🏛️ Good morning, RVA: Election Day!, Richmond 300 annual report, and concrete columns

Good morning, RVA! It’s 47 °F, and today looks great. You can expect sunshine and highs right around 70 °F. Temperatures later this week might even climb into the 80s, which sounds wonderful (unless you’re a fruit tree who’s sure to be ruined by an inevitable March deep freeze (Twitter)).
 

Water cooler

It’s Election Day in Virginia’s 4th Congressional District! If you haven’t yet voted through one of the Commonwealth’s many early voting mechanisms (thank you, Democrats!), you can still head to your standard polling place and cast a ballot in person. Heck, you can even register to vote today and cast a provisional ballot. Amazing!You’ve got no excuses, so get out there and vote!
 

Related: Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Del. Jeff Bourne will “not seek re-election in the new 78th House District or join an already crowded Democratic field of contenders to represent the new 14th Senate District.” Bourne has been a staple in Richmond politics since he got elected to school board a bunch of years ago, and it’ll be weird not having him around. Tap through for the tiniest bit of speculation on Bourne’s next political moves, but I think we’ll probably just have to wait and see to know anything meaningful.
 

Today the City’s Planing Commission meets (full agenda here), and they will finally hear a presentation on this year’s Richmond 300 Annual Report. This is one of my favorite regularly-occurring PDFs, and you should definitely scroll through it. Not only does it give you a good refresher on the broad strokes of the master plan (p. 4–9), but it tracks citywide metrics (p. 13–15) and provides specific, concrete updates on Richmond 300’s Big Moves (p. 17–22). I find all of this stuff fascinating. Make sure you take a look at page 23 for a list of master-plan-related actions slated for 2023, which include: kicking off the zoning ordinance rewrite, passing The Three Zoning Changes, and adopting both a Shockoe and Jackson Ward small area plan. Sounds like the Department of Planning and Development Review has a big year ahead of them.
 

At the beginning of this year’s General Assembly session, 38 entire days ago, VAPLAN sent out an email highlighting the “competing priorities” of Democrats and Republicans. Out of the 58 bills mentioned across both parties, just a few—like you could count them on one hand—survived crossover and still have a chance to become actual laws. This doesn’t mean our elected legislators have sat around twiddling their thumbs over the past couple of weeks, though. Just check out the massive list of legislation signed by the governor in 2022 for a sense of how many bills flow through the GA in a given year. Even with a divided General Assembly and very few big-ticket items to get excited about, it’s pretty interesting (albeit frustrating at times) to watch the legislators do their work.
 

Have you ever seen the concrete columns marking the city limits on several major thoroughfares in different parts of town? Harry Kollatz Jr. at Richmond Magazine has a nice piece about the artist behind those columns (and a few other sculptures you’re most likely familiar with).
 

This morning’s longread

It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

The Onion really crushes this piece about the New York Times’s insistence on running anti-trans garbage in its editorial pages.
 

Naturally, courageous reporting like ours has its detractors. Our critics accuse us of transphobia and are trying to murder us online, with their online mobs. They want to destroy our right to free speech and have us arrested by all the police. What gives? Why would you arrest us, when it’s those deviant trans people you ought to be arresting instead? Do you know what the science says about trans people getting arrested, huh? What if we could find data saying trans people should be more likely to get arrested? What will our detractors say then? They’ll be silent, as well they should be, and free speech will survive one more day. For more evidence of our time-honored journalistic commitment to endangering lives, please see our previous coverage of gay people, immigrants, Black people, and women.
 

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

Great booth work.