Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 46 °F and still rainy—at least from where I’m sitting. The chance of rain dwindles as the day progresses, but the weather most likely won’t dry out entirely until this afternoon. The slog through today is worth it, though, because the weekend looks stunning: Sunny and clear with highs in the mid 60s and 70s.

Yesterday, the Mayor introduced his FY25 budget, and you can watch the video of his remarks via the City’s legislative website, listen to them at 2x over on The Boring Show, or read them as prepared in this PDF. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Em Holter has an overview and, of course, you can dive straight into the official proposed budget document here.

I haven’t had much time to dig through the PDF yet, but highlights include: pay raises for City employees, $21 million for street maintenance (that covers paving but can also include additional infrastructure like sidewalks and bike lanes), $10 million to make improvements to Brown’s Island, $6.1 million for the Fall Line Trail, and a $15.8 million increase for Richmond Public Schools. There’s a bunch to discuss, of course, but that last item for schools will be top of mind for a lot of folks. Remember: The budget passed by the RPS School Board requested an additional $25 million from the City, and they’ll now need to come up with $9 million worth of cuts.

Stay tuned, and give the Mayor’s presentation a listen, it’s only 47 minutes long (just 24 minutes at 2x)!.

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports that “Legend Brewing Co. has put its Manchester real estate up for sale, leaving the future of Richmond’s oldest brewery up in the air. .” To everything there is a season, and, for the Ukrop’s of Richmond beer, that season may be over. I’m bummed, but, if interrogate that feeling, I think it’s mostly about being old enough to remember various Time Was-es. Anyway! Get over it, old man, and let’s build some more housing down that way!

A bunch of journalists at VPM report that the City of Alexandria “ended negotiations” on the Governor’s stadium deal, effectively killing what Sen. Louise Lucas has affectionately called The GlennDome. Governor Youngkin put out this passive aggressive statement which includes an actual “but nooooooo.”

Definitely not local but still really interesting: The New York Times reports that, after years of back and forth, the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to approve congestion pricing in Manhattan. Should the new policy clear the remaining hurdles (literally six lawsuits and a bunch of angry rich people), most passenger cars would be charged $15 a day to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. New York has tried to implement congestion pricing for years and years, and, again, if it somehow squeaks the new regulations past a bunch of litigious New Yorkers, it will become the first American city to do so. Exciting stuff if only for creating an example of how it’s possible to build a less car-centric city—even in America!

Today at 12:00 PM, RVA Rapid Transit will host a virtual Transit Talk focused on the Richmond Connects Final Action Plan. They’ll have folks on hand from the City’s Office of Equitable Transit & Mobility to answer all of your questions about the actual infrastructure Richmond Connects recommends building. Tune in if you’re curious about how our now-adopted transportation plan (!) will impact your neighborhood. I think, between now and this coming January, everyone needs to make a list of projects they’re stoked on and start thinking about how to hold our elected officials accountable for getting them implemented. For me, my list includes (but is not limited to!): Chamberlayne Avenue pedestrian safety improvements, Southside Plaza pedestrian connections across railroad tracks, the James River Branch Trail, and extending the Franklin Street cycle track to Lombardy.

Logistical note: Tomorrow is Good Friday, and the local school districts are closed. While this is technically not a state holiday, the gap between George Washington Day on February 19th and Memorial Day on May 27th is far too long to endure without some sort of break. So! I’m taking tomorrow off from this email newsletter and will return to your inboxes on Monday. If you can, maybe join me in some time away from responsibilities—I think the weather might just be too good to ignore.

I really appreciated this reframing of classic science fiction (rocket ships and robots) as “from the 1900s.” Sure it makes Elon Musk’s hobbies look ancient and out-of-touch, but it also makes me wonder what sort of old-timey visions of the future I’m still holding on to. For what it’s worth, Kim Stanley Robinson—who has written plenty of classic sci-fi stories, including an entire series about colonizing Mars—does a wonderful job writing contemporary science fiction in his book The Ministry for the Future. It’s a book I’m always thinking about, and one of my strongest recommendations!

Hieroglyph was a project where a specific design constraint was imposed on a set of authors and scientists, forcing them to reframe how they looked at science fiction, and the future. I’m not looking to repeat that exact experiment; but I am going to ask this of you: Are your ideas and plans for confronting the crises and opportunities we face in the 2020s based on ideas ‘from the 1900s?’ If so, it is possible that there are new ideas and plans that are a better match to our current situation? I’ve set this as my own design constraint for the next few years. I’m going to write short stories, novels, and collaborate with as many people as I can on real-world projects to reframe and reinvent our future.

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Never a great sign.

Good morning, RVA! It's 44 °F, and rain should move into the region before lunch. As you’re trapped inside or hiding under eaves and awnings, you can expect highs in the mid 50s. The wet weather will most likely continue straight on through to tomorrow afternoon, dumping upwards of two inches of rain onto our already sodden region. Hang in there, because clear skies and a beautifully warm weekend sits just around the corner.

