🦗 Good morning, RVA: The Boring Show, Budget Eve, and reconnecting Jackson Ward

Good morning, RVA! It’s 49 °F, and the nice weather keeps rolling right on through Richmond. Today you can expect highs in the 60s, but I’m already looking forward to this weekend, when we could see highs near 80 °F!
 

Water cooler

It took a few days longer than expected, but I finally got around to updating The Boring Show with City Council’s first meeting of the 2022 Budget Season. If you’re new to Good Morning, RVA, every spring I take the publicly available video from each of Council’s budget meetings and make a podcast out of it called The Boring Show (you can subscribe here). In my very biased opinion, it’s the best way to get a feel for Council’s priorities for the year ahead, plus you can listen at 2x speed while riding your bike through the forest or walking around the block in the early spring weather. It’s both boring and fascinating—perfect for subscribers of this newsletter. Anyway, try and get through the first episode today (it’s about two hours long if you’re listening at a snail-like 1x), because the Mayor introduces the budget tomorrow at 3:00 PM! Exciting stuff!
 

Related, Scott Bass at Richmond Magazine has a nice recap of where we are with School Board’s budget just one day ahead of the Mayor introducing his own budget—which may or may not fully fund RPS’s requests. Bass nails it: “Later in the night, the board would acquiesce. It approved a reduced budget proposal of $356.6 million, keeping funding for the virtual academy and the chief operating officer and wellness officer, but the drama raises the specter of more conflict around the corner. The mayor is expected to introduce his fiscal 2023 budget on Friday, which will kick off another round of negotiations over the next several weeks.” The focus of this year’s budget season is now fully on public schools, which does feel like a shift from a couple months ago. Tune in tomorrow, though, to see how the Mayor decides to fund RPS. It’s the one of the biggest budget buckets, and tomorrow we’ll see the City’s starting bid for how much to fill it up.
 

Also related, the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Michael Martz has some updates on the General Assembly’s attempts to set aside state money for school construction. Tap through and read, because it’s a familiar conversation but with a fascinating party switcheroo: Instead of local Democrats betting the future on theoretical casino revenues, we’ve got state-level Republicans rolling the dice on casino cash to pay for schools. I’m with Senator McClellan, who had this to say: “I’m still skeptical that the casino money is going to be enough.”
 

Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense answers my barbecue development question from the other day! You gotta scroll past all the anti-labor stuff, but Buz and Ned’s “will be demolished to make way for a mixed-use development…planned to include 14,000 square feet of retail space and 300 apartments.”
 

Over the course of this session, the General Assembly has tried to pass laws forcing Richmond to upgrade its Combined Sewer System faster than is practically possible. The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong reports that those bills are dead. To “fix” our CSS we’d need to build five, huge underground structures to contain overflow during big rains—April Bingham, Director of DPU, says “If you think about what we have to build, you think about an Olympic swimming pool. We need about 760 of those.” Dang! That work will cost over a billion bucks, to which the State, despite their desire to see the project completed ASAP, will contribute only $150 million.
 

The folks working on the feasibility study for decking over I-95/64 (aka “Reconnect Jackson Ward Feasibility Study”) will hold a community event tonight from 6:00–8:00 PM at the Black History Museum (122 W. Leigh Street). Pop in to “learn more about the project, understand the history, and explore ideas for reconnecting Jackson Ward.” You should also checkout the Reconnect Jackson Ward website, which has this preliminary survey about the project that you should take. They’ve got an interesting question about which section of the study area you’d like reconnected—I picked the areas adjacent to existing connections. But maybe we’d be better off doubling the number of connection instead of improving existing ones? I’d like to learn more!
 

This morning’s longread

Inside the booming business of cricket catching

Crickets as an energy- and climate-friendly, scalable protein source! Let’s do it!
 

At the bottom of the metal sheets, dozens of drums stand empty. Soon, hopes Kiggundu Islam, chairman of the local bush cricket trappers association, they’ll be filled with millions of the nearly three-inch-long insects. The “visitors,” as they’re called locally, come together to mate and feed in huge swarms after each rainy season in the autumn and spring, when hundreds of people across the country set aside their day jobs to come out and catch them. Salted and fried, the crickets are a delicacy in Uganda, sold for two dollars a bag at open-air markets, taxi parks, and roadsides. (“You see how you enjoy having a movie with popcorn? Me, it’s a movie with nsenene,” says one fan.)
 

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Picture of the Day

Leaves and shadows.