Archive (Page 20) • Good Morning, RVA • Buttondown

🎸 Good morning, RVA: Low COVID levels, the Folk Festival, and marijuana pardons

Good morning, RVA! It’s 52 °F, and yesterday’s wonderful weather returns today. Expect highs around 80 °F with lots of sunshine throughout the entire day. This weekend looks rad, too, with slightly cooler temperatures and pleasant conditions as far as the eye/extended forecast can see. I hope you make the most of it!

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As of last night, the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Levels for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield are low across the board! The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 155, 46, and 88, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 8.1. I’m not really sure what to make of the 3x disparity in case rate between Richmond and Henrico—it’s large enough that it almost seems like a data issue? Regardless, levels are low, get your COVID-19 booster to keep them that way, etc, etc. However, Katelyn Jetelina says not to get too excited about the current low levels, and points to a growing wave in Europe, which we typically see mirrored in the United States. From her State of Affairs post this past Wednesday: “Interestingly, no new subvariant is driving this wave, as the majority of cases are still the ‘old’ BA.5 subvariant. This means changing weather, waning immunity, and/or changing behaviors are the culprit. This theory is only solidified when we see patterns are not changing in neighboring country Israel, for example, whose weather hasn’t started changing yet.” So maybe seriously consider making an appointment for a COVID-19 booster before the weather changes on this side of the ocean?

Speaking of fun things to do while the COVID-19 levels are low: The Richmond Folk Festival kicks off tonight at 6:30 PM, runs through Sunday evening, and you can find the full, exhausting, overwhelming schedule here. I mean, it’s an embarrassment of riches, where do you even start? Personally, I’m fascinated by Sacred Steel and you have a couple opportunities to check out Fran Grace—so maybe start there! As for getting down to Brown’s Island, the City will close a couple of streets over the weekend, and I’m sure parking will be dumb, so consider riding a bike or taking the bus (#2, #3, #5, or #14 will all get you reasonably close). The Folk Festival is one of Richmond’s biggest, coolest things, so get out there and fill up your ears!

#882

October 7, 2022

🎂 Good morning, RVA: Leigh Street improvements, Capital Trail birthday, and the Cannabis Control Authority

Good morning, RVA! It’s 52 °F, and, don’t worry, the warm weather has returned! Today you can expect wonderful highs near 80 °F paired with some beautiful afternoon sunshine. Honestly, I don’t think you could ask for a better Thursday. I hope you can find the time to get out there and enjoy it!

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A downside to scrapping Navy Hill—which, don’t get me wrong, needed to be scrapped—is that we’re still left with a miserable section of Leigh Street between Fourth and Eighth that dips down to serve the basement of the Coliseum. One clever piece of the Navy Hill project would have filled in that dip, returned Leigh Street to grade, and immensely improved bike and pedestrian connections through that part of town. No Navy Hill means no return-to-grade for Leigh Street, but today the Urban Design Committee will consider streetscape improvements that include a new, at-grade multiuse path along the north side of the street. The path will be “wider than a standard sidewalk” and will connect to the bike lanes over the viaduct at 11th Street “using a new street crossing specifically for use by bikes.” If you can read engineering diagrams, scroll through this PDF to get a better sense for the project. This is great news for me personally, as I ride through there all the time and hate descending into the depths of Leigh Street, but, more importantly, this new path will fill in an annoying gap in our bike network.

Ian M. Stewart at VPM has a really nice look back at the Capital Trail after seven years of being one of our region’s best amenities. The Trail is such an amazing, diverse, all-ages-and-abilities space! It’s a wonderful place with a wonderful vibe, and if you haven’t been out that way you really, really should. We’re lucky to have the trail, and its tremendous success as a locality-spanning multi-use path makes the work on future trails, like the Fall Line Trail, exponentially easier.

#1046

October 6, 2022

🎺 Good morning, RVA: Curriculum workgroups, anti-climate plans, and joyful pictures

Good morning, RVA! It’s 52 °F, and today looks warmer than the last two days! You can expect highs near 70 °F and maybe, just maybe, a glimpse of the sun later this afternoon. If you’re one of the thousands and thousands of people out there hoping for a perfect October weekend for Richmond to host it’s biggest and bestest festival…looks like you’re in luck!

