🪳Good morning, RVA: School Board recap, Belle Isle bridge, Breakaway RVA

Good morning, RVA! It’s 65 °F, and today you can expect highs approaching 90 °F with a smallish chance for storms late afternoon. Fingers crossed against that, though, because I’m trying to bike month it up tonight! Also, keep an eye on the weather for this weekend, which, at the moment features potential, dangerous highs of 99 °F!
 

Water cooler

KidsFirst RPS has a nice and thorough recap of this past Monday’s RPS School Board meeting. No major fireworks, but boardmembers continue to introduce and vote on substantive policies with little-to-no heads up—to the public, the RPS administration, or even to other boardmembers." Not great. Additionally, read through all the way to the end to see a preview of what could be the next exhausting School Board thing we’re all forced to deal with: Surplussing the Arthur Ashe Athletic Center. It’s a picture perfect scenario for the five-member voting bloc to tussle with the Mayor by disrupting the Diamond District process. Sounds bad, no thanks!
 

First reported (to me) by my son who went on a school trip to Belle Isle and found the suspension bridge closed, Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the follow up that “Richmond officials have temporarily closed the Belle Isle pedestrian walkway underneath the Lee Bridge…after engineers found that concrete pieces had fallen from an open joint in the Lee Bridge.” Yikes, but only temporary yikes! The bridge should safely open back up to folks tomorrow. Still though, I bet this is pretty stressful news for all of the people hard at work on kicking off Riverrock.
 

In other island news, Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports on some legal drama between the owners of Mayo Island and VCU, who leases? leased? a parking lot down that way. I don’t know how this hullabaloo impacts the potential sale of the island, which went on the market earlier this year for $19 million, but it probably doesn’t make anything any easier. Personally, I still think the City should buy Mayo Island and turn it into public space. Partnership for Smarter Growth agrees, and says this in a recent newsletter that I couldn’t figure out how to link to: “Separately, you may have seen that Mayo Island is up for sale for $19 million. You may recall, though, that residents have overwhelmingly and repeatedly supported the island becoming a public park – in the 2009 Downtown Plan, 2012 Riverfront Plan, and 2020 Richmond 300 Master Plan…We urge the city to follow through and secure the land for a public park.” Realistically, I don’t know where the City would dig up $19 million, but it’s worth exploring!
 

Breakaway RVA is back! Join a bunch of bikefolks tonight for a preview of the Richmond section of the Fall Line Trail. Wheels up at 6:00 PM at the intersection of Loxley Road and Rennie Avenue (just off Brookland Parkway), and the ride finishes up at Hatch Local in Manchester for food, drinks, and, I’m sure, lots of bike-oriented chatter. From the Evite: “This is an all-inclusive, slow rolling ride that leaves no one behind!” Should be a blast.
 

Via /r/rva this picture titled “Florida Predatory Stinkbug nymphs working as a pack to move another insect corpse. As seen in Fulton Hill.” I absolutely hate stink bugs, and the slow, drunken way they fly about freaks me out. However, this random Google tells me these particular stink bugs are “considered a beneficial insect because most of its prey consist of plant-damaging bugs, beetles, and caterpillars.” Fine.
 

This morning’s longread

How a Forgotten Bit of Infrastructure Became a Symbol of Civic Pride

I love stuff like this! Local-specific infrastructure (like Pittsburgh’s public stairs), and I don’t think we have anything like it in Richmond. But! I’d love to hear from y’all if you think we do—no snarky counter examples, earnest answers only!
 

Salt boxes are, or have become, a Baltimore specialty. Nine hundred or so of these bespoke wooden bins—about as wide as a refrigerator, as tall as a toddler, as yellow as a rubber ducky—are stationed strategically throughout the city, mostly on streets too narrow or hills too steep for plows. For decades, they were an unremarkable part of Baltimore’s remarkable winter-weather program, which, on any given snow day, might see some three hundred personnel mobilized during each shift. Although Baltimore averages only twenty inches of snow a year—about sixty inches less than Anchorage and a hundred less than Syracuse—the city still goes through nearly twenty thousand tons of salt every winter season, a small portion of which is distributed via the boxes, which have hinged lids for easy access, but no shovels or scoops.
 

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Picture of the Day

The 3rd District Councilmember blading along with last night’s Northside Ride bike month event! Skate or die!