🗳️ Good morning, RVA: Just regular-choice voting for now, deleting a parking lot, and pawpaw bread

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F, and today looks a little cooler with highs in the mid 80s but plenty of humidity. Keep an eye out for sporadic rain later this afternoon, though!
 

Water cooler

Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that City Council decided to kill the ranked-choice voting ordinance (ORD. 2022–119) before it even got to regular council for a public hearing and a vote. “Ninth District Councilman Michael Jones made the motion to strike the legislation from the council’s agenda, effectively killing the ordinance. Council members Kristen Nye, Stephanie Lynch and Katherine Jordan, the chief sponsor of the bill, voted against the motion.” Tap through to read a bunch of disheartening quotes about ranked-choice voting diluting Black representation and voting power. It’s not super surprising to see incumbents vote against policies that may make it harder for them to win their next election, but to suggest ranked-choice voting is racist? We’ll, that’s disappointing to say the least. I came across two thoughts floating around on Twitter this morning that capture how I’m feeling following this vote. First, Sheri Shannon says “A lot more education is needed to enlighten council.” After last night, that feels right to me. We probably need a real, organized, and funded ranked-choice voting campaign to do work over the course of a couple years before Richmond next attempts to switch the way we run Council elections. If it were me, I’d start laying the ground work next year for a vote in 2025—right after the next Council sits down and the 2028 elections are just a gauzy whisper on the horizon. Second, Allan-Charles Chipman reminds us that Council has an active hand and responsibility in affordable housing policy: Keeping Black voters from being priced out of the City does a whole lot to preserve Black representation and voting power. It’s frustrating to see a majority of Council quick to strike down ranked-choice voting for racism reasons but incredibly slow to act on any of the one million housing, zoning, or transportation initiatives that would actually mitigate some of the impacts racism has on how folks in our City live, work, and thrive.
 

Council also headed into a closed session last night to discuss, with the Chief, the RPD’s Alleged 4th of July Plot. Since it was a closed session, we don’t have a ton of details, but WTVR’s Tyler Layne got a hold of Councilmember Jones afterwards. Sounds like most of the conversation centered around how to better inform City Council when there’s a potential emergency.
 

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports that “an Arts District parking lot is set to be replaced by a building that would be among the tallest to rise along that stretch of Broad Street in recent years.” Eight stories! That’s infinity times more stories than a surface-level parking lot! And get this: The proposed development will have 87 units but just 26 parking spaces—which is awesome consider the thing will sit just a block from a Pulse station.
 

Henry Graff at NBC12 reports on yesterday’s RRHA press conference where they officially introduced new CEO, Steve Nesmith. Tap through to hear some of Nesmith’s plans for the future of public housing in Richmond. He starts for real for real on October 3rd.
 

Via r/rva, someone made a loaf of pawpaw bread that looks exactly like banana bread! It’s definitely high pawpaw season if you want to get out there and do some foraging of North America’s largest native fruit.
 

This weekend—on Sunday, September 11th—the United Way of Greater Richmond & Petersburg will partner with Triple Crossing Brewery in Fulton to host a volunteer pop-up as part of the National Day of Service and Remembrance. Volunteers will “help create United Way Kits, which will contain educational and emergency-preparedness materials to be handed out to families by our nonprofit partners.” Plus, 15% of beer sales will benefit the United Way. Volunteer, hangout, drink beer—sounds like a great way to spend a Sunday. You can register over on Eventbrite.
 

This morning’s longread

Inside the Mind-Boggling World of the Antiquities Theft Task Force

Via Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter, I absolutely loved this interview with a detective from New York’s Antiquities Theft Task Force. 1) Who even knew such a thing existed, and 2) This is exactly how I imagine all New York detectives.
 

Besides Bogdanos, who’s still regularly staffed on homicide cases, the small, tenacious team relies on the wide-ranging skills of three other assistant DAs, five specialists in art and archeology, two detectives, and a handful of Homeland Security agents. If you can’t find them in their office downtown, you can probably assume they’re knocking on the ornate doors of the Upper East Side. To paraphrase the man behind the raids, underneath the genteel patina of the upper-class art world is a solid core of criminal activity. The seized art actually occupies so much space that the DA’s storage facilities have been dubbed Manhattan’s best antiquities museum.
 

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Picture of the Day

What’s the deal with melons?