably calls sweatshirts). I think we should see the sun at some points both today and tomorrow, so maybe by this weekend things’ll have dried out enough that all the mountain bike trails will be open and ready to shred!

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As foretold, I spent my bus trips yesterday with an absolute must-listen episode of The Boring Show. No joke, City Council’s second budget work session, which features a presentation about the Children’s Funding Project and then Superintendent Kamras walking through his proposed budget for Richmond Public Schools, is really something anyone interested in supporting RPS and our city’s kids should give a listen.

First, the Children’s Funding Project! Earlier this week, I’d forgotten I’d written about the Children’s Funding Project back in October. Back then, at one of Council’s Education and Human Services committee meetings, they’d teased a “fiscal map” that would lay out the funding streams for any and all things supporting children. They’ve now completed that map, and it seems like a really cool tool for doing deeper analysis which you then hope leads to better and more-informed decision making. Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the tool at the moment, but you can watch a demo of it here (staring around the seven minute mark).

Good morning, RVA! It's 54 °F, and rain is headed our way. You should expect wet weather for most of the morning and maybe even into the afternoon. Temperatures look great, though, with highs in the mid 70s. Soak it up, because, starting tomorrow, we’ve got about a week of highs in the 50s before we again see temperatures that start with a seven.

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VPM’s Patrick Larsen has an update on DPU’s Combined Sewer Overflow work at Gillies Creek. Look at this amazing stat: “In 2019, the sewer outfall there overflowed 43 times. The city’s installing a new sewer pipe and relocating the outfall point to increase capacity — and take advantage of unused sewer system space. When construction is completed this fall, officials expect that under the same rainfall conditions, overflows will be cut from 43 to five.” This particular project is part of the important work to limit the amount of actual poopy sewage that ends up in the river during extreme rain events—which are only getting more and more frequent. And while this work is good and important and should be a priority for the City, the General Assembly has legislated Richmond into doing it and doing it along a pretty unrealistic timeline. Not only that, but the GA and Governor have subsequently failed to properly fund the City, so meeting that timeline doesn’t feel entirely possible. Larsen reports that the Commonwealth’s current proposed budget allocates $50 million towards Richmond’s sewers, but that lawmakers rejected an amendment to add another $100 million (which would have made up for the money “forgotten” in last year’s budget).

Good morning, RVA! It's 51 °F, and today looks cloudy but amazing. Expect highs in the mid 70s, no reason at all to wear socks, and a near perfect opportunity late in the afternoon to sit on the stoop and watch the day end. Tomorrow, rain returns and cooler weather follows immediately.

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Richmond Police are reporting that an officer shot and killed an individual on the 1900 block of Cedar Street earlier this week. Here’s some information describing the incident, quoted directly from the RPD press release: “Yesterday at approximately 4:58 a.m., officers were called to the 1900 block of Cedar Street for the report of a disturbance with an armed person. Officers arrived on the scene within minutes and located the male suspect, [Kenneth] Sharp. After a brief encounter during which Sharp produced a firearm, Sharp was shot. He was transported to a local hospital where he later succumbed to his injuries.“ Police Chief Rick Edwards has said in the past that, following fatal shootings by police officers, his department would produce and release a “Critical Incident Briefing video” featuring audio and video from the investigation—from sources like body cameras and 911 calls. RPD hopes to release the briefing video for this incident within the next two weeks.

Good morning, RVA! It's 49 °F, and, while we’ve got a decent chance for rain this afternoon, the temperatures look downright amazing. Expect highs in the 70s for today and the next two days until more seasonable weather moves back in. You know, despite the rain, I’m really feeling Richmond’s current weather patterns, mostly because my yard is absolutely exploding with springtime action: hostas, apple blossoms, red buds, coreopsis, and clematis—every dang thing!

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Happy, April 1st! Just a quick reminder that some of the things you see on the internet today may be fake—although brands spending their time making up entirely fake product lines seems like a less successful marketing strategy these days. You can, of course, be assured that the thrilling content below about budgets, legislation, and potholes is as real as real gets!

Good morning, RVA! It's 46 °F and still rainy—at least from where I’m sitting. The chance of rain dwindles as the day progresses, but the weather most likely won’t dry out entirely until this afternoon. The slog through today is worth it, though, because the weekend looks stunning: Sunny and clear with highs in the mid 60s and 70s.

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Yesterday, the Mayor introduced his FY25 budget, and you can watch the video of his remarks via the City’s legislative website, listen to them at 2x over on The Boring Show, or read them as prepared in this PDF. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Em Holter has an overview and, of course, you can dive straight into the official proposed budget document here.