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The reporters have now had the chance to catch a couple hours of sleep and file their stories about Monday night’s RPS School Board meeting, and you can read good recaps from Megan Pauly at VPM and Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Turns out the part I couldn’t track on Twitter yesterday was that School Board’s five-member bloc, after twice failing to scrap the current curriculum, voted to instead create working groups to evaluate the curriculum and create a three-year plan by the end of the current year. I think that’s an unrealistic deadline given that the last month and a half of the year is typically a disaster, but we’ll see what these workgroups come up with in the next 61ish days (42 weekdays (including holidays)). Tap through to Pauly’s piece to see the results of a teacher survey which has the majority of respondents supporting the math and science curricula (57% vs. 43% and 61% vs. 39%, respectively) and about an even split over the reading curriculum (49% vs. 51%). Maybe more interesting, or at least spicier, Jessica Nocera quotes some emails between the School Board and the Virginia Department of Education, which criticize Boardmember Gibson’s habit of constantly launching into surprise motions and says that the Board doesn’t even have the authority to immediately scrap curriculum anyway: “When things are allowed into motion without being on the agenda as an action item, it undermines the processes you all are attempting to institutionalize…The conversations in the two previous board meetings about eliminating the curricula (effective immediately) is not an option for RPS based on the current Memorandum of Understanding.” By the way, Kids First RPS has a whole bucketful of FOIA’d emails, if you’d like to dig into what exactly the School Board gets up to between meetings. The whole situation is exhausting—and I’m not even involved. I don’t know that this is what RPS needs to spends its incredibly limited energy on, but now it’s definitely happening. I’m preemptively thankful for the teachers that decide to participate in these workgroups and hope their work over the coming weeks will result in better experiences and outcomes for RPS’s students (and that they’ll get a chance to take a break at some point before the year’s end).

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams has a good column about Governor Youngkin’s anti-trans policies. He talks to Jamie Nolan, co-executive director at Side by Side, who has this excellent quote about “parent’s rights”: “It’s a privileged phrase. It’s rooted in this idea that every youth grows up in a home with two loving, caring, adult individuals who are providing good examples…Every home is different. Every child is different. And every relationship that they have with their parent or caring other is different.” Any thoughtful person would know not every home is supportive of trans kid—in fact, the Trevor Project says “fewer than 1 in 3 transgender and nonbinary youth found their home to be gender-affirming” and “45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.” We need policies that support and protect kids, not policies that potentially put them in danger.

#484

October 5, 2022

🙅 Good morning, RVA: RPS School Board rejects anti-trans policies, CPC rejects UDC, and I reject this weather

Good morning, RVA! It’s 49 °F, and we’ve got another chilly, dreary day ahead of us. Today you can expect highs around 60 °F and a chance of rain here or there. Don’t worry, typical October weather—aka Richmond At It’s Best—returns tomorrow, and the weekend ahead of us looks amazing.

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Richmond’s School Board met last night, and now we wait for reporters to try and cover what happened at the middle-of-the-night meeting—boardmembers were still voting on motions at 11:30 PM, well past the Hour of Good Decisions. However, from what I can gather from The Tweets, it looks like the Board solidly passed Boardmember Doerr’s resolution to reject the Governor’s anti-trans policies. All members voted in favor except for 4th District Member Jonathan Young, who is clearly and actually a Republican. That’s something that the 4th District, which went for Biden in 2020, should remember when he runs for City Council next go around. The Board also got back into their discussion about scrapping the District’s curriculum, but I couldn’t really follow what happened. I’m going to wait patiently for our education reporters to get some sleep and submit their stories to their editors.

VPM’s Connor Scribner, who clearly has the best name for a journalist, reports on City Council’s competing plans to lower the real estate tax. Councilmember Trammell and Nye have introduced a paper to lower the rate from $1.20 per $100 of your home’s assessed value to $1.16 per $100 (ORD. 2022–271), and Trammell has introduced her own paper to lower the rate all the way down to $1.10 (ORD. 2022–278). I disagree with both, but the latter is reckless. I’ve written about why these across-the-board cuts are a bad idea, but Councilmember Addison puts it really well: “Every penny [of the real estate tax rate] is about $3.4 to $3.5 million of revenue that would be lost to the future budget…One of the challenges with a tax-rate reduction is that our revenues and our forecasted revenues derive how we are going to do our capital budget. And so, when you change the tax rate, therefore it changes our ability to borrow.” So even with the smaller, four-cent reduction, we cut $14 million dollars from the City’s budget and impact our ability to pay for current and future capital projects—parks, side walks, bike lanes, community centers, paving, all kinds of things. Which $14 million of projects and services would these two councilmembers suggest cutting? And what do Richmonders get in return? Not much! The math is pretty straight forward: If your home is assessed at $292,000, then (($292,000/$100) * $.04 tax reduction) / 12 months = … $9.73 in tax savings per month. That’s just not the kind of impact we’re looking for. Like I keep saying, these across-the-board cuts are lazy and don’t really provide any sort of relief for the folks who need it most. City Council needs to get creative and find new ways—ways allowed by state law, which are precious few—to help folks who can’t afford rising assessments without putting the city’s future at risk.

#375

October 4, 2022

🍾 Good morning, RVA: Market Value Analysis, new places to sit, and a live podcast recording

Good morning, RVA! It’s 53 °F, and today looks like our last dry, hurricane-remnant-free day for a bit. Expect highs around 70 °F with a cloudy sky while we finally get ready for some rain. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says that while the wet weather will wait until tomorrow to show up, “the early arrival of rain means the weekend (although cloudy) will likely have a lot of rain-free time with clouds and some scattered showers but likely NOT A weekend washout.” This seems like a great combination of much-needed rain and some time to spend outside over the weekend!

