Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and we turned the corner! Today you can expect highs in the 80s—still humid, yes, but a little less mind-obliteratingly hot. Really, truly pleasant weather should show up tomorrow, just in time for a wonderful weekend.
Water cooler
Tyler Layne at WTVR continues to report on the Richmond Police Department and the alleged 4th of July mass shooting plot. No new info in this piece, but what's fascinating is the diversity of folks Layne got to speak on the record about their concerns and frustrations with the RPD: the president of the Carillon Civic Association, the president of the Richmond NAACP, and the former co-chair of City Council's Civilian Review Board Task Force. It's also the first piece I've read that significantly starts to shift accountability over to the Mayor. This makes total sense! Folks still have tons of questions, and, unfortunately, the Police Chief has decided to clam up entirely. Like I said earlier, I really don't think that strategy is going to work for either the RPD or the Mayor over the coming weeks.
It's Infrastructure Week! Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Richmond has won an $18.4 million grant from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help replace the Arthur Ashe railroad bridge. I am very excited for this bridge-replacement! The current bridge is an absolutely vital connection from Scott's Addition south of the train tracks to points north—like the Diamond (and also my home). It's an awful bridge to walk over and an even worse one to bike over. And while I haven't seen plans or designs for the new bridge, Martz says, "The project also is an opportunity for the city to improve bicycle and pedestrian access along the heavily traveled Ashe Boulevard, which carries about 26,000 vehicles a day through midtown Richmond." Yes! I agree!
VPM has a good interview with Pulitzer Prize Winner Ryan Kelly, the photographer who took the photo just seconds before a man killed Heather Heyer with his car at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville back in 2017 (five years ago tomorrow). It's an incredibly well-known photo—you're probably picturing it in your mind right now—but it's also an incredibly traumatic photo. Kelly does a really great job giving thoughtful answers to tough questions—like how he feels having won a literal Pulitzer "at the expense of death and injuries, and a community being torn apart and still being torn apart five years later." Kelly now lives in Richmond and works at a local brewery, and seems like he's living his best life.
The RTD's Chris Suarez reports on Homeward’s biannual point-in-time count of folks in our region experiencing homelessness: "at least 447 people were homeless at the end of July, with only 243 of them in shelters." Tap through to read how the pandemic made things worse, emergency funding made things better (kind of), and how there's a lot of opportunity to improve the current situation—especially the City-funded emergency shelter.
Need a bunch of reasons to ride the bus? Read this column by Richard Hankins in Richmond Magazine and get to planning your next bus adventure! It's free, easy to use, air conditioned(!), and benefits our ever-burning planet.
Whoa, via /r/rva, this pretty great picture of lightning over Chimborazo park.
This morning's longread
Inside the IRS ‘Pipeline’ used to process tax returns
This photoessay of an IRS tax return facility in Austin will absolutely blow your mind. The new climate bill (which the House could vote on tomorrow??) includes $80 billion for the IRS, and you may say to yourself "That seems like a lot of dollars!" Well, tap through and look at the picture of a man using a program written in COBOL as part of his day-to-day, and you'll start to wonder if $80 billion is even enough.
Taxpayers are trapped in this time warp because Congress has systemically underinvested in the IRS. Its funding was cut for most of the past decade, despite the agency receiving evermore responsibilities: stimulus checks, child tax credit payments, Obamacare enforcement, foreign bank account tracking and, lately, hunting down Russian yachts. Without reliable, long-term funding guarantees, the IRS has struggled to upgrade its systems. I recently took a (chaperoned) tour of the Pipeline, which is usually off-limits to journalists. Imagine Willy Wonka’s secretive chocolate factory, but instead of gumdrops and lollipops it’s ... paper. Everywhere, paper.
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