💸 Good morning, RVA: School Board + City Council = ??, municipal debt tutorial, and Diamond District progress

Good morning, RVA! It’s 48 °F, and today looks humid, cloudy, and wet. Expect a chance of rain throughout the day—and even an opportunity for some severe storms. Bring a rain jacket with you when you walk out the door!
 

Water cooler

I watched the entirety of last night’s combined School Board and City Council meeting at which they talked about the size and funding of a replacement for George Wythe High School. If you’ve got two hours, you can do so, too, over on Richmond Public Schools' YouTube (crank that thing up to 1.5x and save yourself some time, though). Basically each member of each body went around the circle and gave a quick speech about why they thought the new high school should seat 2,000 students or 1,600 students (the latter despite rising population projections and an already overflowing feeder middle school). It didn’t feel like a particularly productive meeting, and I don’t think anyone changed their mind or position. The five member voting block of the School Board made a lot of fuss about Schools having the final say on how (and how big) schools get built, but City Council—not School Board—is ultimately responsible and accountable for appropriating the money. If a too-small school gets built and opens at capacity on day one, it’s City Council who will have to find the funds to fix the problem. I sympathize with them and totally get why they’d want to have some oversight into this process—especially given how controversial seemingly every recent School Board decision has been. As for next steps, sounds like Council will again attempt to vote on releasing money for the design of a George Wythe replacement on Monday. Will it happen? Will School Board compromise on the size of the school? Who knows!
 

I’ve got two City Council updates from earlier this week! First, if you read my paragraph about municipal debt and desperately want to know more, I really recommend listening to the Council’s third budget work session. I got around to listening to it yesterday, and, dang, I learned a lot! City Council’s financial consultants do a great job of explaining how the City’s debt policies work, what they mean, and what they think the future holds. They also answered some of my questions about slide 12 of this presentation, which shows the need for upwards of $14 million of new revenue to cover the City’s debt payments just six years from now. Give it a listen yourself, but what I heard was that existing growth and new economic development could, fingers crossed, pay for these increased payments alone. “Fingers crossed” is not my favorite way to plan for the financial future of the City, and while the Mayor’s Administration believes that Casino 2.0 (and other future development) paired with a real estate tax cut will net enough to cover the payments, I still think reducing revenue right now is a really bad idea. We’ve got billions of dollars in needs, and we shouldn’t operate from such a scarcity mindset. Also, despite it reported otherwise, absolutely no one is suggesting, advocating, or even predicting that the City raise the real estate tax to cover the increase in required debt payments. Not the financial consultants, not the Mayor, not Council, and not even pro-tax people like me!
 

OK, second Council update! The Diamond District presentation from yesterday’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee got posted, and you should tap through to look at this new-to-me timeline on slide four. On March 23rd, that’s today!, the City will invite six developers from the 15 who responded to the Request for Interest (RFI) to respond to a Request for Additional Information (RFAI). That thing’s due on April 25th, the candidate pool is further narrowed in early May with finalists submitting their pencils-down, final answers in June. By early summer we should know a lot about the who and the what and the when of the Diamond District’s future. I’m pretty excited about this one, and Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has some more details from the presentation.
 

The Reconnect Jackson Ward Feasibility Study folks will host a pop-up event today, from 5:00–7:00 PM, at Maggie Walker Plaza (weather pending, I suppose). Stop by and learn more about how we can undo at least some of the disconnection and damage done by building I-95/64 straight through a neighborhood. If in-person events and potential rain aren’t your thing but you still have thoughts and feelings, make sure you take a couple minutes to fill out their survey, which is open until March 31st.
 

This morning’s longread

The two-faced Moon

Tuck in for a little bit of MOON HISTORY. Did you know the far side of the moon (which we had never seen until we sent spaceships out there) is way different than the side we look at every night? Fascinating!
 

Scientists are especially interested in this lunar dichotomy because it’s tied to the Moon’s formation and evolution. Scientists think Earth and the Moon have a shared origin, formed when a Mars-sized object collided with the proto-Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. While active geological processes have erased hints of our planet’s makeup in those early years, the material from early Earth that formed the Moon remains largely preserved on our airless cosmic neighbor. This is especially true for the lunar farside where large regions haven’t been volcanically altered. Studying rocks here can give us insight into the early Earth while teaching us about the Moon’s history. Understanding what caused our Moon’s dichotomy will also allow us to better gauge why Mars and other solar system bodies are also asymmetric.
 

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

Picture of the Day

Native river oats I planted in the swamp near my air conditioner. Stoked on these little guys!