Good morning, RVA: Dominion tower(s), red bus-only lanes, and an ERA opportunity

Good morning, RVA! It's 48 °F, and you should look for highs near 70 °F today. That sounds like excellent Friday weather to me! Saturday expect more of the same, although maybe less sunshine and more clouds, and, on Sunday, look for rain to move in.

Water cooler

This report from Jonathan Spiers in Richmond BizSense about Dominion’s will-they-or-won’t-they second office tower and its impact on NoBro’s financing raises a few of my eyebrows. Spiers says City Council was told in last week’s NoBro work session (which I still need to listen to) that the current TIF projections are based on a second Dominion tower and without one the numbers don’t pencil out. Dominion has filed plans for the new tower with the City and paid for a building permit, so I’m not sure the reason for their caginess. Thumbs up, though, to Councilmember Larson for getting to the bottom of this and asking good questions like “We are projecting the revenue of the second tower that Dominion has not yet publicly committed to building...It’s a ‘what if.’ That’s why I asked: is this written somewhere in this agreement, that Dominion will build this if City Council approves this plan?”

Over on Streets Cred, we took a minute to write about one way the City can make the bus-only lanes on Broad Street safer for people (and better for buses): paint them red. There are a couple ways to go about doing that—each with their own positives and negatives but none of them all that complicated. Let’s just get this done ASAP. I know we all know this, but I feel like I have to keep saying it out loud because it is the most important piece of context for this entire conversation: People driving cars and unsafe street design are what kills and injuries the vast, vast majority of folks on our roads. Unfortunately, yesterday we got new proof of this very thing: A person driving an SUV on Chamberlayne Avenue, an enormous and overly fast street that runs through dense residential neighborhoods, hit and injured a pedestrian near John Marshall High School. The driver fled the scene and the victim was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Chamberlayne Avenue is part of Richmond’s high-injury street network—that means, before this crash, we already knew it was dangerous.

Mechelle Hankerson at the Virginia Mercury has some details on how Democratic candidates for the General Assembly are planning to cover that $1 billion of extra funding the state needs to contribute for public education. Again, my favorite stat from the Commonwealth Institute makes an appearance: “When the recession hit, the state covered about 45% of education costs, with localities covering 48.6% and federal funding making up the remainder. Localities carried about 51% of the cost burden in the school year that ended in 2018, with the state share falling to 41.6 percent.”

As vehicles get more fuel-efficient, revenue generated in Virginia by the gas tax has fallen—even while driving has increased. Graham Moomaw, also at the Virginia Mercury, has the details, including this obvious answer: “Eventually, that could involve moving to a system that charges road users based on how many miles they drive, not how much gas they consume.”

Tomorrow, you’ve got the opportunity to spend the entire day discussing, learning about, and strategizing on the Equal Rights Amendment at the New Era for the Equal Rights Amendment Legal Convention. Folks from all over the nation—including some of my favorite Richmonders—are headed to the UR Law School to figure out how to get this dang thing passed. You can get your tickets online—and, if you are a student or a new lawyer, they’re just $10 and $20, respectively. Students: Definitely don’t miss out on this opportunity!

And, remember, that great STAY RVA talk featuring Dr. Courtney Mykytyn, Taikein Cooper, and Dr. Genevieve Siegel-Hawley is tonight from 6:30–8:00 PM at the ICA. You can get your tickets over on Eventbrite. I guarantee that it’ll be worth your time and you will learn at least 100 fascinating things.

This morning's longread

The Slackification of the American Home

This article speaks to me deeply—especially the bits about getting kids on some sort of shared household todo app. I would be a mess without digital tools to help me keep everything in place and on time, and I think it’s only fair that my kid have access to the those same tools.

Mazmanian says that these programs might be of particular value to households with two working parents, an arrangement that more children grow up with now, compared with a few decades ago. Without one adult in charge of the professional domain and one in charge of the domestic domain, there’s more coordination of who’s in charge of what—which is something productivity tools can assist with. She wonders whether a program like Asana might help even out the imbalances in household duties that often arise between partners—especially men and women—by making them more visible. “It tends to be that couples divide this work up in ways that aren’t exactly equitable, and that one person takes on more of that truly invisible work … Something like this might actually be a way for that person to say, ‘Look what I’m doing’ [to their] family [or] partner.”

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