Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and highs today are back up around 50 °F. Temperatures should creep downwards until this weekend when they return to the 50s with some rain.
Water cooler
I don’t even know where to begin with yesterday’s NoBro news, and I’m not sure how to tie it all together into a cohesive narrative.
First, and this was news to me, the Mayor committed to “hold RPS funding harmless” should the City move forward with this project and various bits of funding get tied up in decades-long debt repayments. This even extends to buildings in the proposed TIF—Dominion towers included. That’s pretty good for schools, but, of course, we don’t need to just hold RPS funding harmless, we need to dump tens of millions of dollars into their budget every year for the next several years. But that’s a different discussion for another time!
Second, the ECHL (East Coast Hockey League) “announced today their intent to locate a hockey team in the new Richmond arena, should City Council green-light the Navy Hill project proposal.” I like hockey just fine, I had a great time at Renegades games in my youth, but, in my opinion, Richmond is a basketball town. That’s just a personal preference, so no need to email me about the strong support of the sport in the region, hockey heads. Regardless, a bunch of folks tied to the project have told me that securing a tenant like this doesn’t impact the project’s financials a ton as most of the money goes back to the team. That said, having a minor league hockey team as a tenant would, though, bring folks to the area two dozen times or so per year. Also, note the focus on City Council in the aforelinked press release, because...
Later in the day things took a turn, and five members of City Council signed on to a non-binding resolution asking the Mayor to withdraw the existing NoBro ordinances and start over with a new RFP. That’d be Councilmembers Gray, Hilbert, Larson, Lynch, and Trammell, and Mark Robinson at the Richmond-Times Dispatch has all the details. Reactions to this resolution and then the reactions to the reactions were all very...intense. The Navy Hill folks released a statement saying the councilmembers’ actions could “discredit the City of Richmond’s business reputation for years to come,” and that they’ve “proactively sought to sit down with each of these five members to ask them for their ideas, amendments and recommendations to make this the best possible deal for Richmond, to which they have offered nothing.” They also say, “No City process has ever been this transparent.” Which, to be clear, asking folks—councilmembers or otherwise—for tweaks and changes to a massive development project only after designing and releasing a very specific RFP is definitely not the most transparent thing I’ve ever seen. The Mayor said Council doesn’t “want to go on record voting against 2,000 jobs from CoStar, $300 M for black and brown businesses, and hundreds of units of affordable housing. These members need to come to the table & do their jobs.” He also, according to Robinson’s account in the RTD, called the resolution “laughable” and “selfish.” Robinson got reactions to that quote from Councilmembers Hilbert and Larson and they were not positive to say the least: “Larson looked like the blood was going to boil out of her head when I asked her about it.” Councilmember Gray called some of the Mayor’s/Navy Hill’s comments “complete, utter bull” from the dang Council dais because she was reading the tweets DURING LAST NIGHT’S MEETING. Like, what. is. going. on.
I’m not sure how NoBro recovers from last night. The project requires seven of nine City Council votes to move forward—that’s a requirement due to sale of City property, which does make me wonder if a version of the project that only leases the property exists on a shelf somewhere. Last night both Hilbert and Larson made it pretty clear they were NO votes and nothing could change their minds. Councilmember Gray certainly seems like a NO, and that’s it. That’s all it would take to sink the Good Ship NoBro. I do think there’s some truth to the Mayor’s point that introducing this resolution is, perhaps, a way for Councilmembers to avoid an up-or-down vote on the project. Like, we had a vote scheduled, just announce you’re going to vote against it and then do so. I’m not sure I get the need for this extra legislation. Anyway, I know I’m going to be paying attention to the tone and tenor of what folks say this morning, after the dust has settled, and emotions have dialed down a bit.
Whew! And on the heels of all that, the Mayor gives his State of the City address tonight! Theoretically the meat of this speech is already written, but, if you’re the Mayor’s team, do you update the speech after whatever all that was last night? Do you cut NoBro mentions? Do you double down? What other stuff will end up in the speech? Will public housing get a mention? Turns out there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the City outside of a couple blocks of Downtown!
The group responsible for providing the Official Virginia Population Estimates, the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at UVA. have updated their numbers—something probably only numbers nerds are excited about. As of July 1st, 2019, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield have estimated populations of 226,841; 328,999; and 350,760 respectively. For the City that’s an 11.1% increase over the 2010 census and a decrease of 78 (estimated) humans from 2018. Didn’t expect that, although Weldon Cooper has put up an interesting accompanying post saying that the population growth in the Commonwealth over the last couple of years was the “slowest in a century as out-migration continues.” You can, of course, download the new population numbers as a spreadsheet, if you really want to get in there.
I’m sure there was more news worth reading today, but I’m already at 1,000+ words and my time this morning has run out. NoBro! Sucking up all the air in the room and in the ENTIRE CITY!
This morning's longread
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
The headline from this NYT story is a bit much, but also maybe not a bit much enough?? Some pretty terrifying stuff here.
While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
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