Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and today you should expect highs in the mid 70s, clouds, and occasional rain throughout the day.
Water cooler
On Friday, Mayor Levar Stoney decided not to veto the budget as amended by City Council—you can read his full remarks here. This means Council gets the oversight of intra-department, program-level budget transfers they were after and will now (fingers crossed) move to tidy up some of that legislation's loose ends—like introducing a threshold for when this oversight is triggered. While I could have done with out the one final dig on City Council in his remarks, we're all super into this tweet from the mayor, "Citizens of Richmond do not want to see us fight — that is the old way. They want us to govern. They want the City to work."
Speaking of, City Council meets tonight for their regularly scheduled, totally not-budget-related meeting. Here's the agenda (PDF).
Robert Zullo at the RTD has a long piece about the future of Richmond's Confederate statues. The new news: the mayor has some thoughts and will announce those thoughts next month. The old news: We still feel the need to give column inches to pro-Confederacy points of view...in 2017! Anyway, tap through and read the whole thing, there are lots of good quotes to get you thinking, including this one from an associate professor at Wayne State, "...if the community is willing to tolerate counter-monuments, then let the Confederate monuments stay. But if they’re not, then maybe putting them in a museum might be a good idea." Counter-monuments! Not a handful of plaques designed not to offend nearby homeowners!
GRTC has updated the map of their proposed rejiggering of Richmond's bus system, and I went through some of the more interesting changes over on the RVA Rapid Transit blog. The Fulton changes especially are good updates, Brent. Download the map and knock out your PDF reading for the day!
This fake bomb story is bananas. It took police five hours and a robot to determine that a clock was not a bomb?
Karen Newtown at Style Weekly has a good reminder that Sally Bell's still exists and that I've done a great disservice to my eight-year-old by not introducing him to the Richmond staple yet.
Bike to Work day was rad, and RVAHub has some pictures. Maybe you see a guy you know?
A scheduling note: I'm headed to Seattle this week! Expect me to be MIA Wednesday through Friday unless I get way inspired by all of the public transit options in Seattle. Maybe someone can send me a daily email with all the Richmond news?
Sports!
- Squirrels went 1-2 over the weekend and welcome the Binghamton Rumble Ponies to the Diamond tonight at 6:35 PM. Tickets are available online.
- Kickers, 2-5-3, ended up with a 1-1 tie against Rochester.
- Nats have the day off today.
This morning's longread
They’re (Almost) All Good Tweets, Brent
Definitely the Twitter account profile you were all waiting for.
Though he has some great friends in the golf program, he won't be sad to leave Campbell, he tells me. He may be internet-famous, but almost no one on campus has any idea who he is. As he eats lunch in a quiet student center, talking openly about his book deal and his mobile-game deal and his thriving clothing line, no one approaches to ask if he is really WeRateDogs. He could have helped recruit students to this Baptist college in rural North Carolina if anyone had cared about his success. But no one does. "The only thing I owe to this school," he says, "is the boredom that caused me to start the account in the first place."