Today at 3:00 PM, Mayor Levar Stoney will introduce his FY25 budget at City Council Chambers. He’ll give some prepared remarks, which usually serve as a sort of budget executive summary, and, should you find yourself with some time to spare this afternoon, you can stream the whole thing live over on the City’s legislative website. PDFs of both the Annual Fiscal Plan (operating budget) and Capital Improvement Plan (capital budget) should be available online shortly thereafter. I’ll make sure to get the Mayor’s speech up on The Boring Show as soon as I can, because I’m sure it’ll be worth a listen.

By the way, I put this past Monday’s City Council kickoff session up last night, so, if you hurry, you can listen to that before the Mayor gets to speechifying later this afternoon. It’s only 38 minutes long—just 19 minutes at 2x—and something you could crush out on your morning commute or maybe even while eating breakfast. Oh, also, you should just subscribe to The Boring Show in the podcast player of your choice, too.

Participatory budgeting—where you, a Richmond resident, get an actual say in how the City spends $3 million of its money—has been a long time coming. Now the wheels have started to turn, the opportunities to get involved have started to pop up, and I’m starting to get pretty excited. If you’d like to learn more about the process, you can head on over to the Powhatan Hill Community Center tonight at 6:00 PM for the second participatory budgeting workshop. If you tapped through the previous link, also got excited, and don’t want to wait all the way until this evening, then I recommend downloading the really well-put-together People’s Budget Richmond Rulebook. It’ll give you some of the PB specifics and slake your PB appetite until tonight’s meeting.

Hayleigh Colombo and Luca Powell at the Richmond Times-Dispatch have an interesting report on the situation with Richmond’s mail delivery. I think, anecdotally, we all know that Something Is Amiss with the Postal Service, and I had sort of chalked it up to underfunding and the wrongheaded idea that USPS needs to fully fund its own operations—a more general set of issues facing post offices all across the country. However, what I didn’t realize is that the Trump-appointed Postmaster General decided to implement his grand vision for “fixing” the mail in Richmond’s own Sandston facility: “Richmond’s Sandston facility was the first facility in the country to undergo DeJoy’s efficiency makeover, which began in 2023.” So maybe the issues facing our region’s mail delivery really are specific to Richmond? We’ll learn more soon, because USPS’s Office of Inspector General plans to release a “thorough examination of systemic failures” in the next couple of weeks. Yikes, that’s some intense framing on that future PDF!

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania has good news for soccer fans: The Kickers will install a new, 65 foot x 35 foot video scoreboard in City Stadium this coming summer. City Stadium is old, like 95 years old, and I love that we’ve found a fun way to keep it in use while also slowly modernizing it here and there.

Congratulations to VPM’s Ben Paviour who “was recently selected by The New York Times to become a part of their 2024-25 Local Investigations Fellowship cohort.” Paviour will continue to work in Richmond but will focus on “Virginia’s judicial appointment system.” Fascinating, and I’m looking forward to reading what comes out of Paviour’s fellowship...with the actual New York Times(!!).

This article’s subhed is great: “Crows are smart enough to pick up trash. Why won’t they?” And it’s like, I dunno, humans are smart enough to pick up trash, too, and you don’t see us doing that either.

Klein, the inventor of the “crow vending machine,” has called himself a “passionate hacker of all things,” but, the more I watched crows in the Jardin des Plantes, the more I wondered who was hacking whom. I saw crows fish McDonald’s bags out of trash cans and follow strollers and toddlers, knowing that children were more likely to drop crumbs. They visited the garden’s menagerie, one of the world’s oldest zoos, to raid food from the llama and rhea enclosures. Evolution had empowered crows to expose the weak spots in our designs, and I found myself admiring their mischief as a rebellion against our hubris. “Crows and ravens have co-evolved with us since the time of Neanderthals, and yet we’ve never domesticated them,” Marzluff, the Seattle ecologist, told me. The real mark of crow genius may be its ability to maintain independence in spaces that humans think of as their own.

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Bringing Up Baby spoilers.

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today you should expect cloudier skies with highs in the 60s. A bunch more rain shows up tomorrow morning and will probably hang around until Thursday evening, so get ready for another couple days of squishy, soggy weather.

It sure seems like it’s been a wet March, doesn’t it? I wanted to know if my gut feeling matched reality, or if I’m just annoyed about how all the wet weather keeps me from riding my bicycle as often as I’d like. So, I turned to my favorite, overly complex weather website, which says that days with “at least 0.04 inches of liquid or liquid-equivalent precipitation” are considered wet days, and in March we typically see 8.5 wet days. Turns out, so far this month, we’ve had seven wet days—just the regular amount! As is often the case, my gut is just frustrated and wishes it were riding a bicycle.