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The 2022 Market Value Analysis is now available for all of your housing data needs. The MVA “categorizes local market conditions within communities by compiling home sales, owner occupancy rates, bank sales and other indicators between 2018–2021.” Sounds boring, I know, but it’s basically an extremely data-heavy picture of the housing market that you can poke around in. For example, two stats, just pulled from the press release, that paint a grim picture: 1) The number of homes selling for less than $250,000 fell from 48% to 34% between 2018 and 2021 as the number of homes selling for more than $450,000 rose from 15% to 21%, and 2) MVA data reveals that in areas with lower-priced homes, 25% of home sales were from owners to investors compared to less than 5% in stronger market neighborhoods. Like I said, grim. Anyway, take some time to scroll through the overview, and, if interactive maps aren’t your thing, you can download the 110-page PDF here.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Eric Kolenich and Michael Martz continue their reporting on Bon Secours and Richmond Community Hospital in the East End. This piece is worth reading to get some of the context and history around what services Richmond Community Hospital offers currently and how that has changed over the years due to disinvestment.

#71

September 29, 2022

🍾 Good morning, RVA: Market Value Analysis, new places to sit, and a live podcast recording

Good morning, RVA! It’s 53 °F, and today looks like our last dry, hurricane-remnant-free day for a bit. Expect highs around 70 °F with a cloudy sky while we finally get ready for some rain. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says that while the wet weather will wait until tomorrow to show up, “the early arrival of rain means the weekend (although cloudy) will likely have a lot of rain-free time with clouds and some scattered showers but likely NOT A weekend washout.” This seems like a great combination of much-needed rain and some time to spend outside over the weekend!

Water cooler

The 2022 Market Value Analysis is now available for all of your housing data needs. The MVA “categorizes local market conditions within communities by compiling home sales, owner occupancy rates, bank sales and other indicators between 2018–2021.” Sounds boring, I know, but it’s basically an extremely data-heavy picture of the housing market that you can poke around in. For example, two stats, just pulled from the press release, that paint a grim picture: 1) The number of homes selling for less than $250,000 fell from 48% to 34% between 2018 and 2021 as the number of homes selling for more than $450,000 rose from 15% to 21%, and 2) MVA data reveals that in areas with lower-priced homes, 25% of home sales were from owners to investors compared to less than 5% in stronger market neighborhoods. Like I said, grim. Anyway, take some time to scroll through the overview, and, if interactive maps aren’t your thing, you can download the 110-page PDF here.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Eric Kolenich and Michael Martz continue their reporting on Bon Secours and Richmond Community Hospital in the East End. This piece is worth reading to get some of the context and history around what services Richmond Community Hospital offers currently and how that has changed over the years due to disinvestment.

#71

September 29, 2022

🦅 Good morning, RVA: Student walkouts, Bon Secours follow up, and an amended CRB

Good morning, RVA! It’s 48 °F, and we’ve got another amazing, even cooler, day ahead of us. Today you can expect dry skies and highs around 70. Looking towards the weekend, and it is officially time to start keeping an eye on Hurricane Ian and its potential impacts on our region. As of right now, NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says we should expect moderate to heavy rain on Saturday and Sunday as the storm’s remnants move through Richmond. Spend 10 minutes today thinking about your plan should we see significant rain and lose power for a bit—never hurts to be prepared!

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Megan Pauly at VPM reports on yesterday’s student walkouts protesting Governor Youngkin’s regressive anti-trans policies for public schools. Pauly talked to students from all over the region about the protests—from Glen Allen High School, Henrico High School, Midlothian High School, Appomattox Regional Governor’s School, and Open High School—representing Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield school districts. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Jessica Nocera and Anna Bryson spoke to a few of our elected representatives and grabbed a few videos of the walkouts, too. Apparently students at over 100 schools across the state walked out or had some sort of protest! These diverse, statewide student protests—which fill me with big, proud feelings—were timed to coincide with the Governor’s anti-trans policies dropping on the State’s online public-comment platform, Virginia Regulatory Town Hall. As of right now, just a couple of days into the comment period, over 25,000 comments already exist. Yes, you probably should go ahead and make your own comment in opposition to the policies, it’s easy and certainly can’t hurt, but the Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction has already said the administration doesn’t really care about the total number of comments and will only consider “substantive” comments. Your guess is as good as mine for how they plan on pulling out the “substantive” comments from a bucket of tens of thousands.

Eric Kolenich and Michael Martz at the RTD have a follow up report to this week’s story about Bon Secours “buying medicine at a discounted price through a federal program intended for low-income patients and dispersing it to customers throughout the area, regardless of their financial ability.” It sounds like Bon Secours has not violated the letter of the federal law, but opening clinics in wealthy parts of Henrico and Chesterfield certainly doesn’t feel inline with the intended spirit of the program. In fact, Mayor Stoney submitted this letter to Health and Human Services Secretary asking them to “investigate the deeply troubling use of section 340B by Bon Secours”, saying “It is immoral to profit off the backs of Black and Brown residents under the guise of ‘healthcare,’ and it must cease immediately.” And Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams looks a bit further down the road and writes about how Bon Secours can make amends for extracting resource and profits from residents by investing in a fully functioning, full-service hospital in the East End.

