Good morning, RVA! It's 71 °F, and we've got another hot one on deck. Today you can again expect sweaty highs in the mid 90s until a cold front moves through this evening—bringing with it a chance for some severe weather. Keep an eye out for storms tonight, but prepare for cooler, more temperate weather tomorrow.
Water cooler
Yesterday, the General Assembly passed their budget and sent it on to the Governor for him to sign. If you want to dig in to the details, The Commonwealth Institute has put together a really excellent PDF comparing the version of the budget proposed by the House, the Senate, and the compromise that they ultimately ended up with. Not only does this PDF show you the difference in priorities between the House and the Senate, but it gives you a great look at the Commonwealth's priorities as a whole in the first (mostly) pandemic-transitional budget. Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to know what a lot of these numbers mean—like is $251.3 million for the state's Water Quality Improvement Fund a lot? Is it enough? No idea. Regardless, I've saved this PDF to my library, because it feels like something I'll want to look through over the next couple of months. Next up: The Governor can amend or veto certain items in the budget, and then the GA will get another crack at it in a couple of weeks. Exhausting!
Ben Paviour at VPM has Governor Youngkin's early legislative / policy reactions to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas—which are mostly a nothingburger. The Governor sidestepped reporter questions about actual legislation that would make Virginians safer, and, instead, pointed to new funding in the budget for additional cops in schools, which we know, from this very shooting in Uvalde, do not necessarily keep children safe from gun violence. Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond digs into that new spending on "school resource officers" and notes that Democrats would have preferred to fund counselors and psychologist instead. I imagine the Governor and Republican legislators will stay quiet on guns over the next couple of months, hoping you'll forget or get distracted, and then work to repeal what little gun violence legislation we have in Virginia.
Richmond BizSense's Jonathan Spiers has the renderings of a proposed development in Carver—where the old power station used to be on the 1100 block of W. Clay Street—and whoa! Look at this thing! From the piece: "Developers behind the project unveiled designs over the weekend for what they’re now calling Carver Station, a planned rehab and conversion of the century-old building and adjoining yard at Clay and Harrison streets into a food hall, gathering room and coworking-office space built in part out of reused shipping containers." Sounds rad to me, and is 100% better than the terrifying power station that was or the lot that now sits empty. Interestingly, maybe?, the developers behind Navy Hill are running this project, too.
It's still Bike Month in my heart, and if that's true for you, too, you can continue to celebrate by joining the folks from Climate Action VA and RVAGreen 2050 for "an evening bike ride on the Capital Trail, a BBQ to welcome summer, and a conversation about the City of Richmond's new equity-centered climate action and resilience planning initiative led by the Office of Sustainability." Sounds like excellent way to spend a Thursday evening, right? Wheels up at 6:00 PM down by Capital Trail just past Great Shiplock Park (3115 Warf Street). You can register online, but the event is free.
This morning's longread
That's a Stress Response
Another great piece from Anne Helen Petersen, this one about the physical impact the stress of the last two years can have on a body. Read this thing! I guarantee that her crowdsourced list of symptoms will sound incredibly familiar—either from your own life or from that of the people around you.
And so, instead of acknowledging — then or until recently — the effects of that structural stress, and connecting it to my hair loss, I did what so many of us learn to do: 1) conceive of it as a personal failing and 2) conceive of it as a personal failing remedied through consumerism. I’ll admit: these deep-conditioning hair masks are awesome; I might never go back to plain old conditioner. But the frenzy of solution-finding blinded me to the root cause — which, in turn, makes me all the likelier to plow through future stress without considering the very real physical or mental ramifications. For myself, sure. But also for all of us: as a society, as a group of people reliant on one another, as people who cannot survive this life alone.
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