Good morning, RVA! It's 69 °F, and today looks like the beginning of a great stretch of weather. Expect highs in the low 80s, less humidity, and enough sun to get it done. NBC12's Andrew Freiden says this is "the first of a lot of LOW HUMIDITY DAYS." Me and my sweaty undershirts are incredibly excited about this development!
Water cooler
RPS's School Board met last night for a marathon meeting, and KidsFirst RPS live-tweeted the entire thing—right up through when the Board moved into a closed session at 12:43 AM. That's a 6+ hour meeting spanning two different days! Bananas! No one makes good decisions after midnight, especially not decisions that impact thousands of kids and families. I'm sure we (those of us who did not voluntarily tune in to a 6-hour public meeting) will get a full breakdown of the decisions the Board did make once reporters have a chance to catch a couple hours of sleep. Poking around on Twitter this morning, though, and it does sound like the Board failed in another attempt to scrap the District’s curriculum (on a 4-4-1 vote, with Boardmember Harris-Muhammed abstaining). That's twice now the Board has tried to delete the current curriculum and replace it with something homegrown, and twice that the motion failed when one of the five-member voting bloc didn't go along with their majority. I think that's interesting.
It's been a while, but I've got another bike lane survey for you to fill out! The City's Department of Public Works needs a second round of feedback for bike infrastructure on six corridors across Richmond: Warwick Road, Admiral/School Streets, Moore Street, W. Marshall Street, Norfolk Street, and N. Sheppard Street. DPW will take this next round of feedback, tweak the designs if needed, and then begin construction as soon as this fall! Exciting stuff for a Tuesday morning. Slight tangent: I haven't had time to do this, but someone should take these proposed bike lanes and drop them on the map of existing bike lanes so folks can see how the new projects help make important connections. For example, the proposed Admiral Street bike lane would (finally!) provide a safe, protected bike connection between Brook Road and Lombardy Street heading south. As someone who rides through there all the time, I'm incredibly excited...but it's hard to know the big picture when you're just looking at the tiny little map in the survey.
Richmond BizSense's Jonathan Spiers reports that the City has selected RVA Diamond Partners to lead the development of the Diamond District. You can find RVA Diamond Partners’ 1-pager with a couple of early renderings here, if you need a quick refresher on what they've got planned. Up next: City Council will need to give their stamp of approval, and I'm sure we'll end up with some more renderings, meetings, and PDFs in the near future.
Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Mayor Stoney introduced a new Civilian Review Board ordinance at last night’s City Council meeting. The City's legislative website hasn't updated with the new ordinances yet so we'll have to wait a bit to read the details, but Suarez lists out a few of the tweaks in the aforelinked piece. Also introduced last night (I think), an ordinance patroned by Councilmembers Nye and Trammell to reduce the real estate tax rate by four cents. I still think it's shortsighted to pass an across-the-board tax cut without even looking into how a Land Value Tax (which we're authorized by the General Assembly to levy!) could impact the City's homeowners. I'd even prefer giving money back to taxpayers (despite the literal billions of dollars the City needs for pretty basic service improvements) than passing a tax cut that lasts forever.
Writing for Style Weekly, Mary Scott Hardaway has a fun story about seed hunters and the "Red-N-Sweet, an extremely rare heirloom watermelon first harvested from the sandy, loamy soil of North Louisiana." Fascinating and fun stuff—bonus points for just a ton of portraits of people holding enormous watermelons.
The Richmond Police Department will hold five "Community Conversations with Chief of Police Gerald Smith" over the next couple of weeks which aim to "bring our city together and listen to one another." I assume these are mostly mea-culpa meetings for the Chief to listen to folks' concerns about how the RPD handled the Alleged 4th of July Plot and for the Chief to work at rebuilding some of the community trust he's lost over the last couple of months. It does feel like the heat has turned down a bit on Chief Smith lately—as he's done media, and now community, apology tours. I don't know if that means our attention has wandered elsewhere or if we're just waiting for some intrepid reporter's next batch of FOIA requests to come through. Regardless, if you want to talk with the Chief directly, now's your chance! The fist Community Conversation, technically for 2nd Precinct residents, kicks off tomorrow at Liberation Church (5200 Midlothian Turnpike) at 6:30 PM. All of these meetings are in-person, but the RPD will host a telephone town hall on September 27th.
This morning's longread
Should You Cut 'Toxic' People Out of Your Life?
A rare counter example to Betteridge’s Law! Should you cut toxic people out of your life? Probably. Do you need to be thoughtful about what "toxic" means and about your own role in a relationship? Yes!
The internet is wallpapered with advice, much of it delivered in a cut-and-dried, cut-’em-loose tone. Frankly worded listicles abound. For instance: “7 Tips for Eliminating Toxic People From Your Life,” or “7 Ways to Cut a Toxic Friend Out of Your Life.” On Instagram and Pinterest, the mantras are ruthless: “There is no better self-care than cutting off people who are toxic for you”; “If I cut you off, chances are, you handed me the scissors.” The signature smugness and sass of Twitter are particularly well suited to dispensing these tidbits of advice. I don’t know who needs to hear this, a tweet will begin, suggesting that almost anyone might need to hear it, but if someone hurts your feelings, you are allowed to get rid of them. There is even a WebMD page about how to identify a “toxic person,” defined aggressively unhelpfully as “anyone whose behavior adds negativity and upset to your life.” Well, by that measure … ! I find this stuff tough to read because—like most people I know—I’ve surely hurt everybody I love at least once.
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