Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and today's weather looks great. You can expect highs around 80 °F and a pleasant break in the humidity. I hope you spent some time outside this weekend and will find more time to do so today, because fall is officially The Best Time In Richmond. Take advantage of it!
Water cooler
The New York Times published a long piece this weekend with the subhead: "Bon Secours Mercy Health, a major nonprofit health system, used the poverty of Richmond Community Hospital’s patients to tap into a lucrative federal drug program." To quote a bit: "Richmond Community consists of little more than a strapped emergency room and a psychiatric ward...Yet the hollowed-out hospital — owned by Bon Secours Mercy Health, one of the largest nonprofit health care chains in the country — has the highest profit margins of any hospital in Virginia, generating as much as $100 million a year, according to the hospital’s financial data. The secret to its success lies with a federal program that allows clinics in impoverished neighborhoods to buy prescription drugs at steep discounts, charge insurers full price and pocket the difference." Seems real bad on a local level, but also yet another signal that our entire healthcare system is so, so messed up.
City Council meets today with a pretty full agenda—lots of budget reallocations and special use permits. Two things to note, though: the ordinance to rezone the area around the Coliseum (ORD. 2022-246) and the resolution officially selecting RVA Diamond Partners LLC as the developer of the Diamond District (RES. 2022-R055). You should definitely flip through this PDF about the latter, it's got some great slides about the community benefits attached to the development along with a high-level explanation of how the funding for this project works (check out slides 47–51). The City will create a Community Development Authority that will issue bonds to finance infrastructure, a park, and the baseball stadium. Those bonds will be repaid by taxes and fees collected from within the project area. This financing mechanism should sound vaguely familiar, because it's very TIFlike and similar to how Navy Hill would have been funded. The massive difference here is in the size and scope of the area from which the taxes and fees are collected. Navy Hill planned to capture and funnel resources from the entirety of downtown to fund new development north of Broad. The Diamond District will only earmark funding from the project area, which is a small triangle surrounding the Diamond that is mostly parking lots and off-limits fields—a triangle that, at the moment, doesn't generate a ton of tax revenue anyway. If revenue in the triangle exceeds the bond payments, the City keeps it. If the revenue falls short of the bond payments, the developer is on the hook to fill in the gap. There may be plenty of twists, turns, and gotchas in the text of the actual developer agreement, but, at least on the surface, this project seems just leaps and bounds better for the City than Navy Hill.
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has an update on the Shake Shake coming to W. Broad Street across from the Target (plus some rumors on a mysterious grocery store tenant). I think we need to really start figuring out how to extend the Pulse from Willow Lawn out to this newly-rebooted shopping center. Shifting a BRT endpoint is more complicated than just adding another station mid-route, but I'm sure some smart engineer can figure something out. It's time to kick off the westward expansion of the Pulse!
Over the weekend, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation worked with Branch's Baptist Church off Broad Rock Boulevard to depave and reforest part of their property. You can read more about the project, and learn how, turns out, depaving is a lot of work. By now, we should all know that the treeless parts of our city are hotter—sometimes unsafely so—than those with a lush tree canopy. Plus there are economic benefits to reforesting: "'We might have had different reasons for doing this project, but we had the same goal—to stop some of that stormwater runoff,' said Jerry Smith, facilities chairman for Branch's Baptist Church. 'I wanted us to pay less in stormwater fees, [Chesapeake Bay Foundation] was focused on the benefits to the environment. This was a win for everyone.'" Pulling up your own personal pavement and replacing it with native trees is such a great example for a local organization to set.
This morning's longread
The Breathtaking Glen Canyon Reveals Its Secrets
This is a pretty optimistic look at just one of the impacts of climate change. If we're being real, though, lots of the physical world will drastically change over the next couple of decades—and some of it will be beautiful.
Water experts and the Bureau of Reclamation have predicted the lake may drop so low by 2023 that there will not be enough water to spin the turbines. Water managers have been trying to avert such a scenario, known as minimum power pool, by releasing water from reservoirs upstream and withholding water from users downstream. The complexities of this Western water puzzle are profound, involving potential threats to energy, drinking water and agriculture. At the same time, something else is going on. The strikingly beautiful canyon that long existed before engineers dammed the river to create Lake Powell is coming back, little by little. John Wesley Powell, who named it Glen Canyon during his survey of 1869, said it was a “land of beauty and glory.” I was eager to document that land as it revealed itself.
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