🚀 Good morning, RVA: No excuse not to vote, tax reduction alternatives, and a big leaf

Good morning, RVA! It’s 64 °F, and highs today could hit 80 °F—as if November 7th was some sort of summer’s day! Nick Russo at NBC12 says we broke the all-time record for high temperatures yesterday, set in 1975, and we might could break today’s record, too. I guess get out there and enjoy it, despite how wrong and bizarre it feels, because cooler(ish) temperatures return tomorrow.
 

Water cooler

Tomorrow is Election Day! Up until now you’ve already had many, many opportunities to vote, thanks to the hard work Democrats did in recent years to expand access to voting in Virginia. But, if you still haven’t cast a ballot, you can do so tomorrow at your local polling place from 6:00 AM – 7:00 PM. Did you ignore all of my warnings over the past few months and fail to register to vote? Don’t worry (too much), starting this year Virginia now allows same-day voter registration: Just head to your local polling place and cast a provisional ballot. There are literally no excuses not to get out there and vote tomorrow!
 

Councilmember Jordan’s email newsletter has two items of note this week. First, she gives a brief rundown on today’s special City Council meeting, at which they’ll “approve a funding allocation to stand up the initial inclement weather shelter site for those without shelter this winter. That site will be operated by Commonwealth Catholic Charities, and will be located at 1900 Chamberlayne Parkway.“ Finding a permanent location for a cold/inclement-weather shelter has proven a slippery task for the City over the last handful of years, and this is 2022’s attempt. After the special meeting, Council will head into their Organizational Development committee meeting, which has a few interesting presentation queued up.
 

Second, and excitingly, Councilmember Jordan lists four alternatives City Council could consider instead of lowering the real estate tax rate:
 

• A one-time rebate up to 5 cents for all real estate tax payers, similar to what Henrico has done.
• A “freeze” or carryover of the last year’s assessment. This would mean that the assessed value of your home would remain the same for the upcoming fiscal year, mitigating the impact of the still-hot housing market. This option would retain the appeals process for individual assessments.
• Taking advantage of the assessment freeze to fix our budgeting and billing schedule. We need to fix our process, and freezing assessments would allow us to get on the right schedule going forward.
• Lastly, since neither rebates nor tax cuts can legally be needs-based, surplus dollars could be allocated towards the Family Crisis Fund and/or other targeted relief programs once the fiscal year 2022 surplus is certified later this year.

I don’t think this is an either/or type of list; we could certainly implement all four simultaneously. And while I don’t know enough about housing or economics to say if this list of actions “solves” the problem of rising assessments, I’m pretty excited about it nonetheless! It’s great to see Council exploring anything other than lazily dropping the real estate tax rate—which would not provide significant relief to folks with modest incomes and instead give the most benefit to wealthy homeowners.
 

Will Gonzalez at WRIC reports on a crash at Laburnum and Hermitage that involved three vehicles and ended with one flipped over on its side. This is, of course, the A.P. Hill intersection, and removing that monument will immediately clear up sight lines and possibly make the intersection instantly safer. I still think that this area—adjacent to an elementary school and the Hermitage Road bike lane—is one of the city’s best candidates for the full protected-intersection treatment. That might be beyond our capabilities at the moment, but it’d for sure work and would for sure keep people from getting injured or killed.
 

NASA launched a rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station early this morning from their Wallops facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. If you happened to be up and looking east around 5:30 AM, you could definitely see an actual rocket streaking through the sky. So cool! If you missed it, /r/rva has a cool picture of the rocket trails, sunrise, and James River.
 

Also via /r/rva a picture of an absolutely enormous sycamore leaf. You could make a nice hat out of that thing!
 

Logistical note! This week is weird. Tomorrow, as previously mentioned, the Commonwealth of Virginia celebrates Election Day, which means I’ll take the day off to ride bikes, putter around the house, and nervously watch the election results come in. Additionally, Friday is Veterans Day, another state holiday, and another chance for me to sleep in.
 

This morning’s longread

America Has Made a Monster Out of Pickleball

I’ve got nothing against pickleball—in fact I think proliferating low-impact sports is great for making fun, physical activity more accessible to a wider range of folks. That said, why do we have to make every single thing a Very Serious Competition?
 

But none of this changes the fact that the Wiffle ball that picklers play with is too big to take too seriously; hitting the smooth, 8-holed hard-plastic sphere at even 40 miles per hour is considered fast. By contrast, the fastest tennis serve on record is 163 miles an hour. The fastest forehand: 124 miles an hour. Even the humble shuttlecock, the “ball” in badminton, long a favorite of lawn parties, boasts a world record of 306 miles an hour. Watch a highlight reel of a professional tennis, Ping Pong, or badminton match, and your jaw will be on the floor, your senses awash in superhuman reflexes and lightning-quick exchanges. Look at the footwork. Marvel at the speed. In pickleball, there is a shot called the dink. The dink has a technical definition—to soft-hit the ball so it arcs over the net, preventing an aggressive return—but the term could also be reasonably applied to nearly every shot in pickleball. Watch the highlight reel of the 2022 US Open Pickleball Championships and your jaw … might stay right where it is.
 

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

Fall at Pine Camp.