🐢 Good morning, RVA: Council returns, tall buildings, and a look at the budget

Good morning, RVA! It’s 73 °F—which is today’s low—and this afternoon you can expect hot, hot highs around 100 °F. You should steel yourself against these end-of-summer temperatures, because the next two days will bring more of the same. But! By Friday, things will start to cool off, and next weekend we may even get a taste of fall!
 

Water cooler

Welcome back, City Council and Friends! The start of September means the return of Council and Committee meetings after their regularly scheduled August vacation. On today’s agenda we’ve got three meetings of note. First, Planning Commission will gather to once again consider the Airbnb ordinance (ORD. 2023–235) and hear options from staff around the proposed primary residency requirement. Staff (and probably every civic association under the sun) supports requiring people who operate Airbnbs in residential neighborhoods to live in those Airbnbs—with a couple exceptions for outbuildings or ADUs. This, from staff’s perspective, will help preserve as much housing as possible and keep it from turning into vacation rentals. You can read through staff’s reasoning in this presentation. I thought Planning Commission would move forward on this ordinance last month, but they asked for a few more options to consider instead. We’ll see what they get up to today! Second, City Council will hold a special meeting to consider “a resolution to express support for the dedication of revenue from the proposed destination resort and casino to fund a Child Care and Education Trust Fund and the construction of certain early childhood care centers.” I have two immediate thoughts: “bleh” and “I thought we were designating the theoretical revenue of a Southside casino to projects on the Southside?” Finally, Council’s Organizational Development committee will meet and consider ORD. 2023–188, the ordinance that would set up a Public Utilities and Services Commission. Who knows how effective this commission will/could be, but it has the potential to tackle things like consumer rates and, eventually, phasing out the gas utility entirely.
 

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports that some of the proposals rolling in for the planned City Center development will include some serious height: “Richmond Community Development Partners…has revised its proposal to include an even taller hotel, totaling 40 stories and 450 feet in height. That height would make the hotel 1 foot taller than the current tallest building in Richmond, the James Monroe Building.“ I love this (slightly petty) energy! If you want to build the tallest building in Richmond, the dead center of the city is the exact right place to do it. Tap through to read more details on each of the four proposals.
 

There’s something incredibly soothing in this piece by Style Weekly’s Mary Scott Hardaway about McLean’s new dinner service. It’s the same breakfast menu that’s been around forever, but it’s their first time serving it for dinner in 30 years. I love this sort of vibe: “They’ll introduce some weekly specials, too, nothing crazy—think a fried chicken dinner with sides like sweet potatoes and corn pudding. ‘We’re giving the daytime chef the choice to do what he wants,’ says Kelleher.”
 

The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong has a bunch of the details from the General Assembly’s super late budget compromise. Lawmakers will head back to the Capitol for a special session tomorrow and will then send their budget across the street for the Governor’s signature. He, theoretically, could propose a bunch of amendments, but that would only delay the already embarrassingly slow process further, which seems like a bad look.
 

This morning’s longread

What the contradiction of slavery tells us about abortion rights

I should just always pencil in Jamelle Bouie for the longread on the first day back after a weekend. In his most recent email, he compares antebellum efforts to limit the movement of Black people between states to today’s efforts by Republicans to stop people from traveling across state lines for abortions.
 

The reason to compare these proposed limits on travel within and between states to antebellum efforts to limit the movement of free or enslaved Black people is that both demonstrate the limits of federalism when it comes to fundamental questions of bodily autonomy. It is not tenable to vary the extent of bodily rights from state to state, border to border. It raises legal and political questions that have to be settled in one direction or another. Are women who are residents of anti-abortion states free to travel to states where abortion is legal to obtain the procedure? Do anti-abortion states have the right to hold residents criminally liable for abortions that occur elsewhere? Should women leaving anti-abortion states be considered presumptively pregnant and subject to criminal investigation, lest they obtain the procedure?
 

If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

Found this little guy out on one of Northside’s guerrilla mountain bike trails.