#737

September 28, 2022

☄️ Good morning, RVA: Monkeypox vaccine eligibility, we are go for Diamond District, and compost

Good morning, RVA! It’s 56 °F, and we’ve got another really wonderful day ahead of us (at least weatherwise). Today you can expect highs in the 70s and sunshine—keep an eye out for some gusty gusts this afternoon, though. If you have planters on your deck railing that keep getting blown off, maybe set them on the ground after lunch.

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Yesterday, the Virginia Department of Health expanded the eligibility criteria for the monkeypox vaccine, adding to the list of eligible folks “any person, of any sexual orientation or gender, who is living with HIV/AIDS; or any person, of any sexual orientation or gender, diagnosed with any sexually transmitted infection in the past three months.” If you’re a newly eligible Richmonder or Henricoan, set a reminder to fill out the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts’ updated Vaccine Interest Form this coming Monday (if you meet the previous eligibility criteria, go ahead and fill out that form right now). This is the second recent expansion of eligibility, which suggests, at least to me, that the tension between vaccine supply and vaccine demand is starting to balance out.

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports that last night City Council unanimously approved the resolution finalizing RVA Diamond Partners as the developer for the Diamond District (RES. 2022-R055). I’m not really sure what happens next, but I bet it’s a whole lot of paperwork. The City hopes to have the new stadium up and running by the 2025 baseball season, which really feels right around the corner. Time to get started tearing things up!

#532

September 27, 2022

🏥 Good morning, RVA: Hospital profits, Diamond District developer, and a depaving example

Good morning, RVA! It’s 60 °F, and today’s weather looks great. You can expect highs around 80 °F and a pleasant break in the humidity. I hope you spent some time outside this weekend and will find more time to do so today, because fall is officially The Best Time In Richmond. Take advantage of it!

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The New York Times published a long piece this weekend with the subhead: “Bon Secours Mercy Health, a major nonprofit health system, used the poverty of Richmond Community Hospital’s patients to tap into a lucrative federal drug program.” To quote a bit: “Richmond Community consists of little more than a strapped emergency room and a psychiatric ward…Yet the hollowed-out hospital — owned by Bon Secours Mercy Health, one of the largest nonprofit health care chains in the country — has the highest profit margins of any hospital in Virginia, generating as much as $100 million a year, according to the hospital’s financial data. The secret to its success lies with a federal program that allows clinics in impoverished neighborhoods to buy prescription drugs at steep discounts, charge insurers full price and pocket the difference.” Seems real bad on a local level, but also yet another signal that our entire healthcare system is so, so messed up.

City Council meets today with a pretty full agenda—lots of budge reallocations and special use permits. Two things to note, though: the ordinance to rezone the area around the Coliseum (ORD. 2022–246) and the resolution officially selecting RVA Diamond Partners LLC as the developer of the Diamond District (RES. 2022-R055). You should definitely flip through this PDF about the latter, it’s got some great slides about the community benefits attached to the development along with a high-level explanation of how the funding for this project works (check out slides 47–51). The City will create a Community Development Authority that will issue bonds to finance infrastructure, a park, and the baseball stadium. Those bonds will be repaid by taxes and fees collected from within the project area. This financing mechanism should sound vaguely familiar, because it’s very TIFlike and similar to how Navy Hill would have been funded. The massive difference here is in the size and scope of the area from which the taxes and fees are collected. Navy Hill planned to capture and funnel resources from the entirety of downtown to fund new development north of Broad. The Diamond District will only earmark funding from the project area, which is a small triangle surrounding the Diamond that is mostly parking lots and off-limits fields—a triangle that, at the moment, doesn’t generate a ton of tax revenue anyway. If revenue in the triangle exceeds the bond payments, the City keeps it. If the revenue falls short of the bond payments, the developer is on the hook to fill in the gap. There may be plenty of twists, turns, and gotchas in the text of the actual developer agreement, but, at least on the surface, this project seems just leaps and bounds better for the City than Navy Hill.

#87

September 26, 2022

🏥 Good morning, RVA: Hospital profits, Diamond District developer, and a depaving example

Good morning, RVA! It’s 60 °F, and today’s weather looks great. You can expect highs around 80 °F and a pleasant break in the humidity. I hope you spent some time outside this weekend and will find more time to do so today, because fall is officially The Best Time In Richmond. Take advantage of it!

