🔮 Good morning, RVA: Electoral Board 180, Charter recommendations, and a new Sheetz

Good morning, RVA! It’s 72 °F, and today we’ll see highs in the 90s and, probably, rain at some point this evening. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says we may need to even be on the lookout for severe summer storms. Keep an eye on the weather app of your choice for weather warnings, and maybe keep your devices charged just in case.
 

Water cooler

As foretold: At their meeting this past Friday, the Richmond Electoral Board reversed course and will now, under pressure from the public and the City Attorney, open two satellite early voting locations—one at the Hickory Hill Community Center and one at City Hall. Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury reports all of the details, including that, because they couldn’t just take the L, neither location will offer voting on Sundays. I’m sure requiring a majority of the Electoral Board to be partisan appointees from the current governor’s party is a policy designed to prevent some sort of voting shenanigans, but, in the current environment, it sure seems to cause unnecessary issues—especially when one of the parties consistently wants to make voting harder for folks.
 

They did it! The City’s Charter Review Commission has released its final recommendations, which you can download in full PDF glory here. They’ve sorted the recommendations into four buckets: Updating the Charter’s language to make it more modern and consistent; adjusting the current Mayor-Council form of government; considering a new Council-Manager form of government (while keeping an elected mayor); and staggering City Council’s terms. The first two buckets they recommend asking the General Assembly to approve this coming session, the third studied by a commission created before the end of this year, and the fourth implemented in time for the 2028 elections. I haven’t had the time to dive into the sure-to-be gory details of each bucket, but they all contain some fascinating ideas! I’m especially interested in bucket number two, which suggests big-but-achievable changes like: tweaking the budget process, requiring the Mayor to report out at Council monthly, and doubling City Council’s salaries (up from something like $25,000). If Council wants to follow any of these recommendations, there’s a ton of work to be done between now and the start of the 2024 General Assembly session. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until Council gets back from their August recess to gauge their interest and willingness to dig in.
 

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania has some fascinating rezoning news out of Henrico County. A Maryland-based developer wants to redevelop alllll of Willow Lawn, turning its vast surface-level parking lots into a bunch of mixed-used buildings: “Owner Federal Realty Investment Trust recently unveiled a plan to redevelop the shopping center and its 37 acres into a new mixed-use district, that over time could include over 2,200 residential units and 500,000 square feet of commercial space.” That’s a lot of residential units, and right on a rapid transit line, too. Sounds like Henrico County’s Planning Commission will consider the rezoning necessary to make the whole thing possible later this summer.
 

Also at BizSense, Charlotte Matherly reports on at least three organizations that have raised back the money they lost when the Enrichmond Foundation imploded last year. This is small-scale good news but still makes me feel horrible for all the other groups involved who maybe haven’t landed on as firm financial footing. I wonder if any organizations had to shut down because they couldn’t afford to operate in limbo while this whole mess gets sorted out?
 

Axios Richmond continues to dominate the gas station food beat with this review of the new Forest Hill Sheetz by Karri Peifer. When I’d commute from Blacksburg to Richmond in the early Aughts, I’d always stop at a Sheetz and get two hot dogs with onions, relish, and nacho cheese, which is a sentence that probably says a lot about me.
 

Nothing reminds me that I live in a small town with a small-town paper like this sort of headline: “Former Buz and Ned’s location to be razed in weeks. The number of times I catch myself saying stuff like “where the old Ukrop’s used to be,” is non-zero and embarrassing! Anyway, as Erick Kolenich reports, 300 apartments will take the place of what was once a small, old, smoky, single-story building. Seems like an OK trade.
 

This morning’s longread

Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to ‘Date-Me Docs’

The New York Times looks at a handful of people who’ve ditched social dating apps and, instead, turned to “Date-Me Docs,” which, spoiler alert, are just websites. It’s cool and good to have a website, and I strongly recommend it. Not only do you then own all of the content you put out into the world, but that content can be anything you want—photos, a list of books you’ve read, and even a Date-Me Doc. My current website, ross.catrow.net, is hosted with micro.blog, but there are many millions of places to host your own website if you want to leave whatever walled-garden social media app and head off into the Wild West of the web.
 

“There is something kinda dorky about ‘date-me docs’ that reminds me of the early days of the internet,” Ms. Li said, referring to the way people used to meet on AIM, AOL’s now-defunct instant messaging service. “I’m still on the apps, though I’ve pulled back heavily in the last few months since they just don’t seem to be working for me in terms of getting serious matches.” Ms. Li, who recently moved to San Francisco from New York, is part of a small but growing group of people who are using online shareable documents — typically Google Docs — to find love. “Date-me docs” are both an emerging dating trend and a relic of a past era, more akin to newspaper personal ads than any bio posted on an algorithm-driven, swipe-based app.
 

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Picture of the Day

Friends I found in the forest.