Good morning, RVA! It's 69 °F, and highs are back in the upper 80s. Expect warm temperatures and sunshine over the weekend. Keep an eye out for some real hot temperatures in the mid 90s on Sunday.
Water cooler
Today, the City will retire See-Click-Fix (RIP, ol’ buddy), and will launch RVA311 as the primary way for Richmonders to report non-emergency problems and get them fixed. Got a massive pothole? Storm drain backed up? Garbage in the bike lane? These are the kinds of things that you can submit using the RVA311 website (RVA311.com) and, theoretically, those issues will make their way through the dark twists and turns of local government and end up in front of the exact right person. As of this very second, it looks like the tool has not yet launched, so keep your potholes to yourself until later today. A mobile app should hit the app store of your choice later this month.
The Elegba Folklore Society will host their annual Juneteenth celebration beginning tonight with a symposium at the Pine Camp Arts Center. Karen Newton at Style Weekly has more details and a bit of background on the Juneteenth holiday.
I loved this piece in Richmond Magazine about Martin Gonzalez by Eileen Mellon. Gonzalez owns La Milpa, one of my favorite taco spots, and has a heckuva backstory.
Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense says a brewery is headed to Brookland Park Boulevard, which is news that makes me feel complicated feelings. A brewery—with a talented head brewer—within a quick bike or bus ride from my house sounds great, but, dang, does anything say gentrification more than a brewery? There is complex stuff happening in Highland Park, y’all. Less complicated is this story about yet another brewery (and arcade!) coming to Scott’s Addition. Note the zoning and rezoning mention!
Vernon Freeman Jr. at WTVR says a pedestrian was hit by two different drivers on Brook Road in Henrico County earlier this week. How many people have been hit on Brook Road in the past year? Four? When will the County do something to slow vehicles down throughout the length of that street? Also, all the TV stations and the paper reported that the pedestrian was struck by “vehicles” or “cars,” which, as you know, is language I don’t like. These cars do not drive themselves into people!
Yesterday, I linked to Superintendent Jason Kamras’s tweet about switching to a gender-neutral cap and gown policy. Today, Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has thoughts and feelings from School Board members Liz Doerr and Jonathan Young 💸. File this quote from Young away with an eye roll: “I don’t like it and I don’t approve, because call me old-fashioned, but I believe in celebrating young ladies and young men...and the incessant efforts to the contrary seem at odds with learning to respect all of our differences, including gender, places of origin, religion, etc.” I don’t really see how making everyone wear the same colored cap and gown (an already super bizarre tradition) lessens this dude’s ability to “celebrate young ladies and young men,” but sure.
VCU has hired a Vann Graves as the next director of the Brand Center. Graves lives in Atlanta now, but is a Richmond native. According to the release, “His family has lived in Richmond since well before the 1900s, when his great-grandfather worked at the Jefferson Hotel and the Jefferson’s carriage house, which today houses the VCU Brandcenter.” That’s fascinating, and I would love to learn more.
Scott Castro has your weekly Friday Cheers preview. This week it’s Parquet Courts and Gauche, you can get your tickets here.
You did it! You survived the Week of Richmond 300 Parking Meeting Reminders! This Saturday at 10:00 AM (2300 W. Broad Street), you can attend the Libbie & Grove parking meeting, the last of the bunch. I’ve started poking some folks for the materials / presentations given at these meetings, and as soon as I get ahold of them, I’ll pass them along.
Sports!
- Squirrels fell to Portland, 2-4, and leave the confines of The Diamond to face Harrisburg tonight at 7:00 PM.
- Kickers take on FC Cincinnati on Saturday at 7:30 PM. You can watch on CBS 6.3.
- Nats pick things back up with a series against the Blue Jays that begins tonight at 7:07 PM.
This morning's longread
The e-scooters are good, let’s cap the number of cars instead, Santa Monica.
Inflammatory headline aside, this article brings up some good points about dockless, shareable scooters. If the goal is to eliminate as many car trips as possible, scooters could do a lot to scoot us toward that goal.
P.S. City Council should start looking at how other cities have regulated these things (and dockless bikeshare, too) and begin thinking through what’s best for Richmond before these companies show up on our door and on our sidewalks.
The likely effect of the proposed policy cap would also do more to make the services functionally inconvenient to Santa Monica residents than it would slow the flow of significant numbers of micro-rental e-scooters into the city. That is assuming that they continue in Venice & elsewhere in the Westside without the proposed city of L.A. policy cap that is opposed by Los Angeles Council Member Mike Bonin representing our adjacent neighborhoods. The proposed cap in combination with limits on providers would mean the scooters would not be as widely distributed to points spread across Santa Monica, but would end up focused only where each scooter could get the highest daily trips in only the busiest areas, making for a more lopsided system favoring visitors to the city at the expense of resident accessibility in many areas outside the downtown core.
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