Water cooler

The New York Times published a long piece this weekend with the subhead: “Bon Secours Mercy Health, a major nonprofit health system, used the poverty of Richmond Community Hospital’s patients to tap into a lucrative federal drug program.” To quote a bit: “Richmond Community consists of little more than a strapped emergency room and a psychiatric ward…Yet the hollowed-out hospital — owned by Bon Secours Mercy Health, one of the largest nonprofit health care chains in the country — has the highest profit margins of any hospital in Virginia, generating as much as $100 million a year, according to the hospital’s financial data. The secret to its success lies with a federal program that allows clinics in impoverished neighborhoods to buy prescription drugs at steep discounts, charge insurers full price and pocket the difference.” Seems real bad on a local level, but also yet another signal that our entire healthcare system is so, so messed up.

City Council meets today with a pretty full agenda—lots of budge reallocations and special use permits. Two things to note, though: the ordinance to rezone the area around the Coliseum (ORD. 2022–246) and the resolution officially selecting RVA Diamond Partners LLC as the developer of the Diamond District (RES. 2022-R055). You should definitely flip through this PDF about the latter, it’s got some great slides about the community benefits attached to the development along with a high-level explanation of how the funding for this project works (check out slides 47–51). The City will create a Community Development Authority that will issue bonds to finance infrastructure, a park, and the baseball stadium. Those bonds will be repaid by taxes and fees collected from within the project area. This financing mechanism should sound vaguely familiar, because it’s very TIFlike and similar to how Navy Hill would have been funded. The massive difference here is in the size and scope of the area from which the taxes and fees are collected. Navy Hill planned to capture and funnel resources from the entirety of downtown to fund new development north of Broad. The Diamond District will only earmark funding from the project area, which is a small triangle surrounding the Diamond that is mostly parking lots and off-limits fields—a triangle that, at the moment, doesn’t generate a ton of tax revenue anyway. If revenue in the triangle exceeds the bond payments, the City keeps it. If the revenue falls short of the bond payments, the developer is on the hook to fill in the gap. There may be plenty of twists, turns, and gotchas in the text of the actual developer agreement, but, at least on the surface, this project seems just leaps and bounds better for the City than Navy Hill.

#87

September 26, 2022

🏳️‍🌈 Good morning, RVA: Early voting starts today, municipal recycling, and Pridefest

Good morning, RVA! It’s 54 °F, and that cooler, fall weather has finally arrived! Today you can expect highs in the low 70s, sunshine, and a beautiful start to the weekend. Temperatures may heat up a little on Sunday and Monday, but the vast majority of the next ten days looks lovely. I hope you have some excellent weekend plans to go alongside this excellent weekend weather!

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As of last night, the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Levels for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield are all medium across the board—but only just! The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 133, 105, and 101, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 10.6. If the current trends continue, next week we could see the first low Community Levels in…who knows how long! That’s exciting news, and, for now at least, the creeping fall hasn’t yet brought along with it creeping COVID-19 case counts or hospitalizations. Let’s keep it that way: If you haven’t yet made an appointment to get your new, bivalent COVID-19 booster (and this year’s flu shot), just go ahead and do that today. Do your part in helping keep these coronanumbers down!

Early voting for the November 8th election starts today at your local registrar’s office, if you’re looking for something civics-y to do this weekened. However, if you still need a minute to get yourself together, you have plenty of time to request an absentee ballot or even register to vote. However: Don’t put either of those things off, don’t let the off-cycle election deter you, and don’t let the last nine months of lessons go to waste! Make a plan cast your ballot today.

#338

September 23, 2022

🍸 Good morning, RVA: Cooler weather, dramatic signage, and cold martinis

Good morning, RVA! It’s 68 °F, and cooler weather arrives this afternoon! You can expect highs in the upper 80s, but then, at some point after lunch, a cold front moves through dropping temperatures and maybe even dropping some rain (finally). Tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, you can expect temperatures mostly in the exceedingly temperate 70s.

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VPM’s Whittney Evans and Megan Pauly talked to a law professor and a couple legislators about the enforceability of the Governor’s new anti-trans policies for public schools. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t seem like the Governor has the authority to make these changes in policy without some sort of action by the General Assembly, an ongoing theme with this administration. I liked this quote from Del. Marcus Simon from Fairfax: “There’s a whole bunch of things that are wrong with the way this was done, but I think that’s mostly because the governor isn’t interested in the policy here.”

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense explains why there’s been an item about Virginia Union University’s tower signage floating around on various City Council agendas for a while now. Apparently, the signs went up without approval (signage is zoning!), and they may run afoul of the Commission of Architectural Review and historic preservation guidelines. Money can solve a lot of problems, though: “A nearly finalized agreement with the state Board of Historic Resources to allow the signage to remain in place includes an annual payment of $35,000 that VUU would be required to pay every year that the signs remain up, among other provisions.” The light-up signs seem fine to me—it is a college campus after all.

#1093

September 22, 2022

🔌 Good morning, RVA: Confederate monument survey, busses in Chesterfield, and electric transportation

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F, and we’ve got another hot day ahead of us. Expect highs around 90 °F as we wait for cooler temperatures—and maybe even some rain—to show up tomorrow afternoon (fingers crossed!).