I haven’t had much time to dig through the PDF yet, but highlights include: pay raises for City employees, $21 million for street maintenance (that covers paving but can also include additional infrastructure like sidewalks and bike lanes), $10 million to make improvements to Brown’s Island, $6.1 million for the Fall Line Trail, and a $15.8 million increase for Richmond Public Schools. There’s a bunch to discuss, of course, but that last item for schools will be top of mind for a lot of folks. Remember: The budget passed by the RPS School Board requested an additional $25 million from the City, and they’ll now need to come up with $9 million worth of cuts.

Good morning, RVA! It's 44 °F, and rain should move into the region before lunch. As you’re trapped inside or hiding under eaves and awnings, you can expect highs in the mid 50s. The wet weather will most likely continue straight on through to tomorrow afternoon, dumping upwards of two inches of rain onto our already sodden region. Hang in there, because clear skies and a beautifully warm weekend sits just around the corner.

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Today at 3:00 PM, Mayor Levar Stoney will introduce his FY25 budget at City Council Chambers. He’ll give some prepared remarks, which usually serve as a sort of budget executive summary, and, should you find yourself with some time to spare this afternoon, you can stream the whole thing live over on the City’s legislative website. PDFs of both the Annual Fiscal Plan (operating budget) and Capital Improvement Plan (capital budget) should be available online shortly thereafter. I’ll make sure to get the Mayor’s speech up on The Boring Show as soon as I can, because I’m sure it’ll be worth a listen.

By the way, I put this past Monday’s City Council kickoff session up last night, so, if you hurry, you can listen to that before the Mayor gets to speechifying later this afternoon. It’s only 38 minutes long—just 19 minutes at 2x—and something you could crush out on your morning commute or maybe even while eating breakfast. Oh, also, you should just subscribe to The Boring Show in the podcast player of your choice, too.

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today you should expect cloudier skies with highs in the 60s. A bunch more rain shows up tomorrow morning and will probably hang around until Thursday evening, so get ready for another couple days of squishy, soggy weather.

It sure seems like it’s been a wet March, doesn’t it? I wanted to know if my gut feeling matched reality, or if I’m just annoyed about how all the wet weather keeps me from riding my bicycle as often as I’d like. So, I turned to my favorite, overly complex weather website, which says that days with “at least 0.04 inches of liquid or liquid-equivalent precipitation” are considered wet days, and in March we typically see 8.5 wet days. Turns out, so far this month, we’ve had seven wet days—just the regular amount! As is often the case, my gut is just frustrated and wishes it were riding a bicycle.

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While I await the video from yesterday’s Budget Season kickoff meeting with City Council, Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details to tide me over. To get ready for the Mayor’s budget presentation on Wednesday, Council has put together five big buckets to hold all of their own priorities: Strong futures for children and families; safe and clean neighborhoods; strategic infrastructure projects; planned growth, economic progress, and affordable housing; and responsible, accountable, and innovative government. If you really want to dig in, you can scroll through this 48-page PDF—hop down to page 30 for the list of specific priorities City Council wants funded and how much each of those priorities will cost. Next up: On Wednesday we’ll get to see how closely Council’s vision aligns with the Mayor’s vision.

Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and we’ve got an up-and-down weather week ahead of us. Today, expect clear skies and highs in the 60s; then get ready for cooler, wetter weather to move through on Wednesday; but, later, celebrate truly excellent weather this weekend with highs right around 70 °F. I know it’s early to start looking forward to the weekend, but too bad! I’m gonna do it anyway!

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City Council has a busy and fun schedule today. First, they’ll meet at 3:00 PM for their budget season kickoff—a thrilling meeting that mostly consists of them getting on the same page with their own priorities for the operating and capital budgets. This meeting can sometimes serve as a barometer for how spicy Council plans on getting with the Mayor’s proposed budget (which, remember, drops on Wednesday). You can tune in live over on the City’s website, and I’ll make sure to get the audio up on The Boring Show as soon as I can.

Second, Council will get together for their regularly scheduled meeting with a ton of items to consider, but they all sit entirely on the Consent Agenda. That’s sort of been the way of things lately, but it’s double smart considering the potentially long budget meeting beforehand. I mean, who wants to spend eight hours in meetings? Not this guy.

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, cold again, and that big rain I wrote about earlier in the week shows up tonight. After a day of cloudy skies and highs around 60 °F, you should expect the wet weather to start late this evening and continue straight on through until tomorrow afternoon. Sunday looks nice and crisp, though.

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It’s here! Yesterday, City Council released their schedule for the 2024 (aka FY2025) budget season! I’m excited and want to point out a couple important dates for you to put on your calendar:

1. This coming Monday, March 25th, Council will host their first budget work session—a sort of a pre-season game—to get everyone on the same page about shared priorities.

2. Then, on Wednesday, March 27th at 3:00 PM, the Mayor will introduce his budget, and this show will finally get on the road for real.

3. After that, we’ve got a handful of work sessions and public hearings before Council (theoretically) votes on a final, amended budget on May 13th.