While I await the video from yesterday’s Budget Season kickoff meeting with City Council, Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details to tide me over. To get ready for the Mayor’s budget presentation on Wednesday, Council has put together five big buckets to hold all of their own priorities: Strong futures for children and families; safe and clean neighborhoods; strategic infrastructure projects; planned growth, economic progress, and affordable housing; and responsible, accountable, and innovative government. If you really want to dig in, you can scroll through this 48-page PDF—hop down to page 30 for the list of specific priorities City Council wants funded and how much each of those priorities will cost. Next up: On Wednesday we’ll get to see how closely Council’s vision aligns with the Mayor’s vision.

Charlotte Rene Woods, also at the RTD reports that, surrounded by cake pops, the Governor signed the “cake pop bill” (HB 759). This new law allows folks to market “low-risk foods, like baked goods and pickles” via social media without drawing the ire of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. If you decide to read the aforelinked article, prepare yourself for a lot of Republicans tramping around shouting about reducing regulation and the limiting the size and scope of government. Mostly, I think it’s neat that this lady, Kelly Phillips of KP’s Kake Pops, will now have a cool story to tell about how she changed state law. I wish I had a story like that!

Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers got ahold of the first renderings of the City’s new baseball stadium. Make sure you orient yourself property to the article’s header image! Notice how the new stadium will nicely front Arthur Ashe Boulevard, unlike The Diamond which puts two huge triangles of parking along the street and totally kills the vibe.

A couple weeks ago I linked to the Newlin Music Prize—an award given to Richmond’s best new album—as a great source of new, local music. Yesterday, they announced that Butcher Brown’s Solar Music has won the $2,500 cash prize plus a bunch of honor and bragging rights. Tap through to see the full short list of nominees and make sure you add them all to your queue.

Early this morning a huge container ship ran into one of the piers supporting the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and the entire thing immediately collapsed. The video is terrifying, like a horror film, and I can’t stop watching it. I think because we don’t often see infrastructure collapse in such an acute way in America—typically our infrastructure decays over decades. As of about 6:30 AM, emergency responders were conducting a rescue effort for people who were driving across the bridge when it collapsed.

I’d sort of missed / ignored the news about Trump’s social network, Truth Social, going public. Snooze fest, right? Well, maybe not, since major corporations or foreign governments can just dump a ton of money into this publicly traded company, and, as the stock prices go up, directly enrich a presidential candidate. This longread calls it the first “publicly-traded presidential candidacy,” and that feels scary and new.

Will there be any restrictions on who can own stock in DJT? Such limitations would be difficult to enforce, particularly if there are intermediaries or big funds involved. This means the Russians, Chinese and Saudis could each take huge institutional stakes in DJT as a publicly-traded company very much tied to the possible future president. This would make the notion of foreign governments renting rooms at Trump hotels look quaint by comparison. Imagine come 2025 that big, wealthy buyers hold commanding stakes in Trump’s net worth, and he is now the president. What wouldn’t he do to stay in their good graces? Our jurisprudence around the Emoluments Clause isn’t set up to handle such a situation. I’ve read many pieces about how Trump is set to be worth $3.4 billion more next week, but I’ve seen nothing so far warning of the dangers of a publicly-traded presidential candidacy. We are in wholly uncharted waters.

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Floral carpet.

Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and we’ve got an up-and-down weather week ahead of us. Today, expect clear skies and highs in the 60s; then get ready for cooler, wetter weather to move through on Wednesday; but, later, celebrate truly excellent weather this weekend with highs right around 70 °F. I know it’s early to start looking forward to the weekend, but too bad! I’m gonna do it anyway!

City Council has a busy and fun schedule today. First, they’ll meet at 3:00 PM for their budget season kickoff—a thrilling meeting that mostly consists of them getting on the same page with their own priorities for the operating and capital budgets. This meeting can sometimes serve as a barometer for how spicy Council plans on getting with the Mayor’s proposed budget (which, remember, drops on Wednesday). You can tune in live over on the City’s website, and I’ll make sure to get the audio up on The Boring Show as soon as I can.

Second, Council will get together for their regularly scheduled meeting with a ton of items to consider, but they all sit entirely on the Consent Agenda. That’s sort of been the way of things lately, but it’s double smart considering the potentially long budget meeting beforehand. I mean, who wants to spend eight hours in meetings? Not this guy.

Two and a half items to note, though:

Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury reports on the potential to expand the state’s Virginia Breeze intercity bus service by adding an east-west line, connecting Harrisonburg to Virginia Beach. This seems like a great idea, and I think a lot of Richmond folks would be interested in taking intercity bus service to Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, or Virginia Beach. This part confuses me though: “The Alternative 1 route plan calls for stops at Richmond International Airport and in Newport News, Williamsburg and New Kent, while Alternative 2 includes stops in Suffolk, Petersburg and Richmond’s Staples Mills area, a transportation hub which is also home to Amtrak’s most-used train station in the Southeast.” Putting Richmond’s bus stops in two locations that are incredibly hard to reach by bus—the airport and the Staples Mill train station—seems counter productive at best and, at worst, a great way to create a service that no one uses. Why not have both routes run through Main Street Station where Virginia Breeze’s Capital Connector route already stops?

