🚶Good morning, RVA: James River Branch Trail, register to vote, and the deadest person

Good morning, RVA! It’s 58 °F and rainy. The rain should taper off sometime this morning, but cooler temperatures move in this afternoon. Tonight we could see lows in the 30s, so pull your plants in if you haven’t already!
 

Water cooler

Planning Commission meets today for their regularly scheduled meeting, and you can find the full agenda here. Of interest to me this morning is ORD. 2022–286 which would set the process in motion for the City to acquire a bunch of land from CSX for the James River Branch Trail. Here’s a 12-year-old PDF explaining the history of the project, which gives you some context on how long these things can take (who reading this remembers Councilmember Conner?), and here’s the James River Parks System Master Plan which mentions the trail a bunch of times, saying “in conjunction with ongoing and planned multimodal improvements, this [trail] would provide an important connection from the southeastern portion of the City to the heart of JRPS. It would also provide access to the City-owned property south of Ancarrow’s Landing that is proposed for addition into the JRPS.” Once this thing eventually gets built, we’d have a Capital Trail-style shared-use path making some interesting connections across a chunk of the Southside. Pretty cool stuff! I imagine Planning Commission, and ultimately City Council, will pass this without issue.
 

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports on a potential new development coming to a surface-level parking lot adjacent to the Lowes on Broad Street. Platania reports that developers are planning a five-story apartment building with 301 units and a 423-space parking garage. Hmmm, I love replacing parking lots with homes, but seems like they’re planning on building too much new parking to go along with those new homes.
 

FYI! Today is the last day to register to vote or to change your voter information. You can register to vote or check your registration status online, it’s easy to do and will give you some good Monday morning peace of mind. I just checked mine and am definitely still registered to vote. See? So easy!
 

Jahd Khalil at VPM has a nice recap of the ongoing Reconnect Jackson Ward process. Applications were due this past week for the federal DOT grant that Richmond could use to kick off building a cap over 95/64, literally reconnection the Jackson Ward neighborhood (in a small way) with fancy new infrastructure. The first step, though, is an extensive planning process—for which the City has asked DOT for $1.69 million. We’ll have to wait until early next year to learn if Richmond is a recipient, but I do like our chances.
 

Who is the deadest person in Hollywood Cemetery? AXIOS Richmond says it’s William Mayo, but I dunno. How do you compete with the spirit of GWAR’s Oderus Urungus for death-related honors?
 

I think I’ve written about the Richmond Compost Initiative before, which set up about two dozen compost drop-off location (at most public libraries) for folks to dump their food waste and help feed some of Richmond’s community gardens. Tonight at 6:00 PM you can join Kate Rivara, the City’s Community Garden Coordinator, at the West End Library (5430 Patterson Avenue) to learn more about the composting program. The West End Library is, of course, a compost drop-off location itself, so maybe bring some food waste with you as a special gift to Kate.
 

This morning’s longread

The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture

I really enjoyed this thoughtful look into our culture’s obsession—especially our work culture—with calendars (even though I didn’t agree with all of it). Some folks publicly perform organization for their social media audiences, which sounds incredibly tedious, and some folks, like me, have to really do organization or will completely fail at life. My reliance on a calendar isn’t to prove to other people how busy I am, but because I would just never remember to do anything without it!
 

People call too many meetings when they want to feel more in control; those meetings often make you worse at completing whatever task or project you’re struggling to complete, in part because they’re conducted in a mononchronic way, reinscribing systems of authority, obsessed with (inactionable) action plans, and never actually building any sort of consensus about what should be done (or why you are doing it). Same with fetishizing organizational planning over actually doing, or having a clutter-free house that always feels sparse and uninviting, or a delivery system that makes it possible to have nearly anything on your doorstep the next day but contributes mightily to the ongoing elimination of life as we know it, or sending a quick email to get an email out of your inbox, only to then have a new email asking for further clarification.
 

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Picture of the Day

Every couple of years I can’t stream a sports game, so I end up listening on this very old, very charming radio.