Good morning, RVA! It's 65 °F, and today you can expect highs in the 90s. At this point, the long-term forecast looks like we’ll avoid any rain for the entire week.
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting that Arthur Robinson III, 33, was shot to death on the 5000 block of Old Warwick Road on Friday night.
This past weekend Richmond celebrated the renaming of the Boulevard to Arthur Ashe Boulevard, and it is now officially official! I was surprised (and stoked) at how much national media the event picked up. Here’s the Washington Post’s coverage: Confederacy’s former capital gets a street named after Arthur Ashe — and some hope for a more inclusive look. And here’s an essay from the New York Times: Richmond Is at a Crossroads. Will Arthur Ashe Boulevard Point the Way?. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Alexa Welch Edlund has a stack of 38 photos from the event for you to flip through, and Michael Paul Williams has a column up about the name change 💸. Alright, OK! We did a good thing renaming the street! Now, let’s do another good thing and start pulling down monuments. An easy place to start: Pass Councilmember Jones’s resolution simply asking the General Assembly for authority over our Confederate monuments. Remember, that resolution died in a 3-6 vote last year (NO: Addison, Gray, Hilbert, Larson, Agelasto; YES: Robertson, Newbille, Jones). I thought Marc Cheatham at the Cheats Movement got it exactly right: “While it is a major step, in the right direction, to rename the Boulevard in honor of Ashe, Confederate monuments still line Monument Ave, the prominent street that Ashe Boulevard now intersects. Richmond still has major challenges to address regarding social justice, race, equity, and inclusion. This weekend does not remove those challenges but it does signal that things can get done and there are opportunities to continue moving our region in the right direction. It was a great day. I hope we have many more.”
Today is the one-year anniversary of the opening of the Pulse and our entirely redesigned bus network! Can you believe it? So much transportation-related stuff has happened since then, and Richmond just has a ton of transit momentum. I’m excited for whatever is next. GRTC will hand out some swag at Pulse stations today to celebrate, and you can read their press release to learn a few interesting Pulse facts.
City Council meets tonight for their regularly scheduled meeting, and, according to the agenda as it stands, its mostly a snoozer. Keep an eye on 4th District Councilmember Larson’s ORD. 2019-158 which would create a new (empty) fund/moneybucket for the City called the “2019 Capital Projects Replenishment Reserve.” The intent is to replace some of the money that, to avoid raising the real estate tax, Council took from future capital projects—specifically a handful of river access projects. They could have just raised the real estate tax and theoretically had funding for even more projects, on the river or otherwise, but instead, they borrowed from the future and now have to try and find consensus to pay the future back. Remember that Council did a similar thing to the public arts fund a couple years ago and have still left that debt unpaid.
Mel Leonor at the RTD says Scott Wyatt is the Republican nominee for the 97th House of Delegates district—at least for now. The long and confusing path to get the 97th to this point seems most likely to end in court, so don’t go buying a bunch of campaign signs yet. Del. Peace says he’s keeping all options on the table.
The second round of meetings hosted by the Partnership for Affordable Housing begins today and runs through Thursday. The first meetings aimed to have folks discuss “the vision and values for their communities and what housing challenges residents face.” This second round of meetings “will focus on strategies in addressing [those] housing challenges.” For tonight’s meeting, you can head over to the Eastern Henrico Recreation Center (1440 N. Laburnum Avenue) from 6:30–8:30 PM. FYI, Richmond’s meeting is on Thursday, and, if you can’t make any of the meetings, you can fill out this online survey. It’s (maybe literally) the least you could do!
This morning's longread
Donald Trump Assaulted Me, But He’s Not Alone on My List of Hideous Men
This is the best written, most gut wrenching account of sexual assault I’ve read—and, as the title suggests, it’s about the president.
After almost two years of drawing and redrawing my list, I’ve come to realize that, though my hideosity bar is high, my criteria are a little cockeyed. It is a gut call. I am like Justice Potter Stewart. I just know a hideous man when I see one. And I have seen plenty. For 26 years, I have been writing the “Ask E. Jean” column in Elle, and for 26 years, no matter what problems are driving women crazy — their careers, wardrobes, love affairs, children, orgasms, finances — there comes a line in almost every letter when the cause of the correspondent’s quagmire is revealed. And that cause is men.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.