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Dave Ress reminds me that “Virginia is the only state that says restoration of voting rights to anyone with felony convictions is subject to the discretion of the governor.” Embarrassing. 39 states (78%!) allow people to vote once they complete their sentences. And with a Republican governor at the helm of the commonwealth, we’ve seen those rights restoration drop each year.

From my inbox: “Meet the new kids at Maymont!”—and by kids, they definitely mean adorable baby goats. Here’s a whole folder of cute baby goats pictures, and you can stop by the Nature Center during Spring Break (April 1st — 5th) to say hi in person.

Four years ago we still had a lot to learn about COVID-19 and hadn’t really figured out a lot of the mitigation measures we’ve got today. Here’s a very-Richmond quote from the Mayor, way back in 2020, discouraging group hangouts at the river: “If folks are at Texas Beach with a bunch of PBRs, then obviously we’re going to provide some guidance that they should disperse.” You definitely wouldn’t hear this sort of thing today—first because small outdoor hangouts at the river are a great way to help prevent the spread of respiratory disease, and, second, because access to Texas Beach is still closed while we wait for a replacement bridge.

Less local, but still a milestone to mark: Three years ago, Governor Northam signed the legislation banning capital punishment in Virginia. Also tap through that link if you want to read some very early casino coverage.

This is great advice for getting unstuck, and I think it’s a lot of the reason that the entire Getting Things Done system relies on breaking tasks down into their very smallest next actions. “Do taxes” is a lot more daunting than “Put all of the year-end tax papers into a pile on the kitchen table.” If I do the latter, I bet I’ll keep going and get some more done.

Sometimes, it all gets to be too much. There are too many things to do! I need to figure out where to start! I get paralyzed by the sheer enormity of it all. This has happened enough times that I know the solution: do literally anything. It doesn't matter what! Write half of an article. Categorize two expenses. Write down all your ideas for videos. Clean your office. Respond to a single email. By doing anything, I find momentum. I find motivation! I ease the heavy feeling and find my stride. The mere act of doing pushes back the tidal wave of thoughts. The problem is primarily emotional. I feel paralyzed. The solution is primarily emotional too! Just do one thing.

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Nailed it.

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, cold again, and that big rain I wrote about earlier in the week shows up tonight. After a day of cloudy skies and highs around 60 °F, you should expect the wet weather to start late this evening and continue straight on through until tomorrow afternoon. Sunday looks nice and crisp, though.

It’s here! Yesterday, City Council released their schedule for the 2024 (aka FY2025) budget season! I’m excited and want to point out a couple important dates for you to put on your calendar:

Council is legally required to adopt a budget for Richmond Public Schools by May 15th and a budget for the City by May 31st, but, other than that all of these dates are tentative and can slip and change at any moment. But, honestly, the chaotic, late-night, hours-long budget meetings of the 2010s are mostly a thing of the past. In fact, the last couple of budget seasons have been pretty smooth sailing—a definite improvement, especially considering the level of uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

I’ll plan on relaunching The Boring Show next week—a podcast of the audio from all of these public budget meetings. That way folks who want to follow along can do so at 2x speed.

Budget season is one of my favorite times of the year, and it all starts next week!

Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury reports that if the Governor does not rename his “Office of Diversity, Opportunity and Inclusion” back to the “Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, the budget recently passed by the General Assembly will take the money allocated for that office and move it instead to...the Virginia Cannabis Equity Business Loan Fund. Is this petty? With a Governor who is “not interested” in the retail marijuana market? I think so, yes! But, before you feel too much of a way about it, remember that the current head of that office, Martin Brown, gave a speech at VMI saying “Let’s take a moment right now to kill that cow. DEI is dead...It was mandated by the General Assembly, but this governor has a different philosophy of civil discourse, civility...living the golden rule, right?” To be clear, this is the head of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion saying that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is dead and that, instead of working to undo hundreds of years of systemic inequity we should just be civil to one another? Honestly, I’d forgotten all about Brown, but now I’m worked up and excited to follow along with these shenanigans baked into the budget by the General Assembly Democrats.

I don’t know what it means, but Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “longtime Richmond-area business leader Bob Sledd has left his role as senior adviser to Gov. Glenn Youngkin a month after taking the job.” I mention it, because Sledd is somehow tied into the recent ABC budget mess—he even served on that agency’s board of directors before taking this most recent role as the governor’s adviser on “transformation and good governance issues.” Like I said, who knows what, if anything, this actually means, but it makes me go hmmmmmm.

Take five minutes this morning and fill out this Virginia Capital Trail Foundation survey and help them kick off their strategic planning process. The Capital Trail is one of our best things and we definitely owe all the excitement behind the Fall Line Trail to the Capital Trail’s unambiguous success and awesomeness. The least you can do is fill out a quick survey! You’ve got until April 30th to do so, but just knock it out right now.