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The old, deposed Confederate Monuments are now the responsibility of the Black History Museum and the Valentine. It’s a big responsibility, and, as they figure out what to do with these things, they want to get it right: “The Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia (BHMVA) takes the responsibility of managing and having ultimate accountability for the disposition of the Confederate monuments very seriously. We are committed to ensuring the origin of these objects and their purpose are never forgotten: that is the glorification of those who led the fight to enslave African Americans and destroy the Union. We are likewise committed to the opportunities these monuments and our work related to them create: the opportunity to use the monuments as tools for education healing, and reconciliation as we deepen our understanding of an essential element of the American story: the expansion of freedom.” Part of that thoughtful process includes this quick survey that you should fill out. I felt surprising emotions when I saw the Valentine’s temporary Jefferson Davis display, so I’m pretty excited for whatever the Black History Museum ends up putting together. Collecting these massive things in a single, appropriate space with the right context should be pretty powerful.

The Chesterfield Observer reports that GRTC and Chesterfield County have agreed on a one-year expansion of bus service along Midlothian Turnpike. As soon as fall 2023, we could see 30-minute bus service along Midlo, continuing from its existing terminus at the city line, all the way out to Buford Road—including stops at Johnston-Willis Hospital and Chesterfield Towne Center. First, this is great news. Midlothian Turnpike is one of our region’s primary corridors and needs high-quality and frequent (more frequent than this!) bus service. Second, I’m nervous about setting up a one-year pilot. Folks don’t make life decisions based on bus service existing for a single year; you’re not going to take a job at the hospital if you’re not sure you’ll be able to get to work a year from now. But! Chesterfield had great success with the newish bus service down Route 1, so I’m hopeful they’ll be able to replicate that with this new service out Route 60.

#903

September 21, 2022

⚾️ Good morning, RVA: School Board, silos, and Squirrels

Good morning, RVA! It’s 65 °F, and we’ve got another hot day in front of us. Expect highs around 90 °F again as we patiently wait for Friday’s cooler temperatures (and maybe even temperatures that starts with a six!). However, for today, stay cool stay to hydrated!

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Patrick Larsen at VPM has a few quotes and thoughts from local School Districts about Governor Youngkin’s new regressive anti-trans public school policies. Of course I deeply appreciate RPS Superintendent Kamras quickly and forcefully asking the School Board to “object to this model policy as vociferously as we possibly can to prevent its implementation.” But I also like where Dot Heffron, Chesterfield School Board Member, is coming from, too. She seems frustrated at the no-notice, drastic shift in a policy that’s been, in her words, “a nonissue.” RPS School Boardmember Liz Doerr introduced a motion last night to reject the Governor’s new model policy, an action which should show up on their October 3rd agenda.

Speaking of the RPS School Board, KidsFirst RPS live-tweeted their meeting last night and reports that the Board wrapped things up at 8:41 PM! That’s way before bad-decision o' clock!

#524

September 20, 2022

🏟️ Good morning, RVA: Horrible guidelines, new rezonings, and a School Board meeting

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F, but warmer weather returns today and continues until Thursday. Expect highs near 90 °F and lots of sunshine. The end of this week looks pretty nice though—now just to maintain until then!

Water cooler

This past Friday, Governor Youngkin’s administration issued new, horrible guidelines for how public schools should treat transgender kids. From Hannah Natanson at the Washington Post: “The administration of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) this weekend sharply restricted the rights of transgender students, sending schools into turmoil and drawing strong denunciations from Democratic legislators and some educators, but earning applause from Republicans…The new ‘model policies’ — a version of which must be adopted by all of the state’s 133 school districts next month — will require transgender students to access school facilities and programs matching the sex they were assigned at birth. The policies also make it onerous for students to change their name and gender at school.” You can read the new model policies here, ghoulishly titled “2022 Model Police’s on the Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools”. About the new policies, RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras says, “This is unacceptable. Public schools should be welcoming and inclusive, not exclusionary. The very least we can give our students is dignity and respect. This action takes it away.” Democratic legislators say the new policy violates the spirit of a 2020 law passed by the GA and, as such, will be challenged in court. We’ll see. We’ll also see how progressive school districts respond should VDOE adopt this new, regressive policy. We’ve watched conservative school districts, like Hanover County’s, decide to just…not comply…with current policies that protect trans students, and those districts have suffered literally zero consequences.

Related, I thought this was a really good insight from Ned Oliver and Karri Peifer at AXIOS Richmond: “The administration’s rollout of the policy offers a textbook example of Youngkin’s strategy of delivering dramatically different messages to different audiences. Youngkin exclusively announced the policy to a right-wing national media outlet, the Daily Wire, on Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, his administration never issued a press release to Virginia-based media outlets, instead emailing reporters to promote efforts to hold down college tuition costs.”

