Good morning, RVA! It's 54 °F, and today we'll see temperatures in the 80s—that's awesome! In fact, the weather this entire week looks awesome.
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting two murders that occurred on the 4000 block of Midlothian Turnpike at 7:30 PM Saturday night. Officers arrived on the scene and found two victims shot to death—Terrell D. Thomas, 20, and a second, as yet unidentified man. These are the 19th and 20th murders of 2017.
City Council will hangout for a bunch of consecutive hours today as they've got a budget work session, informal meeting, and their regularly-scheduled formal meeting. On today's budget docket: the Department of Justice Services; Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities; Department of Social Services; the Office of Community Wealth Building; and the Richmond Public Library. That's an ambitious schedule, but it must be done as Council's budget amendments are due tomorrow. You can also find the agenda for today's formal Council meeting here (PDF)—but will the Councilfolk even still be awake at this point? Tune in at 6:00 PM to find out!
Ned Oliver spent some time with Mayor Stoney and delivers us this wonderful Q&A plus companion article. My two favorite parts are Ned's response to the mayor listing out his (intense) schedule for a given Friday and the mayor's response to the kerfuffle between the Finance Department and the auditor. Today is the 100th day of the year and the end of Mayor Stoney's The First Hundred Days™. I'm interested in what y'all think: What's the best work the mayor's done over the last 100 days, and what do you wish he'd done better / more of?
Tina Eshleman at Richmond Magazine writes about 6PIC, a youth-focused initiative in Highland Park run by some of the most awesome people in town. I'm super interested in Faith Braxton's idea to host scary movie nights. Faith, this is literallly my most favorite kind of movie night! But other than hopefully inviting boring old dudes to movie nights, there is a ton of really excellent stuff planned for 6PIC—just look at the list of involved organizations: Storefront for Community Design, Art 180, Groundwork RVA, Boaz & Ruth, and Saving Our Youth VA—and it'll be fun to watch over the next couple of years.
When the governor writes an editorial in the paper, I consider it my civic duty to tap on the link.
Sports!
- Squirrels split their series against Hartford and now host Altoona tonight at 6:35 PM.
- Kickers fell to Louisville City FC, 1-0.
- Nats lost the series to the Phils, 2-3, and start a new series with St. Louis tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta
You’ll forgive our excessively clinical attitude about this damage–and its going to cost tens of millions to fix–but what we have here is a classic “natural experiment” of the kind economists and students of public policy relish. So what happens when we take a major urban freeway out of service for a couple of months? Are Atlanta commuters in for hours of gridlock every day and grisly commutes? Will the region’s economy grind to a halt as a result? We’ll be watching over the next several months to see. So far, the results are consistent with what we’ve seen in Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Monday morning came, and something funny happened: traffic wasn’t so bad.