Good morning, RVA! It’s 41 °F, and highs today will hover around the low 60s. It’ll take awhile to get there, so make sure you leave the house wearing plenty of layers.
Water cooler
Y’all! Last week, I forgot to mention that I’m in Pittsburgh through Wednesday for Rail~volution, a transit conference just as nerdy as it sounds. This impacts your life because Good Morning, RVA will switch into Lite Mode™ until I get back to Richmond. Take note!
Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a long and thorough piece about where we stand on school funding, new taxes, and Paul Goldman’s continued attempts to run the City via ballot referendum 💸. That last one, in particular, bothers me—the City’s Charter is not the place to cram all of these aspirational thoughts and feelings about schools or Coliseums.
The RTD’s Tom Silvestri announced that after the 2018 election, the newspaper will no longer make editorial endorsements. He gives a bunch of reasons, but mostly cites the confusion readers have with the separation between news and editorial. If this sounds like a confusion you have in general, one that is unrelated election endorsements, you are not alone! Read this thread from the mysterious Twittter account @RTDBrainTrust, from which I’ll quote a bit: “@RTDOpinions' rationale for no longer publishing endorsements is the same rationale for no longer publishing editorials: conflating news and opinion in same company, media arrogance, history of rich, powerful owners pushing their views.”
J. Elias O’Neal at Richmond BizSense says almost three hundred new units are coming to Manchester near the Lee Bridge. It’s hard for me to tell from the article what exactly is going on down there, but it seems like a mix of apartment buildings and townhomes with a plan to reconnect some of the street grid. As always, I wonder if they’re building too much parking.
Hmmm small-batch, non-dairy cheese? I was skeptical, but I like this pitch from the maker, “You go to drink Coke and you get Pepsi and you have a negative reaction, and it’s not because it wasn’t good, it’s because you didn’t get what you expected.”
Today’s Rail~volution takeaway: Pittsburgh has something like 800 sets of public stairs! Recently, they just spent a million bucks to completely replace a decaying set, which made me think about Richmond’s own decaying public stairs (mostly in the East End). I wonder if there’s any political will to spend a tiny bit of cash to clean up the steps we’ve got in town?