#960

September 19, 2022

🧑‍🎨 Good morning, RVA: Beautiful weather, creative tax solutions, and the RVA Street Art Festival

Good morning, RVA! It’s 59 °F, and today you can expect beautiful weather with low humidity and highs right around 80 °F. The amazing temperatures continue right on through the weekend, too, so I hope you have something planned that involves at least some sort of outdoor physical activity. I know that this is probably 2022’s False Fall and we should prepare ourselves for an impending Second Summer, but, dang, this weekend’s gonna feel great!

Water cooler

As of last night, the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Levels for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield are all medium across the board. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 170, 131, and 156, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 13. The big question I have is whether or not the approaching fall and winter will bring with it another coronawave or if we’re really starting to see a permanent decrease in the spread of COVID-19 in our communities. We’ll find out in 6 weeks, I bet. Until then, you, personally, can help keep those numbers down (and help keep yourself out of the hospital) by making an appointment for one of those new bivalent boosters. The region is lousy with appointments, and you can probably even find one today at your local pharmacy. The best part: These boosters work against the original strain of COVID-19 and the newer Omicron strains—all in a single shot! Why not get your flu vaccine while you’re there, too? You’ll walk out having strong protection against all sorts of things! You’ll be the She-Hulk of respiratory diseases!

You should read through 1st District Councilmember Andreas Addison’s September newsletter. He’s been the advocate on Council for implementing a Land Value Tax in Richmond, and he explains where we are in that process—delayed and slow moving, which isn’t great news as Council already has an ordinance to lower the real estate tax on their agenda. Maybe that’s not a done deal, though! Addison says, “We are exploring a real estate tax rebate funded through our FY2022 Budget Surplus based upon last years approved budget. I am interested in capping or limiting the amount real estate assessments can be increased per year to 5%…We have a proposal on the table to lower the tax rate. I am concerned that the solution of only lowering the rate will not address the underlying problem in how we calculate our taxes and how an inflated housing market is currently driving this problem.” Yes to all of this. These are great examples of creative ways to provide tax relief to those who need it while not hamstringing Richmond Of The Future should, for whatever reason or recession, assessments and revenue crater. Here’s the rub: With no other solutions on the table, Councilmember Nye and Trammell’s plan to cut the real estate tax by four cents will most likely pass. However, if Councilmember Addison can quickly tee up some of these alternatives, a majority of Council may be willing to delay any rate cuts, giving time to fully flesh out a LVT plan for next September.

#691

September 16, 2022

🐐 Good morning, RVA: Mapping the bike network, Diamond District in committee, and post-apocalyptic goats.

Good morning, RVA! It’s 60 °F, and we’ve got another beautiful day ahead of us. Expect highs in the low 80s and a continued break in the humidity. I hope everyone can find some time to sit quietly outside, enjoy the weather, and watch the world go by for at least a minute or two.

Water cooler

All you gotta do is ask! The person behind the Richmond Department of Transformation (assuming it’s not just an incredibly advanced AI), put together a mostly-accurate-but-totally-serviceable map of the existing and proposed bike lanes across the city). Here’s what I want you to do: Turn off the bike share station layer, zoom out a bit, and then toggle the “Public Survey 2022” layer on and off. You should see how these new, proposed bike lanes aren’t just isolated islands but connect and infill the existing bike network. You should also see that we’ve got massive gaps in that existing bike network that we need to address. Still though, the progress made over the last couple of years is really impressive. P.S. The Department of Public Works still wants your feedback on those six proposed bike lanes—it only takes a couple of minutes and gives you the opportunity to ask for more physical protection on each of these designs.

City Council’s Finance and Economic Development committee meets today at 1:00 PM and will consider, among other things, the resolution to approve RVA Diamond Partners LLC as the developer of the Diamond District (RES. 2022-R055). At this point, Councmembers Newbille, Robertson, Lambert, Addison, Jordan, Lynch, and Jones have all signed on as patrons—which means, barring something completely unexpected, this is gonna zoom through committee today and easily pass Council at their next meeting in a couple weeks.

#255

September 15, 2022

💎 Good morning, RVA: Gun violence, new legislation to watch, and more on the Diamond District

Good morning, RVA! It’s 59 °F, and NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says we haven’t seen a morning in the 50s since June 21st. Today you can expect highs in the 80s, mostly sunshine, and a strong pull to take as many meetings or calls or classes outside as possible. Enjoy, and get ready for more of the same over the next couple of days!

