😢 Good morning, RVA: So long, budget season; staircases; and saving zero-fares

Good morning, RVA! It’s 60 °F, and today you can expect clouds and highs in the 70s for pretty much the entire day. We might escape rain-free though! Enjoy, because it looks like the chances of that happening over the next couple of days are slim.
 

Water cooler

OK, it’s been a minute, but I finally got around to listening to all of City Council’s budget sessions—you can, and should!, listen to them all at 2x speed by subscribing to The Boring Show podcast. Last week, Council wrapped up their amendment sessions, came to consensus on a final budget and Capital Improvement Plan, and sent Council staff off to finalize all of the budget-related papers for introduction this past Monday. That means this coming Monday, May 9th, at the public hearing, will most likely be your final opportunity to have any sort of say on the FY23 budget (although it’s pretty much a done deal by now). This year felt like an incredibly amicable budget session, with Council and the Mayor’s administration mostly agreeing on mostly everything. While a couple of meetings did get shifted and added to the schedule, we didn’t see contentious arguments stretching into the night, Councilmembers yelling at the administration, or angry speeches from City staff. All things considered, it went pretty smoothly!
 

This year, like nearly every year, really underscores the budget powers of the Mayor. The budget he submits is almost never altered in a substantial way by Council, because, turns out, restructuring an $836 million budget is a ton of work and City Council is a part-time job with hardly any staff. If Council’s priorities diverged from the Mayor’s (which they haven’t really at this point), it’d require a bunch of councilmembers to get on the same page and do a ton of work together leading up to and during the budget session. It’s a lot to ask and doesn’t seem incredibly likely. So, the lesson here for advocates is: If you want something in the budget, you need to start bothering folks about it before the Mayor’s staff starts putting the budget together—basically immediately following the passage of the previous budget.
 

Anyway, listening to budget season each year continues to be the very best way to get to know the City’s decision makers and to learn more about the people behind all of the policies. It’s always bittersweet for me when it wraps up!
 

The City’s Urban Design Committee meets today with a full and interesting agenda. They’ll consider plans for a new plaza in front of the Costar building, an early review of a replacing a bridge on the 1500 block of E. Broad Street that you may not even knew existed, new interpretive signage for Belle Isle, exciting (and final) plans for additions to the Southside Community Center, and an early look at the Main Library renovations that include a giant spiral staircase. Is UDC the funnest city committee? It might be! If I could join one committee, I think it’d be this one or maybe Safe and Health Streets, tough call.
 

Wyatt Gordon, writing for the Virginia Mercury, has a really interesting piece on how old building codes about staircases of all things limit our ability to build dense, affordable housing. Shoutout to Charlottesville Planning Commissioner, Lyle Solla-Yates, for pushing a nerdy, practical thing that could have a big impact across the Commonwealth!
 

Keep your eye on this: Lyndon German at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office will take over an investigation into a police-involved car crash that killed two teenagers on the City’s Southside. From the piece: “RPD’s Special Operations Division Crash Team led the department’s initial investigation, although police have been increasingly vague about the details of the collision since it occurred.”
 

Today at 12:00 PM, RVA Rapid Transit will host another free and virtual Transit Talk session, this one focused on saving our regional bus system’s zero fare program. Neither the Mayor nor City Council put any money in Richmond’s budget towards the required $1 million match of the state grant that currently subsidizes the zero fares. During their penultimate amendment session (I think), Council did debate Councilmember Addison’s proposed amendment to add that money into the City’s budget, but the Mayor’s CAO (who now serves on GRTC’s board) convinced Council that the million bucks can and should be found elsewhere. I totally agree that the City should not be on the hook for paying for the entirety of the region’s fare-free program, but I am increasingly nervous that the region (the City included) will decide to dip into money specifically allocated to expanding bus service to instead cover zero fares. And remember: the required match increases year after year until the state grant complete goes away. If the region wants zero fares, they should pay for it with new money, not the money intended to build a truly regional bus system.
 

This morning’s longread

COVID Fear and COVID Shame

I really enjoyed this piece by Emily Oster about coronashame. I mean, I get it! Many folks—myself included—have made big, everyday-life sacrifices to be incredibly careful throughout this pandemic, and if/when they eventually get COVID it feels like a moral failing. But it is not! People get sick, especially from a disease as contagious as some of the COVID-19 variants. No one feels deep shame from catching the flu!
 

It’s not just fear. People also feel shame. Some of this is shame about putting our children at risk for reasons we think are selfish: We were so careful, and just because I wanted my son to see his grandparents/go to Disney/hike in Utah, we went on a plane and now he has COVID. “I’m a bad mom,” someone wrote to me. Let’s start here: this isn’t true. You aren’t a bad parent. That isn’t how we think about other illnesses. Pre-COVID, when your child got the norovirus, you didn’t think, “I’m a bad mom”; you thought, “I’m going to have this in 12 hours. How many meetings do I need to reschedule?” Some childhood illness is a fact of life, and even pre-COVID most of the choices we made involved some illness risk — choices like child care, seeing other people, play dates, grandparents, planes, trains, trampoline parks, and so on. 
 

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

Picture of the Day

A picture of that same dramatic plant from yesterday. See, plant? You’re fine.