🌊 Good morning, RVA: Deluge your delegates, scooter updates, and the marijuana market

Good morning, RVA! It’s 46 °F, and today you can expect highs in the 70s! Sure! You can look forward to even warmer temperatures tomorrow and then for rain to move in on Friday. I’ll wait until the end of the month to pull the data, but surely this has been a record-breakingly warm February, right?
 

Water cooler

I appreciate the directness in last night’s email from RPS Superintendent Kamras: “It’s crunch time for the state budget and we need your advocacy. Here’s the very short story: the Senate version of the budget is MUCH better for RPS and school divisions across the Commonwealth. Below are the Senators and Delegates who are meeting to hash out the final budget. Please deluge them with calls and emails advocating for the Senate’s budget.” Tap through the previous link to see the entire list of folks you should contact or copy/paste this list of comma-separated email addresses directly into your email client for easy deluging. Remember, keep it short, professional, and just tell them you support the Senate’s version of the budget. Related, the RPS School Board will host their own budget work session tonight at 6:00 PM at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. There’s no public comment period on the agenda, so you can show up to observe, if you really want, or you can just stream the meeting over on RPS’s YouTube.
 

Thad Green at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Henrico County will consider issuing real estate tax rebates to homeowners again. I continue to think it’s smart to issue rebates while assessments continue to rise alongside the (maybe fake?) specter of recession. The alternative of lowering the real estate tax—assuming you don’t want to just pay for more things—could put a jurisdiction in a real bind should the economy start to crumble. Richmond is, of course, in a way different place: With assessments still rising but with massively greater infrastructure, maintenance, and service needs. Given all that, it’ll be interesting to see if the Mayor includes something similar in his proposed budget this year.
 

Richmond BizSense’s Jack Jacob reports that the General Assembly has killed legislation to set up the legal retail marijuana market, leaving the Commonwealth in its current weird middlespace for another year. Not only is the existing situation confusing (and sometimes dangerous) for Virginians, but the State is leaving tons of tax revenue on the table! Dumb!
 

This past Monday, City Council passed both the ordinance to increase the number of scooters on our streets (ORD. 2023–029) and the resolution to officially adopt the Climate Equity Action Plan (RES. 2023-R005). The new street light policy (ORD. 2022–375), the other paper I have my eye on, was sent back to the Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee for their March meeting. A quick note about the scooter ordinance: Remember that if a scooter company now wants to exceed the fleet limit, they can do so but must deploy a bunch of vehicles to the Southside. I’ll take a note to check back later this spring, but, as of this morning, neither Bird nor Lime has a single scooter on the south side of the river.
 

The City of Richmond will host a Black History Month event, titled “The Road to Richmond — Transforming Richmond through Music, Art, Culture, and Education,” tonight at 6:00 PM at Main Street Station. According to the really cool poster, folks should expect “interactive cultural immersions, reading circles, and dynamic panel discussions.” I hope whoever illustrated the bateau man on the poster is selling prints somewhere.
 

This morning’s longread

Mastodon: A New Hope for Social Networking

Elon Musk threatened to fire Twitter engineers unless they made his own tweets show up more on people’s timelines. So if you’re finally looking for a good Mastodon explainer / tutorial, here’s the best one I’ve found so far.
 

You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies with a single occupant! The admin of each instance—the captain of your particular boat—might make arbitrary decisions you disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks and turns. But you’re not stuck on the boat with drowning as your only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a flotilla can also pup off and form their own disconnected groups, but no boat, however large, is more important than any other in the community.
 

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Picture of the Day

It’s like our own alien obelisk.