This piece in Strong Towns about a rough budget season in Winnipeg made me feel a lot of feelings. I’ve got first-hand experience with excitement over money for urban trees, stressful budget cuts, pitting worthy priorities against each other, and heartbroken public commenters. It’s comforting, in a way, to know that these experiences are universal.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Richmond’s 2024 budget season—which is about to kick off any minute now—will open with this same sense of stressful austerity.

On a recent Monday morning, I hopped on a bus and headed downtown. My destination: city hall. It’s budget season in Winnipeg, and I was going to present our response to the preliminary city budget on behalf of our city-wide tree coalition. To our great joy, after five intense years of lobbying local government, our coalition had succeeded in getting some good policy in place and, critically, a budget to actually bring those policies to fruition. People rarely go to these meetings to support a budget or say thank you, but as a coalition we’d felt it was important. City councilors are people, too, and everyone likes to be acknowledged when they’ve done something right…especially when most of the other people would be there to oppose the budget.

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Why do they all just throw their book bags in front of the stairs? Did they have a meeting about this and circulate a memo?

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today we’ve got more of the same ahead of us: Highs in the upper 50s and clear skies. I’ve got my eye on Saturday, which, according Weather.app, will dump over two inches of rain on our just-dried-out city. I guess if you’ve got outside plans, make sure they get done either today or tomorrow, because it’s gonna rain!

John Murden at South Richmond News has put the City’s list of vacant properties onto a Google Map that you can scroll around on. I love this sort of citizen data project, and, almost 17 years ago (gasp!), I put together something similar with the help of a dear friend who died back in 2018. Daniel was so smart and kind and curious, and I’m constantly wondering what creative projects he’d have thrown himself into to support his community through the pandemic. What a loss for Richmond!

Anyway, here’s my one story about running a website dedicated to highlighting the details of Richmond’s vacant properties: A thousand years ago in 2007, a couple of weeks after launching VacantRichmond.com, some random man showed up in my office and threatened me with...I guess violence? He wasn’t specific about his intentions, but he was pretty upset about how I’d highlighted the fact that he owned a bunch of vacant properties, had for years, and was, at least partially, responsible for a bunch of safety issues in several neighborhoods across the city. It was scary and we called the cops!

Today, City Council’s Finance and Economic Development committee will meet to talk about a lot of stuff that’s way over my head and you can find that full agenda here. Still over my head, but low enough that I can just reach up and grasp it, two papers that try and clean up some of the meals tax collection issues from the past couple of months (ORD. 2024-081 and ORD. 2024-082). The first requires the Department of Finance to notify tax payers of any _over_payments to their accounts, while the second requires the Department of Finance to send a bill for unpaid taxes and fines 45 days before their due date each year. The first has broad support on Council and from the Mayor, while the second (at least so far) just lists Councilmember Lynch as its sole patron. I’d love to learn more about why and am interested to see if this paper makes it out of committee or falls down into the infinite blackhole of continuance. We’ll see!

Dave Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the next round of bills the governor vetoed or signed into law. On the chopping block: A bunch of papers related to immigration, police, and drugs. Making its way fully through the bill-becomes-a-law process: HB 688, which permanently allows the sale of to-go cocktails.

Stop by Basic City Beer Co (212 W. Sixth Street) tonight from 6:00–8:00 PM to hear James River Park System Superintendent Giles Garrison and Friends of the James River Park Executive Director Josh Stutz talk about what’s in store for one of Richmond’s best, wettest, and most important parks. These are two smart and excellent people that will probably have a smart and excellent conversation, so don’t miss out on the chance to learn a thing or two and the opportunity to ask either of them your most burningest JRPS questions.

Here’s some great advice about putting together your Very Important Business Documents. Honestly, whether you’re a bizperson or not, it’s something anyone who needs to share information with another human should read. Two important takeaways:

It's not a murder mystery. Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be building dramatic tension in a professional context; this isn't a thriller where you're trying to surprise them with twists and turns. It's perfectly fine to open with a key question or conclusion, step back to walk through the logic and context that leads to that point, and then restate at the end to drive towards your goal. But more often than not, if you don't set the stakes and make your point clear up top, you'll exhaust your audience, or leave them distracted trying to guess where you're headed all along the way.

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Just finishing up some work in the hammock.

Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and temperatures rebound today, heading back up into the upper 60s / maybe 70s. Expect some wind this afternoon, but, other than that, we’ve got some really excellent weather in front of us. In fact, this may be the warmest, most spring-like day in our 10-day-forecast future—make sure you get out there and enjoy it!

Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the Virginia ABC’s $100 million revenue shortfall. Pressured by the Governor’s “chief transformation officer,” the ABC forecasted a 5% growth in sales revenue last summer but, adjusting for reality, has only seen an increase of 1.4%. Now folks are scrambling to figure out what went wrong and how to fill the sizable gap left in the state’s budget. Just to be super clear here, we’re talking about the Governor pushing the state’s liquor monopoly to find ways to sell more alcohol to more Virginians because it’s a core money generator for his budget. Seems like a legal retail marijuana market would also generate a ton of cash for the commonwealth, but, for some reason, the Governor’s “not interested” in that, and it’s hard for me to understand the difference between the two things!

Yesterday, I saw a bunch of stories similar to this one by Elizabeth Holmes at WTVR: “Why Henrico Police will no longer respond to certain marijuana, shoplifting, and noise calls.” As you can probably imagine, the good people of Henrico County Had Some Questions, and, by yesterday evening, the Henrico Police Department ended up walking back / clarifying how they will actually be reprioritizing their resources; Holmes reports that the Department is currently short-staffed by about 64 positions. I promise, it’s not for schadenfreude reasons that I like watching stories like this evolve and unfold, I just love how important the words we use can be.

John Murden at South Richmond News reports important news: Richmond has its own local pretzel makers, and, not only do they exist, but they’re called Butter Boys. From their Insta, these look like pretty delicious pretzels, especially those cheddar parmesan jammers.

Related: I’ve had a ton of success with Alton Brown’s soft pretzel recipe over the years. It’s easy (but does take forever from start to finish) and will definitely impress your friends. They make for an excellent Saturday project.

Last night I was talking with some folks about the City’s participatory budgeting process and wondering how best to not only get the word out about, you know, participating when the time comes but also how to let people know that the City even has a participatory budgeting process at all. It’s so hard to reach folks, and it’s even harder to get folks involved.

That’s true now and was certainly true back in 2020 as the reality of the early pandemic started to solidify. Here’s what I wrote four years ago as Council cancelled some of the opportunities for Richmonders to weigh in on the budget: “I keep thinking about how folks can stay civically involved while stuck at home and incredibly distracted. My current take—and I'd love to hear your opinions—is that City Councilmembers need to reach out to people and organizations already in their networks directly to collect thoughts, feelings, and emotions on pending legislation. It's a lot of work, but just Facebooking or emailblasting about a thing isn't going to get useful results.”

I still think this is true! While Council’s email game has stepped way, way up in the past four years, just sending (sometimes overwhelmingly comprehensive) emails isn’t enough. And, as a tool to reach and engage residents, social media seems far less effective than it did four years ago. Honestly, I don’t have a great solution, but I do think there’s some space for a creative legislator to experiment and do something more interesting than weekly email updates and quarterly in-person district meetings—or do something more interesting with those pretty standard tools.

Also, while we’re talking about it, here are all the City Council newsletters that I know about. If you know of one I’m missing, please let me know, and I’ll update the list.

This piece, ostensibly about the Trim Silence feature in your podcast player, mixes poetry and prose in a really well-balanced way—which is a bizarre sentence to type. Expect some strong language, but I think it works in the context of what the author set out to achieve.

It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice. This post is about how much I hate the Trim Silence feature. I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.

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A backyard standoff.

Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, and, what the heck, I thought we’d fully moved on to spring. While I sit over here hoping my about-to-bloom azaleas make it through this mini cold snap, you can expect clear skies and highs in the mid 50s today. Looks like we might have one or two more potential overnight freezes ahead of us this week, so fingers crossed for the little plants out there!

Today both the Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee and the Planning Commission meet for some good ol’ fashioned regularly scheduled meetings.

Land Use, Housing and Transportation will consider RES. 2024-R011, which would adopt Richmond Connects as the “official comprehensive transportation plan for the City of Richmond.” This is super exciting! The City hasn’t updated their official transportation plan in a ton of years, and we’re way past due for an update. The Richmond Connects team has put together a good plan—one that centers equity, community, and action—and, if you’d like, you can reach out to your City Council reps in support of it (or just to thank everyone for their hard work). After LUHT recommends this paper, which I think they totally will, it’ll head over to full Council to make it official official in the coming weeks.

Later in the evening, Planning Commission will discuss, of course, a million SUPs because we really need to clean up our zoning, but they’ll also weigh in on the plans to transform Blackwell Park “by adding and renovating site features that promote community-preferred recreation activities and site elements. The primary improvements include sports fields and courts, a permeable parking lot, and a fitness trail.” Check out some of the diagrams and renderings in the final plan PDF. I have a special place in my heart for parks with full football fields—including uprights!

Speaking of transportation plans (whenever am I not!), our regional transportation planning group, PlanRVA, hosted a forum last week to kick off their multi-year effort to put together a multi-decade regional transportation plan. VPM’s Ian M. Stewart has the details, including the note that PlanRVA should have a prioritized list of long-term infrastructure projects—like, over the next 25 years—by this coming April. What even will the world look like in 25 years? Who can say, but here’s what I can say with certainty: We’ll still need more bus service and fewer highways.

