🏝️ Good morning, RVA: Mayo Island, ominous Diamond news, and a big amendment

Good morning, RVA! It’s 52 °F, and today we’ll see highs in the mid 80s alongside some really beautiful weather. I hope you love it, because we’ve got a few more days of this lined up ahead of us in the weekly forecast, and I’m pretty excited about it.
 

Water cooler

Alright, I’ve got a handful of City Council updates for you today, which, honestly, isn’t that different from any other day. First, I posted Monday’s budget work session up on the Boring Show for your listening pleasure. I’m about halfway through, and, so far, I’d recommend it—3.5 stars out of five! Council walks through their budget amendments and the Mayor’s Administration explains how those amendments are either already funded in the proposed budget or why the Administration recommends not funding them at all. The tone remains civil (at least so far in my listening), which has been true for most of this year’s budget meetings. I can definitely say that I’m enjoying the Councilmember Jones era of City Council and the way he’s run things the last couple of weeks. If you’d like a less exciting and less human summary of Monday’s meeting, you can also flip through the presentation slides.
 

Second, City Council will host their sixth budget work session today at 1:00 PM and will focus on “Discussion and Preparation of Final Council Proposed FY 2024 Budget Amendments.” I can’t believe it, but we’re coming around to the close of the 2023 budget season already!
 

Finally, at the end of their work session today, Council will introduce “ordinances related to the acquisition of real property, commonly known as Mayo Island.” Back in early January, the City and the Capital Region Land Conservancy had put together $9 million of an $11.4 million bid to buy Mayo Island, which, at the time, had listed for $19 million. I’d not heard much about any progress on closing that funding gap until today, and had almost entirely forgotten about it. After these ordinances get introduced, we’ll know a lot more about what kind of deal the City ended up finalizing.
 

John O’ Connor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a worrisome update on the Flying Squirrels and their proposed new stadium. The head squirrel (team president and managing partner) released a statement to the RTD yesterday saying, in part, “we cannot be confident that the future of the Squirrels in Richmond is secure,” as construction timelines for the team’s new home start to slip. Major League Baseball has set a 2025 deadline for completion of a new stadium, and, if the City misses it, I guess they’ll take away the Squirrels? That’d be a huge bummer—especially if a new Diamond came online just a couple months after the deadline. I wonder if we can get an extension if we show good progress over the next year? Maybe?
 

VPM’s Ben Paviour reports that Governor Youngkin has introduced a pretty sizable amendment to a bill originally written to require porn sites to verify users’ age. From the piece: “Youngkin amended the bill to require verification when users under 18 years old visit most websites that collect or use their personal data. It would also apply if they sign up for social media like TikTok or Instagram. Sites would require a government ID, credit card or signed consent form in order to verify a users' age.“ I have a lot of issues with this amendment, but let’s start here: When I read this reporting, it reminded me of a recent longread I posted about the federal government’s various proposals to ban TikTok outright instead of doing the hard work to actually protect our online privacy. If the governor or Virginia’s lawmakers really want to protect children online, they could start by restricting tech companies from harvesting our data without our permission.
 

Richmond Public Schools will hold a public hearing on renaming Ginter Park Elementary School tonight from 6:00–7:00 PM in the school’s auditorium. The renaming committee has proposed five options for community members to consider: Northside, Dogwood, Albert V. Norrell, Frances McClenney, and Azalea Elementary School. I’m partial to the plant or place names myself!
 

This morning’s longread

Highway Star

I enjoyed this brief vignette of life as a female truck driver in America. It’s definitely not a job at which I would succeed, but I can see how it appeals to some folks.
 

Two months after we met, Jess invited me to Las Vegas, where she and her friends from REAL Women in Trucking were gathering for the organization’s annual “Queen of the Road” ceremony. On a hot August night, we met up at a patio bar in the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, where actual Chilean flamingos lived in a marshy enclosure with catfish and koi. She was sitting, with Halima, at a long wooden table surrounded by women truckers. “This is Idella,” Jess said, introducing me to a silver-haired woman wearing a white button-down patterned with palm fronds. I recognized her name from admiring stories Jess had shared on the road. Idella told me she was based in Arkansas, where she moved high-value goods. “When I sit in the seat, there’s something in the diesel that turns into I’ve got to go,” she told me. “I’m good at what I do. The harder it is, the more challenging it is, the more I like it. Without a challenge, I have no purpose.”
 

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Picture of the Day

Get after it.