Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, and you might need to grab a flannel today as temperatures will max out around 50 °F. Tomorrow and Sunday, though! Prepare to take advantage of some really stunning weather over the next three days.
Water cooler
Today's the day! At 3:00 PM, Mayor Stoney will introduce his FY23 budget to City Council. You can watch live over on the City's legislative website. Of course all ears will be tuned in for how the mayor has decided to fund Richmond Public Schools, but he'll undoubtedly cover plenty of other topics that should interest readers of this newsletter: gun violence prevention, the Civilian Review Board and police officer pay, paving and public transportation—all sorts of stuff! Due to a dark and ancient tradition I don't really understand, Mayor Stoney will technically present the Capital Improvement Plan to the Planning Commission today at 10:00 AM, before he heads over to City Council. This is the capital portion of the budget—buildings, bike lanes, parks, things you can touch with your hands—and is often where you'll find the funding for the exciting projects coming to your neighborhood. Watch both live today, if you dare, or check The Boring Show podcast early next week for the audio. Budget season has begun!
The Richmond Public Library continued the public part of a process to redesign the Main Library earlier this week, and I totally missed it! Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has all of the details, including some neat renderings. You can also find a recording from this week's public meeting on the Library's website along with the results of their community survey, too. Note the conversion of the current basement into an underground parking lot and the proactive decision to avoid surface-level lots. Also, connecting the dots to budget season, this is exactly the type of thing that would show up in the Capital Improvement Plan. Sounds like the Library will finalize the renovation plans and then pitch them to the Mayor for inclusion in next year's CIP—set a reminder to start advocating for this when fall rolls around!
I appreciate Ben Paviour at VPM for continuing to poke at the Governor's probably-fake snitch-on-your-teacher-for-acknowledging-racism tip line. Youngkin's administration has blocked public records requests for tips submitted and even for "the volume and subject matter of withheld records." My guess is that 95% of the tips are from liberals across the country trolling the governor, 4% totally inane requests from Republican-adjacent groups that would be offensive to read aloud, and 1% actual tips. Still though, I appreciate Paviour's work on this because the Governor's choice to block this early, probably trivial request certainly sets the stage for later reporting. It's clear that this governor is not interested in transparency and will warp existing public record laws as much as he can to keep his administration's business in secret. While it might work that way in hedge fund world, that's not how it works in government!
Whoa, how freaking cool is this: Via /r/rva, an old Richmond trolley fare token found in someone's back yard. If you're really into public transportation, you can get an enamel pin reproduction of one of these (I have two!).
This morning's longread
What Does the End of Beef Mean for Our Sense of Self?
I wish this article would have explored the concept in the headline a bit more, but tap through anyway because the pictures in this thing are...arresting? Disturbing?
Although the American love of meat has infiltrated almost every corner of the globe, the world’s consumption of meat per capita remains only a third of North America’s. On average, Asians eat a fourth as much meat as Americans; Africans less than a fifth. Outside the West, a number of countries have long-lasting and sophisticated vegetarian traditions, from India — home to nearly 1.4 billion people, of whom 39 percent identify as vegetarian and another 41 percent restrict how much meat they eat — to Ethiopia, where more than 40 percent of the population are Orthodox Christians and the most devout shun both meat and dairy on 250 fasting days a year.
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