👮‍♀️ Good morning, RVA: A new police chief, affordable housing funding, and transportation projects

Good morning, RVA! It’s 71 °F, and today looks like regular summer stuff. You can expect highs right around 90 °F, sunshine, sticky humidity, and iffy air quality (OK, that last one is slightly irregular but probably part of the deal moving forward). I don’t see much rain in the extended forecast so maybe set some reminders to keep your plants watered!
 

Water cooler

Jahd Khalil at VPM reports that Interim Police Chief Rick Edwards will become Actual Police Chief Rick Edwards at a swearing-in ceremony on Monday. You can read the City’s press release here, which, along with a ton of supportive quotes, details the process that lead to Edwards’s selection, which I appreciate. Out of 26 candidates, four made it past the initial screening, three accepted interviews, and Edwards was the hiring panel’s unanimous selection. James Millner of Virginia Pride said “Every candidate we interviewed was great, but Rick was exceptional. His deep love for the city, his understanding of its diversity, and his knowledge of the department make him the right choice for chief of police." RCOP, the police union, gave the most milquetoast quote (which, honestly, is probably a good sign) saying “RCOP looks forward to working with the new Chief in making the agency equitable and fair for our officers while developing better community relations. As with any Chief, RCOP will hold him to high standards and work together toward progress." Now Edwards will start pushing the department towards his own vision of policing in Richmond, and we’ll get to really see what he’s really all about. I’m keeping an open mind; during his time as interim chief he did not invent a fake mass shooting plot, so he’s got that going for him.
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Em Holter has a fascinating and confusing story about the future of the City’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund Board. I’ve read it a couple times now and still feel like I’m missing some of the pieces, but, at its core this seems like tension between the Mayor and City Council and their differing visions for how the City funds affordable housing.
 

Also at the RTD, Anna Bryson has some follow up from Governor Youngkin’s new anti-trans policies for public schools. Specifically, this update from RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras: “Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras said on Wednesday that he will recommend the school board reject the state’s new model guidance and maintain its current policies. ‘At RPS, our motto is to Teach with Love. That means embracing and protecting our students for exactly who they are,’ Kamras said in a statement (Twitter).” I’m sure the Governor’s new policies will show up on a School Board agenda (and court docket) in the immediate future, so stay tuned.
 

WRIC’s Will Gonzalez reports that Mayor Stoney will chair the Central Virginia Transportation Authority. This is the regional group that decides how to allocate millions of transportation dollars to projects across the region. Most of the money, like gobs and gobs of it, goes to funding highway widenings and building new, unnecessary interchanges. But! A nontrivial amount funds GRTC and a handful of great transportation projects, like the Fall Line Trail. I don’t know that having the Mayor chair the CVTA will actually mean more dollars for local projects or less focus on anti-climate highway projects, but a guy can hope?
 

This month’s Virginia Capital Trail Foundation newsletter, which you can sign up for here, notes estimated completion dates for two Capital Trail-related projects that I’m pretty excited about. First, down by Great Shiplock Park, the rerouting of the Trail off Dock Street and onto newly-acquired land adjacent to the river should wrap up as early as next summer. The current stretch of trail on Dock Street isn’t the worst thing imaginable, and it’s probably the safest protected bike lane in the City, but it does feel a bit like riding through a post apocalypse. The new riverside alignment should be green, serene, and a soothing balm to your blood pressure. The other project, also with a summer 2024 completion date, will add water and sewer to the Four Mile Creek Trailhead. Riding from the City out to Four Mile Creek and back, is a nice, breezy loop, but lacks a place to fill up your water bottle—and we all know how I feel about staying hydrated. Adding publicly accessible water to Four Mile Creek is huge win. Both of these projects are big upgrades for folks who use the Richmond region section of the Trail and both are due to arrive in about a year. Exciting stuff and just another reason to get yourself out on the Capital Trail if, for some reason, you haven’t yet!
 

This morning’s longread

How to Blow Up a Timeline

I’m still reading lots of thoughtful pieces about the demise of Twitter and the vacuum it leaves behind. For me, Mastodon remains the place that most matches my values and how my brain works, and, if you’d like to try it out, you can sign up over on the GMRVA-adjacent instance that I run at rva.fyi. Along with many brands, business, organizations, and politicians, I did join Threads and have started to experiment and have already received my first chortlely, well-actually reply from some random man. Threads seems a lot like Twitter. You can follow GMRVA over there if you want, but no promises on how long I stick around!
 

This same caution needs to be applied to Threads; one of the central questions is whether Twitter reached all the people who enjoy microblogging or whether Meta has some magic formula that will allow it to scale to a much larger population. That’s not ideal from a business perspective, but the upside is that those who made it through that great filter selected hard into Twitter’s unique experience. Most sane people don’t enjoy seeing a bunch of random bursts of text from strangers one after the other, but those that do really really love it. And, despite Twitter’s notoriously slow rate of shipping new features over the years, it eventually offered just enough knobs and dials for its users to wrestle their timelines into a fever dream of cacophonous public discourse that hasn’t been replicated elsewhere. More than any other social network, Twitter was one its users seized control of and crafted into something workable for themselves. To its heaviest and most loyal users, it felt at times like a co-op. Recent events remind us it isn’t.
 

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Picture of the Day

Feels like the world has ended in this picture.