Good morning, RVA! It's 74 °F, and we’ve got a hot and humid day ahead of us. Plus, you need to keep an eye out for severe thunderstorms this afternoon. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says 3:00–8:00 PM is the window to watch!
Water cooler
City Council meets tonight and will tackle a ton of interesting topics. Just a few to keep an eye on: The Broad Street rezonings that I’ve talked about for the past several months (ORD. 2021-151) sit on the consent agenda, as does the special use permit for the Airbnb tree house (ORD. 2021-195) and RES. 2021-R039 which would declare racism a public health crisis. Council has continued most of the regular agenda, but will discuss ORD. 2021-186, a casino-related ordinance that, from the staff report, is the official ordinance required to “petition the Circuit Court for a referendum” on November’s ballot. If you can believe it, we’re just 99 days out from the 2021 elections, when, among other things, we’ll all vote on whether or not to bring a casino to Richmond.
Get excited, because it’s time to take another bike lane survey! The Department of Public Works has detailed designs available for new bike lane projects on six different corridors across the city: Brookland Parkway, Colorado Avenue, Grove Avenue, Marshall Street, Walmsley Boulevard, and Warwick Road. If you’d like to share general thoughts on the corridors you’ll want to take this survey. If you somehow have the super power of grokking engineering diagrams, DPW has set up a Konveio for you to leave very specific feedback on the actual proposed schematics for each corridor! I will let deeper nerds than I dig into those documents and report back to the rest of us. You have until August 11th to submit your thoughts, feelings, questions, and concerns!
Also in non-car transportation news, GRTC installed a ton of new concrete pads at bus stops across the Southside last week. Looks like most of these are along Richmond Highway and Midlothian Turnpike. This is a pretty big deal because, as we all should know by now, Southside lacks physical infrastructure—including sidewalks. No sidewalk means no place to stand and wait for the bus and no place for the bus to levelly deploy its ramp. Speaking of infrastructure on the Southside, I enjoy the boldness of these two resolutions from Councilmember Jones: RES. 2021-R040 asks that 60% of ARP money get appropriated to “community improvement and infrastructure projects in South Richmond and underserved communities,” and RES. 2021-R041 asks that 60% of the $25 million casino signing bonus be appropriated to “community improvement projects in South Richmond and underserved communities.” There’s a whole lot of money about to hit Richmond’s bank account, and we should most certainly build some infrastructure on the Southside with it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to right some wrongs with money!
Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on some of the really complicated consequences of marijuana legalization. What do you do for someone who was denied public housing (and lost their place in line) due to a marijuana conviction less than a year before legalization? This is tough to read: “Under RRHA’s decision, Page is barred from reapplying for a voucher until February 2022 — three years after her conviction for something that is no longer a crime.”
Also in the RTD, Caitlyn Freeman reports on a pay raise for Henrico County Public Schools’ superintendent. Read this quote from the Henrico School Board Chair and then think about the Richmond Public School Board and their continual fumbling of the George Wythe situation: “As much as we enjoy and benefit from her leadership, the truth is that someday a future board will need to search for [Cashwell’s] successor. Henrico will only be able to attract the best candidates if it demonstrates and sustains a commitment to educational leadership.”
This morning's longread
When Women Filled the Air
This is charming thing I never knew about: Post-WWI lady DJs in America’s Midwest.
They were the early mom influencers. They created a sacred space, a gentle gathering of women’s voices, which had no place in major media outlets. Here, they could be themselves: just women talking to lonely women over the airwaves. Discussing recipes, families, beauty tips, cosmetics, loss, grief, budgeting tips, and so much more. Radio homemakers constructed the uneasy identity of the heartland, offering with their recipes and voices a practical road map to what Elspeth Probyn, a professor of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney, calls the “very practical figure of an everyday ethics of living.”
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