Maybe Henrico’s County manager was miffed about the recently released Census population numbers because of articles like this one by Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “This Richmond-area county among fastest-growing in U.S.”? Spoiler: It’s not Henrico! But, I dunno, do people really move to a place because it shows up on “fastest-growing county” listicles? Probably not. My money’s still on the money—that the Census (supposedly) shortchanging Henrico on population numbers means fewer dollars coming in at some point or in some way.

The best thing I learned last year was bamboo’s fascinating lifecycle and, for awhile, I couldn’t stop talking about it (OK, I am still always talking about it). That said, I do not want bamboo anywhere near my yard, because once it gets established, good luck getting rid of it. See this post on /r/rva: “We have bamboo in our backyard. We hate it. We spend so much time every year chopping it down, digging up the roots, and searching the internet for ways to prevent it growing back. All methods have failed. With spring time coming, new shoots have popped up, and it instantly enraged us.” A helpful commenter responds: “I have conquered a 30x80 patch of bamboo. It's just takes daily dedication for years...You can win, but you have to be stronger and more disciplined than the bamboo.” Amazing.

Three years ago yesterday, Mayor Stoney got his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine as Virginia opened up vaccination eligibility to the “Phase 1b” group. Remember all the phases?? And remember waiting and waiting for your turn to come around? Remember people chasing down vaccine appointments across the state through “vax hunter” Facebook groups? What a time!

Zach Seward is the NYT’s “Editorial Director of A.I. Initiatives,” and in this piece he lays out some bad, decent, and interesting uses of AI in news. None of these really flipped my switches—especially the generative AI examples—but they did get close. The below excerpt describes a fully automated (and very low stakes) data dashboard that uses generative AI to title and describe some of the charts. That feels adjacent to a good use of the technology to me.

The data and charts are fully automated. The site tries to highlight charts that are showing interesting data, like an outlier, or particularly strong growth or decline. So far, cool but basic math. Where LLMs play a role is in providing context: the headlines and other brief copy that appear around the charts to help readers understand what they're looking at—The air quality in New York today is good, subway ridership is still below pre-pandemic levels, but on the bright side, our fight against rats is showing progress. These are really focused use cases for an LLM, and the fact that a bot wrote these reports is fully disclosed. It's not a deep investigation into the war on rats, which I'd love to read, too, but it's a certainly a helpful way to keep tabs on one's city.

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Perfect!

Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and today you can expect cloudy skies and highs around 60 °F. That’s still basically springlike but is quite a drop from yesterday’s weather perfection. I think we’ll see these cooler temperatures stick around throughout the week, with a couple warmer days sprinkled in here and there.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s editorial board did the research around VCU’s PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) that I couldn’t find the time to do last week, and I’m very thankful for it. Tap through to read the whole thing, but, as foretold, VCU pays the City of Richmond just a fraction of what they’d owe if they were required to pay real estate taxes. Some of the low points:

So you can see how the General Assembly telling VCU to cancel a contract they signed to pay an annual PILOT of just $2.5 million feels so petty. Maybe we can get DPW to stop collecting the trash from the brand new, real-estate-tax-free General Assembly building for a couple of weeks so that representatives from all around the commonwealth remember the services the City provides them—basically free of charge!

Starting in May, the RTD will launch a new initiative called “The Mobile Newsroom” and will “send journalists to work one week a month out of different locations across the region...[to] listen to community members and report on topics important to them.” I think this is an interesting idea! I look forward to seeing what sort of stories will come out of posting up a reporter at, say, a library for a week. I think there’s a lot of power in asking community members about what impacts their lives, but I also sort of hate person-on-the-street interviews when regular folks are framed as experts on any given topic. It’d be hard for me to resist the urge to churn out a bunch of profiles of the folks who happened to stop by the library that day, and, instead, focus on finding the bigger stories. Anyway, I’m excited to see the RTD try something new and really interested in where this ends up. Now go and fill out this survey to give the them a couple suggestions about where they should set up shop.

Tom Lappas at the Henrico Citizen reports that “Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas pushed back strongly Friday on a U.S. Census Bureau population estimate published Thursday that projected the county had grown by only 207 residents in 2023..” The County Manager estimates that Henrico saw 5,168 new residents, and sort of disparages the entire federal government in his response, saying: “It doesn’t surprise me that you get a result like this from a federal agency, because I mean in the past month, I can’t tell you how many complaints we’ve gotten in here about the Postal Service.” Those two things are definitely not related. But Census numbers do matter more than just ranking which counties in Virginia grew the most and are important to get right; federal and state funding can often fluctuate with a locality’s population numbers.

On March 18th, 2020, Charlottesville Area Transit took their bus system fare-free as part of their COVID-19 mitigation plan. At the time I wondered if GRTC would go the same direction but had some questions about where they’d find the funding to do so. Four years later, we’ve got an entire bus system that’s been fare-free for years...and I’m still wondering where they’ll find the longterm funding to keep it that way.

