Good morning, RVA! It's 53 °F, and today, after the wet weather moves through, looks like our warmest day of the week. Expect highs in the 60s to go along with a small possibility of rain this morning. I think, after today, we might get enough rain-free days to dry out our soggy landscapes! P.S. You are not imagining it: Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond reports that our average winter temperatures are four degrees warmer than in the 1970s.
Water cooler
Big news from RPS Superintendent Kamras’s daily email: The school district has hired a new Chief Wellness Officer and Chief Operating Officer. Both internal hires, Renesha Parks (previously the Director of Exceptional Education) will serve as the CWO, while Dana Fox (the Director of School Construction) will take over at COO. Congratulations to these bold, brave women who step into important and complicated roles. We’ll see what the future holds for them, because I was pretty convinced that the School Board would pull some shenanigans to keep these positions open even longer.
Jahd Khalil at VPM reports that the Mayor’s administration has finalized the total amount of revenue collected from the City’s real estate tax, which clocks in at $21 million over their original estimate. Most of the additional cash will help pay for inclement weather shelters and additional raises for police, fire, and emergency communications staff. Quick aside about the latter: “A press release from the mayor’s office said those pay adjustments would be for employees not accounted for in a $17 million increase in first-responder wages in May’s budget.” This sort of “Ope! We found more money!” happens every year to some extent, so you shouldn’t be too scandalized by this reporting—but it’s clearly not the best way to run things. Would last year’s budget process have gone any differently with an additional $17 million hanging around? No clue, but it’d be nice to have all the money on the table before we head into budget season. That’s why (I think), when the Mayor introduced his plan to issue real estate tax rebates, an additional piece of the assessments puzzle was to “align the city’s assessment and budget cycles.” Theoretically that administrative shift might could fix these sorts of year-end money influxes.
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers has some great reporting on the draft details of Those Thee Zoning Changes, specifically the proposed changes to the City’s Airbnb regulations: “the recommendations would eliminate a primary residency requirement in which operators must reside at the property being rented for at least half the year. Instead, [Short-Term Rentals] would be permissible in any dwelling in any of the city’s zoning districts, but with a distance requirement separating the unit from another STR at a non-primary residence.” This is a hard sentence for my brain to understand, but, I think the intent here is to allow landlords to run multiple Airbnbs but prevent them from buying up entire blocks of housing to use as short-term rentals. This is, of course, anti-housing and will reduce the amount of housing stock in Richmond, but I think it is a compromise I’d be willing to trade for permitting by-right Accessory Dwelling Units everywhere and the entire elimination of parking minimums (the other two zoning changes). You can flip through the City’s presentation on these changes here and you can leave a public comment here.
We all know the A.P. Hill monument at Hermitage and Laburnum is horrible, creates one of the most dangerous intersections in the city, and will, at some point, come down. When, though? I’ve been pretty wait-and-see, since legal challenges tend to take forever to lawyer their way through the system, but it does feel like we’re getting close. NBC12’s Henry Graff reports that the statue could come down as early as next week. Exciting!
This morning's longread
How Apples Are Ranked
I’m almost positive I’ve linked to this apple guy before, but now he’s got his own, very thorough, very funny apple ranking site. Yes, it’s mostly a joke, but it’s also entirely a real apple ranking site.
Thankfully in the early 2000s, due to the emergence of a class of idle yuppies willing to shell out disproportionate amounts of disposable income at organic grocery stores, it became economically viable to invest in the development of what I term “designer apples.” As a result, a dizzying array of new apples hit the shelves and continued to do so year after year. With so many new breeds, the antiquated system of delegating an apple as “good” or “bad” is an unworkable injustice of oversimplification. Society demands an updated rubric for apple evaluation that meets the moment. I have created that rubric. I have no children. This rating scale is my only hope to keep my namesake alive. It is something I hope to be utilized for generations to come and is my only chance at achieving immortality. Therefore I am naming this system: The Frange 100 Point Apple Rating Scale aka the F100.
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Picture of the Day
Just seconds before runneling.