Water cooler

You should read RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras’s email from last night. First, to see the real and horrible impact gun violence has on our city’s children and families. Second, to read his thoughts on the current efforts by School Board to scrap-and-rewrite the District’s curriculum. Here are three points he brings up that address a handful of concerns I’ve heard floating around and mentioned during various public comment periods: “1) Curricula are the floor, not the ceiling. Teachers are free to make adjustments to the curricula as necessary to meet the unique needs of their students. 2) No RPS teacher will be disciplined for making adjustments that they feel are necessary to meet the needs of their students. 3) Curricula are living things. They need to continue to evolve based on student and teacher needs. RPS is committed to that process.”—emphasis his.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams write about that same gun violence and how RRHA’s new CEO, Steven Nesmith, has a hard and complicated job: “And this is part of what separates Nesmith’s job from that of other real estate developers. To be successful, he must not only replace the aging bricks and mortar of RRHA’s housing stock. He must foster a sense of security among tenants beset by gun violence and chronic economic and housing insecurity.” Nesmith, who grew up in a public housing neighborhood in Philly, already seems pretty involved in the community—despite not officially starting until October.

#615

September 14, 2022

🍉 Good morning, RVA: A marathon meeting, a bike lane survey, and a Diamond District developer

Good morning, RVA! It’s 69 °F, and today looks like the beginning of a great stretch of weather. Expect highs in the low 80s, less humidity, and enough sun to get it done. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says this is “the first of a lot of LOW HUMIDITY DAYS.” Me and my sweaty undershirts are incredibly excited about this development!

Water cooler

RPS’s School Board met last night for a marathon meeting, and KidsFirst RPS live-tweeted the entire thing—right up through when the Board moved into a closed session at 12:43 AM. That’s a 6+ hour meeting spanning two different days! Bananas! No one makes good decisions after midnight, especially not decisions that impact thousands of kids and families. I’m sure we (those of us who did not voluntarily tune in to a 6-hour public meeting) will get a full breakdown of the decisions the Board did make once reporters have a chance to catch a couple hours of sleep. Poking around on Twitter this morning, though, and it does sound like the Board failed in another attempt to scrap the District’s curriculum (on a 4–4–1 vote, with Boardmember Harris-Muhammed abstaining). That’s twice now the Board has tried to delete the current curriculum and replace it with something homegrown, and twice that the motion failed when one of the five-member voting bloc didn’t go along with their majority. I think that’s interesting.

It’s been a while, but I’ve got another bike lane survey for you to fill out! The City’s Department of Public Works needs a second round of feedback for bike infrastructure on six corridors across Richmond: Warwick Road, Admiral/School Streets, Moore Street, W. Marshall Street, Norfolk Street, and N. Sheppard Street. DPW will take this next round of feedback, tweak the designs if needed, and then begin construction as soon as this fall! Exciting stuff for a Tuesday morning. Slight tangent: I haven’t had time to do this, but someone should take these proposed bike lanes and drop them on the map of existing bike lanes so folks can see how the new projects help make important connections. For example, the proposed Admiral Street bike lane would (finally!) provide a safe, protected bike connection between Brook Road and Lombardy Street heading south. As someone who rides through there all the time, I’m incredibly excited…but it’s hard to know the big picture when you’re just looking at the tiny little map in the survey.

#128

September 13, 2022

🍉 Good morning, RVA: A marathon meeting, a bike lane survey, and a Diamond District developer

Good morning, RVA! It’s 69 °F, and today looks like the beginning of a great stretch of weather. Expect highs in the low 80s, less humidity, and enough sun to get it done. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says this is “the first of a lot of LOW HUMIDITY DAYS.” Me and my sweaty undershirts are incredibly excited about this development!

Water cooler

RPS’s School Board met last night for a marathon meeting, and KidsFirst RPS live-tweeted the entire thing—right up through when the Board moved into a closed session at 12:43 AM. That’s a 6+ hour meeting spanning two different days! Bananas! No one makes good decisions after midnight, especially not decisions that impact thousands of kids and families. I’m sure we (those of us who did not voluntarily tune in to a 6-hour public meeting) will get a full breakdown of the decisions the Board did make once reporters have a chance to catch a couple hours of sleep. Poking around on Twitter this morning, though, and it does sound like the Board failed in another attempt to scrap the District’s curriculum (on a 4–4–1 vote, with Boardmember Harris-Muhammed abstaining). That’s twice now the Board has tried to delete the current curriculum and replace it with something homegrown, and twice that the motion failed when one of the five-member voting bloc didn’t go along with their majority. I think that’s interesting.

It’s been a while, but I’ve got another bike lane survey for you to fill out! The City’s Department of Public Works needs a second round of feedback for bike infrastructure on six corridors across Richmond: Warwick Road, Admiral/School Streets, Moore Street, W. Marshall Street, Norfolk Street, and N. Sheppard Street. DPW will take this next round of feedback, tweak the designs if needed, and then begin construction as soon as this fall! Exciting stuff for a Tuesday morning. Slight tangent: I haven’t had time to do this, but someone should take these proposed bike lanes and drop them on the map of existing bike lanes so folks can see how the new projects help make important connections. For example, the proposed Admiral Street bike lane would (finally!) provide a safe, protected bike connection between Brook Road and Lombardy Street heading south. As someone who rides through there all the time, I’m incredibly excited…but it’s hard to know the big picture when you’re just looking at the tiny little map in the survey.

#128

September 13, 2022