Municipal Mania

This week we continue our district-focus episodes with the 3rd District's Councilman Chris Hilbert and School Board member Kenya Gibson.

This week on Municipal Mania, we sat down with Delegate Jeff Bourne in the midst of a chaotic time in Virginia politics to talk about how we are also halfway through the 2019 session of the General Assembly.

We continue our series of interviews with each district's #RVACouncil and #RPSBoard reps. Unfortunately, the snow storm situation threw off our schedule last year for the 2nd District. For our interview with 2nd District Councilwoman Kim Gray, you can go back and check out the December interview. Now, this show is our snow day make up interview with 2nd District School Board Member Scott Barlow.

For this week's episode, we sat down with former 5th District Councilman Chuck Richardson to talk about the current efforts surrounding current 5th District Councilman's residency.

As broadcast on the January 18th episode of Open Source RVA on WRIR, here is the Quick and Dirty City Council Round Up for the January 14th meeting of RVA Council.

In advance of the January 17th screening of Until the Well Runs Dry, RVA Dirt sat down with Chelsea Higgs Wise and Dr. Shawn Utsey to talk about MCV's documented history of using black bodies for medical advancement, how that history has been handled by VCU to date, and why this history means so much in the present.

We sat down with state Senator Jennifer McClellan ahead of this year's General Assembly Session. Session begins TODAY January 9th. Check in on RVADirt.com for General Assembly coverage from Richmond 2Day editor, Brandon Jarvis.

It's our last show of the year, folks! The magical Hopes and Dreams for 2019 episode starring:

Francesca Leigh-Davis

Jessee Perry

Melissa Vaughn

Chelsea Higgs Wise

Porshia Foster

Open Source RVA's Krysti Albus and Don Harrison

Ennis Cole

Let's Get Drunk and Talk About It's Nate Peterson

and

Shonda Harris-Muhammed.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Economic Development Chat and Learn. For those who couldn’t make it, here is the audio of the event, and the video can be found on our Facebook page.

Thank you to our facilitator for the evening, Chelsea Higgs Wise. You did a superb job keeping the conversation flowing and taking us to different places to consider. And thank you Dr. Ben Teresa for your TIF expertise.

One segment we are not uploading is the beginning where all attendees introduced themselves and what brought them to the meeting. We made the decision to withhold the names from this posting as we acknowledge the real concern of retaliation for truth-telling. To give the viewer some context, there were community members from a variety of backgrounds including health, food justice, civic associations, education, environmental protection, affordable housing, and beyond. There were no elected officials in attendance; however, Jeff Kelley of Kelley Communications who was contracted by NH District Corp for Communications work on the Navy Hill Project registered and attended the event. He introduced himself in his capacity at the beginning.

Keep checking back as there is additional follow up to come. We will post the PowerPoint used as a PDF in the near future. But wait... there’s more! We will be sending out a google form with follow up questions about the meeting. That form will include a question for if people want to make their, their organization’s, or their blog’s information publicly available. The goal of doing this is to facilitate the connection of people beyond this one meeting. We posted the notecards y’all wrote but we will also upload them as a file and create a space for people who couldn’t attend to add theirs.

We look forward to hosting more of these chat and learn style meetings. Thank you as always for your support.

And a huuuuuuuge shout out to Allan-Charles Chipman for holding it down on the audio and video for the evening! We really appreciate it. Thank you.

Jessee and Melissa endure a painfully long and fraught meeting of Richmond City Council on 12.17.2018.