Good morning, RVA! It's 24 °F, and that’s a wintry temperature! Today you can expect highs right around 40 °F, which is much more wintry than this past week. Colder temperatures continue through the weekend with a chance of rain on Saturday.
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting a murder on the 1700 block of Bellevue Avenue. Wednesday night, officers arrived at the scene and found Robert M. Willoughby, 86, “suffering from obvious signs of trauma.” He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Team NoBro has crunched the numbers on Del. Jeff Bourne’s bill to allow the use of a portion of the state sales tax to pay for some of the project’s costs. If passed, the Delegate’s bill will allow them to shrink the size of the BigTIF from 80 blocks down to 11 blocks—basically just the project area plus the new Dominion tower and the old Dominion tower (which is the possible site of yet another Dominion tower). A way smaller TIF ameliorates one of my biggest concerns with this project: That capping revenue from our currently thriving downtown until NoBro starts to generate its own revenue—when there’s so much citywide momentum yet so many citywide needs—is shortsighted and defers many of our current priorities for at least 6-7 years. So now, as downtown continues to grow on its own, the City would get to keep some of that new revenue to spend on things like schools, housing, streets, and transportation. For me, this doesn’t change the fact that an arena is probably not the best use of our limited downtown space or the fact that the process to get us to where we are has been pretty bad, but it does make the public paying for this portion of NoBro more palatable. I’m really interested to see how Team NoBro re-engages the public and decision-makers now that the entire financial underpinnings of the project have changed. Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense will walk you through the details of those changes.
Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has followed the early progress of the new gun safety bills working their way through the General Assembly. Thus far, the Senate passed bills allowing local governments to ban guns in public buildings and parks (something Councilmember Jones has been after since at least last year), and a bill restoring the one-handgun-a-month rule. I love this quote from Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw on how the one-handgun-a-month law had previously been in effect for 19 years, “I maintain that if 228 handguns isn’t enough for you, there’s something gone terribly wrong in your life.”
Whoa misleading headline in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “572 food service and cleaning workers at VCU Health System get layoff notices as new contractor is named” 💸. VCU Health will switch its cleaning and food services provider from Aramark to Compass One, however John Reid Blackwell reports that “VCU Health said all non-management food and environmental services employees currently employed by Aramark will become Compass One employees after meeting Compass One’s pre-employment qualifications. All VCU Health employees currently working in food and environmental services will remain VCU Health System-paid employees.”
Logistical note: Monday is a federal holiday, which means you won’t hear from me until Tuesday. Monday, MLK Day, is also Lobby Day at the General Assembly—a time when regular citizens have the day off and can come downtown to speak to their legislators one-on-one. Unfortunately, this coming Monday is also when the gun people decided to plan a rally at the Capitol to protest the gun safety laws the GA will almost certainly pass. Who knows what will actually happen, but I think you should expect thousands of angry folks—mostly White men, many with guns—flooding our downtown. In response, and rightly so, the Governor has declared a state of emergency and banned guns from the Capitol grounds, which means the gun-obsessed, open-carry folks will spill out into our streets. Perfectly legal and perfectly terrifying. I say this is unfortunate not because rallies for legislation I disagree with are bad. No, but the rest of us have lost an opportunity to participate in the legislative process, because we don’t want to get caught in a literal crossfire, and that’s what’s unfortunate. I will stay far, far away from downtown on Monday, and I think you should, too.
This morning's longread
How Incest Caused The Deformities And Downfall Of One Of Europe's Most Powerful Royal Families
Do you know about the “Habsburg jaw?” I didn’t until mentioned by friend-of-the-email Susan! So interesting, and you can follow the jaw along it’s path through history by comparing this series of old portraits of Spanish royals.
While marriages between biological relatives were common in the ruling houses of Europe well up until the last century (Queen Elizabeth II actually married her own third cousin), the Spanish Habsburgs engaged in the practice with particularly dangerous abandon. In fact, nine out of the 11 total marriages that occurred among them during the 184 years they ruled Spain from 1516 to 1700 were incestuous. In fact, modern researchers widely state that generations of inbreeding among the Spanish Habsburgs resulted in the infamous “Habsburg jaw” deformity and ultimately caused their downfall. Due to incest, the family’s genetic line progressively deteriorated until Charles II, the final male heir, was physically incapable of producing children, thus bringing an end to Habsburg rule.
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