Good morning, RVA! It's 64 °F, and today looks great. You can expect another day with highs in the 80s! The 80s! Looks like tomorrow has some rain in store for us, which I'm not too broken up about because it might help wash away some of this pollen that coats every single surface.
Water cooler
Tonight at 6:00 PM, the City will hold a virtual meeting about the newly-approved City Center Innovation District and potential ideas for its rezoning. You can see the current zoning map on the aforelinked website, and, embarrassingly, I can't seem to find the proposed zoning map. I'm sure it exists somewhere, though! You can, however, find the future land use map for this part of town on page 33 of the City Center Innovation District Small Area Plan. What's the difference between land use and zoning? The land use is, just like the name says, how we'd like the land in that part of town to be used—in this case, mostly "downtown mixed-use" and "institutional" with a touch of "neighborhood mixed-use." Then you can flip over to Richmond 300 to check out how Richmond defines which buildings and uses make up these broad categories with human-understandable names. For example, "downtown mixed-use" should be: "urban in form and may be of larger scale than existing context. Plazas and setbacks create an engaging street life. Many buildings are vertically mixed-use" (page 66 of this enormous PDF). Once you've got a nice description of what we should do with the land, we then try to apply existing zoning districts from the City's zoning ordinance to make development of those sorts of uses legal. Maybe development that's "larger scale than existing context" is illegal to build in parts of downtown today, so you've gotta change the laws to allow it. This, by the way, is where things transition from something humans can understand to something lawyers can understand. Finally, sometimes you don't have the zoning districts you need to support the development you want, and that means creating new districts. Richmond did that semi-recently with the creation of TOD-1, or the Transit-Oriented Development district. Finally finally, if it's been 100 years since you've done a KonMari deep clean on your zoning ordinance, sometimes you just need to do an entire rewrite of that thing. The City plans to do exactly that, should money stay/end up in this year's budget. Got it? This has been you friendly, unplanned, early-morning zoning explainer!
For those of you looking, here's ORD. 2022-112, the ordinance that the Mayor submitted to City Council on Monday night to transfer $7.3 million to RPS for building an 1,800-seat replacement for George Wythe High School.
Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Henrico County passed their $1 billion budget last night. This sentence really illustrates how politics and government in Richmond and Henrico are just so very different: "There was no discussion regarding the budget Tuesday night."
Also at the RTD, you're going to want to check out this big collection of newspaper ads from the 1980s. "When you've the urge to splurge, and your wallet says don't—it's time for Traveler, the x-tra light 10-speed by Schwinn." For sale at Agee's (at their same location in Carytown) for just $181.95! I had to close the tab or this email would have never made it to your inboxes.
Richmond BizSense's Jack Jacobs reports on some tweaks to Virginia's medical marijuana laws that the governor just signed. Sounds like it'll be easier and cheaper for folks to get approved for using medical marijuana: "Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed into law this week legislation to eliminate the requirement that people register with the state’s Board of Pharmacy before being cleared to buy medical cannabis products from approved sellers in the commonwealth." Also, in related, apparently old (or forgotten), news, gLeaf has plans to open a medical marijuana dispensary in the old Need Supply building in Carytown.
Mike Platania, also at Richmond BizSense, reports that Mayo Island is for sale—just $19 million and you can own an island! Honestly, the City should buy this and turn it into a river park.
This morning's longread
The Internet Has a Rat Poison Problem
I was doing some research into pest control and came across this article about these really horrible anticoagulant rat poisons and the loose regulations governing their online sales. Then I ended up listening to this rat-based episode of the Throughline podcast. Just surrounded by rats lately, I guess!
The global market for anticoagulant rodenticides is expected to grow from $3.8 billion in 2020 to $5.8 billion by 2027, with the United States accounting for more than one-third of sales, according to market research firm Global Industry Analysts. One reason for this skyward growth is that in recent years rat populations have been surging in cities and expanding into suburbs, and there are reports that the pandemic has only made matters worse. Wherever rats go, they threaten outbreaks of extremely unpleasant human illnesses, including scrub typhus, salmonellosis, and leptospirosis. The poisons are also increasingly deployed in the agricultural sector, where rodent urine and feces spoil an estimated 20 percent of the world’s food supply. Perhaps the biggest factor behind the success of second-generation anticoagulants is the simple fact that they are really good at killing rats.
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