Also, not to turn this new section of the email into a place where I paste smart sentences Past Ross wrote, but, look at this one about pandemic-era students: “It’s wild thinking about how this cohort of students, across all grade levels, will just have an asterisk next to them whenever they show up in future datasets.”

I went through the sofa-buying process during the pandemic and did, in fact, end up with a midcentury-modern sectional advertised on Instagram and shipped deconstructed to my doorstep. It’s fine. I feel better, after reading this piece in Dwell, that maybe there’s just no other way (because of capitalism).

The politics of the midcentury-modern movement are well documented, especially its ties to postwar welfare states in Europe, affordable design for the masses, and warm and homey use of fabrics and woods. A sofa that looks just like those references but is designed by a company that exists only on Instagram, made cheaply and badly, and shipped around the world in order to satisfy the bottomless maws of investors in "the Netflix of couches" or whatever, that’s a change. Midcentury design was still a product to be made and sold in a capitalist system, but it wasn’t the grimmest possible expression of that system, the way contemporary sofas can be. "This is kind of the way it goes with all products," says Reiss. "They become more efficient, but it’s just about cutting costs. The incentives to have a great $2,000 couch—I mean, who’s going to fight for that?"

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E. E. Cummings takes over the subtitles.

Good morning, RVA! Whoa it is already 60 °F, and today you can expect highs right around 80 °F. For most of the day clouds will probably fill the sky as we wait for some potential rain to move in later this evening. Don’t get too down about it, though, because the rest of the weekend looks pretty dry with temperatures in the upper 60s. You should definitely plan to move forward with whatever full slate of excellent, outdoor weekend activities you already had planned.

Yesterday, the Governor “took final action on 50 pieces of legislation, signing 30 bills into law and vetoing 20 bills.” In what’s either good news or bad news for Richmond’s new women’s soccer team, the Governor vetoed HB 1167 which would have prevented the sale of English ivy in Virginia. Looks like the Governor is totally fine with sustaining a legal retail market for this particular weed.

By the way, Richmond Ivy dad hats do exist, and you can order one right here.

It’s budget season all around the region, and Sean Jones at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a look at Henrico’s proposed $1.2 billion budget. Top priorities for the County include: a pay increase for County employees, schools, and infrastructure. Also, Henrico will spend $30 million from the Central Virginia Transportation Authority on “sidewalk, pedestrian and road projects.” It’s hard to tell, without digging deep into the actual budget document itself, just how that $30 million will be spread across those three areas, but I like that Jones at least started off with sidewalks.

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that “Baker’s Crust Artisan Kitchen ceased operations at 3553 W. Cary St. on March 3, marking the end of a 26-year-run.” I’m shocked! Not that I’m a super fan or anything, it’s just that Baker’s Crust has been a part of my Carytown experience ever since I first started loitering and causing trouble there way back in the 90s. What’s next? Agee’s Bicycles is going to stop bringing out the best in me??

Fruits and Veggie Week takes place from March 25–29 at 13 RPS schools across the School District. To make the week a success, Greater Richmond Fit4Kids needs a bunch of volunteers to 1) help cafeteria staff portion out fresh fruit and vegetables, and then 2) breezily convince kids that fruits and vegetables are worth trying. All The Cool Kids Are Doing It, Man. Check out the Fit4Kids Sign Up Genius to find the schools that still need volunteers, and sign up this morning!

March 15th, 2021 marked one year since I’d created my own COVID-19 spreadsheet. I don’t know why I had the inclination or foresight to start tracking COVID-19 data all the way back in March of 2020, but I did and I continued to do so all the way until July of 2021. By that point, CDC and VDH had both put together enough of their own interesting data products that what I was doing felt duplicative—plus I got tired of spending 15 minutes every single afternoon, regardless of what was going on in my life, copying numbers into a spreadsheet.

Submitted by Patron Casey. Installing bike lanes almost never negatively impacts a business—in fact, generally, bike lanes are good (to great!) for businesses. I know this, you know this, but a lot of folks who own businesses either do not know this or do not have the time and energy to read 32 academic studies about whether or not this is true. Thankfully this article does most of the work for you and even links off to all of the primary source material, too!

“As someone whose family had a small business when I was growing up, I know how invested you get in it,” says Joseph Poirier, a senior researcher at the urban-planning consultancy Nelson Nygaard. “It’s your whole life. Anything you think could threaten that, even if the government and their consultants tell you it’s not going to be a problem, is very scary. It makes sense.” It’s also wrong. Four decades’ worth of research proves it. I know this because I’ve read every study and report I could find that looked specifically at the economics of bike lanes since 1984 — 32 research articles, to be exact. The results show that making streets friendlier for bikes — and sidewalks friendlier for pedestrians — is actually good for business. The rise of “complete streets” and “road diets,” as urban planners call them, has been a huge boon to businesses in cities.

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...feed me Seymour?