Good morning, RVA! It's 34 °F now, but it’ll be 51 °F later—sounds like a day to wear a couple of layers, for sure.
Water cooler
After a week or more of teases, here are the Governor’s full remarks to the Joint Money Committees on his proposed budget amendments. Because, sure, why not, here’s the entire proposed budget as a set of PDFs if you should want to really dig in. Maybe of particular note for folks is the Revenue Forecast section (PDF). Mechelle Hankerson at the Virginia Mercury has a more human readable summary, plus some details about how tax changes at the federal level unintentionally mean more money for Virginia.
Richmond Magazine has a huge stack of articles all about Arthur Ashe that make up a commemorative issue. They span from essays, to history, to present-day impact, to all sorts of things. Read them all!
Depressing headline alert. From Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense: “Boulevard space to become a Midas after all.” Now we’ve got yet another car-focused business taking up valuable streetfacing space on a corridor with a ton of human-focused potential. Cool.
Did you know the James River Park is in the midst of a master planning process? This is different and more focused than the Richmond 300 process, and you can hear a little more about it in this podcast that features the Mayor and Parks Director Chris Frelke. If you want to get involved, take a second and fill out this quickly survey about how you use the James River Park.
I enjoy this article by Holly Prestidge in the RTD about a local cheesemonger both because of the very serious way it talks about cheese (a very serious topic, indeed), and for teaching me what the word “truckle” means.
Are you ready to think about the 2021 gubernatorial race? I am not, but if you are—no judgement—here’s a Q&A with Attorney General Mark Herring.
Because sometimes the internet is beautiful, a person realized that Drake’s Hotline Bling has the same number of syllables as Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Then, a different person set the former to the tune of the latter and also the latter to the tune of the former. This is important Christmas Content that I feel strongly you should be aware of.
This morning's patron longread
Winning the “Cold Civil War”
From Patron Thad comes this longread about community wealth building that makes me go “mmm!” in support.
This is the approach the impressive and determined organizing campaign in support of Amendment 4 took. Campaigners showed how everyone—people of color, whites, the young, the old—suffers when some are disenfranchised. In addition to a firm moral message in favor of “second chances,” the campaign showed diverse examples of the human faces of disenfranchisement, and it demonstrated how current policies undermine, rather than enhance, public safety. A broad-based coalition thus used the power of stories and an insistence on inclusion and decency to remove a major impediment to democracy. To move forward as a nation, we will need much more where that came from.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.