Good morning, RVA! It's 58 °F, rainy, and it’s gonna be rainy for a while. You can expect highs somewhere in the 60s and every reason to wear boots. Celebrate today’s cooler temperatures by taking five minutes to crack the window and quietly listen to the rain fall on the street outside.
Water cooler
As foretold, Path to Equity (RES. 2022-R027) was the only paper that I’m keeping an eye to pass City Council last night. Council continued the rest of them until the middle of June, so we’ll revisit then. I’m keeping an eye on the calendar, though, because there aren’t too many more meetings until Council’s summer break, and I’m wondering if some of these more complicated papers (like the collective bargaining pair) will get kicked to the end of this year. That’d be a bummer. Also of note, councilmembers introduced a couple of interesting new ordinances and resolutions last night, including ORD. 2022-156, which would extend the due date for personal property taxes to August 5th. Your car tax bill, due June 6th and often showing up just a week or so before it’s due, probably went up this year because the market value of used cars has, weirdly, gone up. With any luck this ordinance will pass quickly and folks will have more time to deal with the possibly unexpected cost.
Also kind of Council-related, Patrick Larsen at VPM reports on the City’s proposed Strategic Plan for Equitable Economic Development. You can download the full PDF here, if you want to flip through. Because I’m petty, I immediately looked for the plan’s remote-working goals, which are found under Objective 2 (page six): “Launch a remote worker attraction and retention initiative— RemoteRVA—to make Richmond a destination of choice for remote workers in the Eastern US.” I’m glad the City is making this a priority, unlike the Governor or even the Mayor, I guess?, who tweeted his support of the Governor’s backward in-person-or-bust telework policy for state employees.
If you’re having a hard time keeping track of all the projects in progress or planned in Jackson Ward, I don’t blame you! There’s a lot going on. To help with that, Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has a great overview of everything in the works and how it all fits together.
This week, join Bike Walk RVA for two Bike Walk Talks to help inform their advocacy over the next couple of years. The first, to talk through the upcoming Richmond Connects transportation plan, takes place tonight at Legend Brewing Company at 5:30 PM. The second—which will focus on HenricoNext, the County’s comprehensive plan—kicks off at Final Gravity Brewing tomorrow at 5:30 PM. If you’ve been spinning your (bike) wheels about how to get involved in local transportation advocacy, this is a great place to start.
This morning's longread
The $93-billion plan to put astronauts back on the Moon
I’m starting to get really into NASA’s Artemis project, which hopes to send humans back to the Moon before the end of the decade. Here’s a great explainer of where we are in that process and what to expect over the next couple of years. I honestly wasn’t (and maybe still am not) convinced that people would return to the Moon within my lifetime!
Living and working near the lunar south pole comes with unique challenges. Because the Moon isn’t tilted on its axis, as Earth is, sunlight does not always reach its poles. Some areas are permanently illuminated and others are in perpetual shadow. Each lunar day, the Sun circles low above the horizon, creating an otherworldly experience similar to the effect the midnight Sun has in the Arctic and Antarctic. Because the Sun is so low above the horizon and because the lunar landscape is so craggy, parts of the Moon, such as nooks in deep craters, can remain locked in shadow. NASA is designing Artemis spacesuits that can withstand the huge temperature swings experienced from light to dark and back again. Cameras will need to have a high dynamic range, functioning equally well in deep shadow and bright sunlight. And even getting around on the surface will be challenging.
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