🔨 Good morning, RVA: Buses three ways, a new budget, and a property auction

Good morning, RVA! It’s 26 °F, and today should be sunny and cold with highs in the 40s. Now that’s more December-like weather.

Water cooler

Michael Paul Williams has thoughts about the School Board’s failure to rezone the Northside 💸. We’re all on the same page here, but I do take issue with some of his framing. I want to be super clear: The blame for implicitly endorsing the status quo of segregated Northside schools lies solely with the School Board. Rezoning is their responsibility—not the Superintendent, City Council, or the Mayor. The RPS administration designed and implemented a year-long rezoning plan, and, at least for the Northside, the School Board failed to act on it in any way. If, as Williams suggests, “the district lacked the nuts-and-bolts information about how pairing would work and the persuasive force to convert the skeptics it should have known were out there on this contentious issue,“ then there is an elected official for that district whose job it is to educate and listen to their constituents. 1st District’s Liz Doerr provided a pretty good model for elected folks to start with. So what’s next? For rezoning, who knows. But to combat segregation, Superintendent Kamras has a bunch of non-rezoning policy tools at his disposal—Passion4Learning being the most immediate but flip through the Dreams4RPS strategic plan (PDF) to see all sorts of equity-focused actions. Folks should be just as supportive of those policy initiatives as they were about rezoning.

The RTD’s C. Suarez Rojas was at GRTC’s board meeting yesterday and mostly covers the board’s conversation on fare evasion. Two things that I am able to believe simultaneously: 1) We shouldn’t waste too much time, effort, and money enforcing fare payment on the Pulse, and 2) The current company providing the fare enforcement is doing a bad job. I love this quote from GRTC CEO Julie Timm, “We need to change the conversation from fare evasion into helping people learn how to use the system and pay.” Also, and I think this is so super important given how easily it is for information to get twisted and then spread far and wide, GRTC has no plans to arm fare enforcement officers and was never going to anyway. Here’s Timm again, “Fare enforcement officers are required to have armed officer training in order to issue a summons; however, GRTC fare enforcers are not armed. Putting armed officers on our buses to issue court summons to our riders will not prevent fare evasion, and I do not believe anyone is suggesting we do that. It is the wrong answer for our system and our community.”

One other small bus-related update, because I can’t help myself: The agenda for yesterday’s GRTC board meeting (PDF) contains this fascinating discussion item: “Articulated Buses.” One straightforward way to increase the capacity and reliability of the Pulse is to just get bigger buses. I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I think articulated buses would be cheaper than running MORE of the standard buses in the long run. Plus it gives GRTC some experience with the bendy buses and an excuse to eventually get a few more for some of the busier routes (looking at you #1ABC).

OK, fine, a THIRD bus-related thing—deal with it! Sean Gorman at the RTD says Chesterfield’s Planning commission approved plans to “build up to 1,250 housing units on property surrounding the Stonebridge shopping center at the former Cloverleaf Mall site.” Honestly, this is a perfect spot for great bus service: lots of homes, a grocery store, and a walkable area (at least internal to the development) that sits along a major corridor. It’s already even served by a 30-minute bus into town! So when I read things like, “A county analysis found that the development could generate 8,800 additional trips a day on Midlothian Turnpike, as well as neighborhood roads to the south of the turnpike. The proposal calls for a series of road improvements in the area to help alleviate added traffic.” I wonder why getting the County to pay for more frequent bus service to the development is not a top priority.

The Virginia Mercury’s Ned Oliver has the details on Governor Northam’s new budget that dropped yesterday. He’s also handing $200 million to the New Dem Majority to see what they come up with, which sounds exciting.

A bunch of the Southside properties previously owned by the Hilds went up for auction yesterday, and J. Elias O’Neal at Richmond BizSense has the details. It sounds like a handful of developers bought up the larger properties and some will look to continue the Hilds’ planned renovations or expansions. That part of town continues to grow and nothing as trivial as a federal criminal investigation will stop it!

Oh no! / This is exciting! CEO of the American Civil War Museum, Christy Coleman, will leave the museum next month to take the head job at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. It’s always a bummer when awesome and talented people leave Richmond, but how can you not be stoked for awesome and talented people moving on to do big things elsewhere?

Tonight, the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission will host their penultimate public hearing at 6:00 PM in the Hickory Hill Community Center (3000 E. Belt Boulevard). After tomorrow, that’s it! The Commission will then, presumably, retreat to their dry, warm, and safe burrow and begin working on their recommendation for City Council. I do not envy them their task, but am pretty dang excited to read what they come up with.

This morning’s longread

The Siege of Carrie Lam (Idle Words)

Is the person who runs the Pinboard bookmarking service one of the most interesting people in the world? Maybe! After spending the 2016 campaign season raising money for under-the-radar Democrats (and teaching campaigns about digital security), they’re now in Hong Kong writing about the ongoing protests.

Police were everywhere. Blue-jacketed media liaisons (meant to be the kindler, gentler face of the Hong Kong police force) admonished everyone to stay on the sidewalk. Every so often a red taxi parted the crowd to disgorge a lucky citizen, like the winner of a Willy Wonka golden ticket, who would be allowed inside to ask, for the first time in 17 weeks, just what the hell the Hong Kong Chief Executive thought she was doing.

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This morning’s Instagram