🥱😲 Good morning, RVA: Fall Line Trail, boring but interesting, and police pursuits

Good morning, RVA! It’s 47 °F, and today’s weather looks great! Expect highs in the 70s and sunshine for most of the day. We’ve got a bit of rain still lingering around tomorrow afternoon’s forecast, but, other than that, I think we’re in store for a really excellent stretch of Richmond In The Fall!
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, Henrico officially broke ground on the County’s first segment (and, I think, the first segment overall) of the 43-mile Fall Line Trail. This tiny little section of trail will cover about a quarter of a mile in Lakeside, swooping through the old Bank of America building parking lot and into the charming Spring Park. So exciting! While Henrico has a whole timeline laid out for construction of their future (and longer) bits and pieces of the Fall Line, I haven’t seen anything similar from Richmond or Chesterfield—but someone point me to it if it exists, please! Tom Lappas at the Henrico Citizen has some more details and a picture from the official ribbon cutting / ceremonial golden-shovel digging situation.
 

This afternoon, City Council’s Finance and Economic Development committee meets with at least two boring-but-interesting papers on their agenda. First, ORD. 2023–289 is the ordinance that Council must pass each and every year setting the real estate tax rate (usually at $1.20). If they do not, the rate defaults all the way back to $1.125 due to some ridiculous anti-city state law. Such a significant loss in revenue would have a brutal and immediate impact on City services! This paper is boring, because it passes each year with mostly no drama (see: brutal impact on City services). It’s interesting though, because in recent years there’s been talk of lowering the real estate tax rate as an incentive for approving the Casino 2.0 referendum. That (horrible) idea seems mostly dead in the water these days, though—especially since pro-casino Councilmember Jones is listed as this ordinance’s patron. Second, ORD. 2023–310 approves modifications to a parking space lease between the City and the federal government. This paper is clearly boring, but it’s also interesting because, due to the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, it includes an addendum “incorporating a prohibition on a ByteDance covered application.” See, interesting!
 

WTVR’s Tyler Lane has a really fascinating report on Chesterfield’s “unapologetic” 197% increase in police pursuits. Lane also talked to an expert at VCU who said, “A [police] pursuit is comparatively more dangerous than a police shootout. That is, people are more likely to get hurt in a pursuit than they are with a police officer and a bad guy shooting at each other.” That’s definitely not something I’ve thought about before but makes total sense. It really contrasts with this statement from the Chesterfield Police: “I will tell you that we are unapologetic in how we pursue criminals, how we pursue safety on our streets." Sounds like a lot of the times—maybe even most times?—choosing not to pursue someone after a traffic stop would actually lead to safer streets.
 

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the ongoing commercial development of Brookland Park Boulevard. Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has an update and reports on a new tattoo shop coming to the commercial corridor, but scroll down to the bottom of the article for a long list of local businesses signing leases and moving in to new (or newly renovated) spaces. There’s a lot going on over that way!
 

Last night I got a press release announcing that former Speaker of the House of Delegates Eileen Filler-Corn has decided to run for Virginia’s 10th Congressional District. Even though the 10th is a solidly NOVA district, this news is notable for Richmond as it (potentially) removes at least one (potential) opponent from Mayor Stoney’s (potential) 2025’s gubernatorial run. 2025 is one million years in the future, and many things could happen between now and then, but note this down.
 

This morning’s longread

The Tangled Grief of Israel’s Anti-Occupation Activists

I keep looking for the perfect longread to express everything running through my mind when I think about what’s happening in Israel…but I haven’t yet found it. This one, while not perfect, does a great job of illustrating “it’s complicated,” which, on an overwhelming scale, is what I feel most of the time.
 

That Gvaryahu felt he had to draft two separate statements in the space of three days, that he felt that he had to state the obvious—that the Hamas attacks had been horrific and unjustifiable—is one symptom of the excruciatingly complicated predicament in which Israelis who publicly oppose the occupation have found themselves. In Israeli society, which has invented myriad ways to keep the occupation invisible, their expertise is their ability to see the causal connections between the occupation and violence directed at Israeli Jews. But, at this moment, if the activists focus on these causal connections, or if they focus too much on crimes perpetrated against Palestinian civilians, now and in the past, they risk being irrevocably marginalized in their own country. Unlike most Israelis, these activists are simultaneously absorbing two streams of traumatic news: the still accumulating details of the brutality and extent of Hamas’s attacks, and the real-time flow of information on the bombardment and siege of Gaza, whose two million residents are being collectively punished with lack of fuel, water, energy, and food.
 

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Picture of the Day

Still one of my favorite bathrooms in town.