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today we’ve got more of the same ahead of us today: Highs in the upper 50s and clear skies. I’ve got my eye on Saturday, which, according Weather.app, will dump over two inches of rain on our just-dried-out city. I guess if you’ve got outside plans, make sure they get done either today or tomorrow, because it’s gonna rain!

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John Murden at South Richmond News has put the City’s list of vacant properties onto a Google Map that you can scroll around on. I love this sort of citizen data project, and, almost 17 years ago (gasp!), I put together something similar with the help of a dear friend who died back in 2018. Daniel was so smart and kind and curious, and I’m constantly wondering what creative projects he’d have thrown himself into to support his community through the pandemic. What a loss for Richmond!

Anyway, here’s my one story about running a website dedicated to highlighting the details of Richmond’s vacant properties: A thousand years ago in 2007, a couple of weeks after launching VacantRichmond.com, some random man showed up in my office and threatened me with...I guess violence? He wasn’t specific about his intentions, but he was pretty upset about how I’d highlighted the fact that he owned a bunch of vacant properties, had for years, and was, at least partially, responsible for a bunch of safety issues in several neighborhoods across the city. It was scary and we called the cops!

Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and temperatures rebound today, heading back up into the upper 60s / maybe 70s. Expect some wind this afternoon, but, other than that, we’ve got some really excellent weather in front of us. In fact, this may be the warmest, most spring-like day in our 10-day-forecast future—make sure you get out there and enjoy it!

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Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the Virginia ABC’s $100 million revenue shortfall. Pressured by the Governor’s “chief transformation officer,” the ABC forecasted a 5% growth in sales revenue last summer but, adjusting for reality, has only seen an increase of 1.4%. Now folks are scrambling to figure out what went wrong and how to fill the sizable gap left in the state’s budget. Just to be super clear here, we’re talking about the Governor pushing the state’s liquor monopoly to find ways to sell more alcohol to more Virginians because it’s a core money generator for his budget. Seems like a legal retail marijuana market would also generate a ton of cash for the commonwealth, but, for some reason, the Governor’s “not interested” in that, and it’s hard for me to understand the difference between the two things!

Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, and, what the heck, I thought we’d fully moved on to spring. While I sit over here hoping my about-to-bloom azaleas make it through this mini cold snap, you can expect clear skies and highs in the mid 50s today. Looks like we might have one or two more potential overnight freezes ahead of us this week, so fingers crossed for the little plants out there!

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Today both the Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee and the Planning Commission meet for some good ol’ fashioned regularly scheduled meetings.

Land Use, Housing and Transportation will consider RES. 2024-R011, which would adopt Richmond Connects as the “official comprehensive transportation plan for the City of Richmond.” This is super exciting! The City hasn’t updated their official transportation plan in a ton of years, and we’re way past due for an update. The Richmond Connects team has put together a good plan—one that centers equity, community, and action—and, if you’d like, you can reach out to your City Council reps in support of it (or just to thank everyone for their hard work). After LUHT recommends this paper, which I think they totally will, it’ll head over to full Council to make it official official in the coming weeks.

Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and today you can expect cloudy skies and highs around 60 °F. That’s still basically springlike but is quite a drop from yesterday’s weather perfection. I think we’ll see these cooler temperatures stick around throughout the week, with a couple warmer days sprinkled in here and there.

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The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s editorial board did the research around VCU’s PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) that I couldn’t find the time to do last week, and I’m very thankful for it. Tap through to read the whole thing, but, as foretold, VCU pays the City of Richmond just a fraction of what they’d owe if they were required to pay real estate taxes. Some of the low points:

• Richmond misses out on $45 million dollars per year of real estate tax revenue due to all of the state-owned buildings downtown (and that includes VCU and the health system).

• The City receives just $3.8 million annually in PILOT payments from the State.

• And the State doesn’t even want to pay that much: “The state not only takes land and pays almost nothing in return, but it has a history of making only partial PILOT payments. And since 2014, the number of state-owned parcels subjected to PILOT decreased by more than half, from 71 to 32.”

Good morning, RVA! Whoa it is already 60 °F, and today you can expect highs right around 80 °F. For most of the day clouds will probably fill the sky as we wait for some potential rain to move in later this evening. Don’t get too down about it, though, because the rest of the weekend looks pretty dry with temperatures in the upper 60s. You should definitely plan to move forward with whatever full slate of excellent, outdoor weekend activities you already had planned.

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Yesterday, the Governor “took final action on 50 pieces of legislation, signing 30 bills into law and vetoing 20 bills.” In what’s either good news or bad news for RIchmond’s new women’s soccer team, the Governor vetoed HB 1167 which would have prevented the sale of English ivy in Virginia. Looks like the Governor is totally fine with sustaining a legal retail market for this particular weed.