Good morning, RVA! It's 30 °F, and you can expect highs in the mid 40s alongside some afternoon rain. Stay warm, and stay dry!
Water cooler
Well, they did it! With history’s eyes all over them, Richmond’s City Council voted 6-3 in favor of Councilmember Jones’s resolution (RES. 2019-R071) to ask the state for the authority to take down Confederate monuments (YES: Addison, Hilbert, Lynch, Robertson, Newbille, Jones; NO: Larson, Trammell; ABSENT: Gray). I guess, third time’s the charm! Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details and the important context that Councilmember Gray missed the vote due to a family emergency. If you have a moment, you should drop Councilmember Jones a note of appreciation for his continued work on this issue (
Hold on to your butts, because the General Assembly kicks off their 2020 session tomorrow! A friend of mine asked me if our elected officials are “just gonna spend the next 60 days doing a bunch of liberal rad stuff?”, and, I think, yeah, mostly they are. Not Washington state liberal rad stuff, of course, but some Virginia-sized liberal rad stuff? I think maybe! One liberal rad thing I wrote about for my day job at RVA Rapid Transit and wanted to pitch here is the opportunity for Richmond to walk away from this year’s General Assembly session with a dedicated funding stream for regional public transit. As of last year, after Southwest Virginia got theirs, only the Central Virginia region lacks a dedicated funding stream for transit and transportation. This, unsurprisingly, severely impacts our ability to run regional public transportation! But with legislators convened to do liberal rad stuff for the first time in forever, the potential for our region to finally get its own method for funding regional public transportation is higher than ever before. Two ultra important things to keep in mind: First, if a regional funding bill is introduced, it must include money specifically allocated to public transit maintenance, capital expenses, and operations. Must! We’re not talking about money for squishy “multimodal projects,” but money strictly for actual-factual public transportation. This is non-negotiable. Localities must be prevented from using any new regional money to build “multimodal” projects like car-centric speeder highways painted with sharrows. Money for multimodal projects is good, but we also need money specifically for dang buses. Period. Second, as of this very moment, such a bill has not yet been introduced so the details are mostly big question marks. You can certainly email your state legislators and tell them that you whole-heartedly support dedicate, regional funding for public transit today, but keep an eye out for the final details. Honestly, this is a huge opportunity for our region, and it’s important to get it right. You can join the RVA Rapid Transit email list to stay further in the loop.
Also GA-related, Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has the details on the New Democratic Majority’s plans to improve health care policy. I love this sentence in particular: “One area Democrats in the General Assembly might go further than the governor is teeth.” Also at the Mercury, Mechelle Hankerson digs into the possible increases in state-level education funding—something that will definitely benefit Richmond City in particular.
Quick schools note: The RTD’s Justin Mattingly says that the RPS School Board elected a new chair and vice-chair last night: 9th District’s Linda Owen and 7th District’s Cheryl Burke. Congratulations to the new leadership, and let’s hope they can help the Board avoid further embarrassing non-actions like we saw with last month’s unrezoning of the Northside.
Karri Peifer, also at the RTD, says Comfort will close at the end of the month. First, Ipanema changes hands and now this! Shockingly, Richmond is a different place than it used to be. That’s not all bad, of course—see the first item above.
Yesterday, after the big monument vote, City Council held their Organizational Development committee meeting—mostly to hear a presentation from the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission on their final report (which I wrote about yesterday and which you can download and read here). Get stoked, because, now that they’ve got a report in hand from the Commission, Council will host five more public hearings on NoBro! More public hearings! Five of them! Surely you do not tired of public opportunities to weigh in on NoBro?? The first of these public hearings takes place tomorrow, January 8th, at Binford Middle School at 6:00 PM. The other meetings follow on the 9th, 14th, 15th, and 16th—I’ll make sure to remind you day-of for each.
This morning's longread
Why time management is ruining our lives
It’s no secret that I love thinking about (and wasting time on) personal productivity and time management. And I would definitely fail at life, much more than I do currently, without a trusted todo system. That said, I loved a lot of the sobering vibe of this piece.
You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like – but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about technology. They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas. Which paths will you pursue, and which will you abandon? Which relationships will you prioritise, during your shockingly limited lifespan, and who will you resign yourself to disappointing? What matters?
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