Good morning, RVA! It's 73 °F, and today looks cloudy with a chance for a little bit of rain this morning. You can expect highs in the mid 80s, and don't forget to keep checking in on your outside plants—it's been a while since we've had a good soaking!
Water cooler
VPM's Ian M. Stewart asks: "What would it take to permanently close Carytown to cars?" The answer, which he doesn't really get around to, is a bucketful of political will. We'd need strong support from the 1st, 2nd, and 5th district councilmembers, the mayor (so they could make it a priority for City staff), and a lot of residents (especially business owners). I think we have some of that citizen support right now, but we would have to really work to nail down the support from elected officials. Not impossible, certainly, but a lot of work.
Richmond's Department of Parks and Recreation has closed the pedestrian bridge over the train tracks to Texas Beach. From the announcement: "During a recent inspection of park-maintained bridges, the pedestrian bridge that leads to Texas Beach was found to be structurally unsafe for public use. The bridge will be closed effective immediately." NBC12 reports that while there is $2 million of federal funding to fix the bridge, there is, at this point, no timeline for repairs or a replacement. Huge bummer! Texas Beach is such a great and easy river spot, and, with the bridge closed, I'm not sure there's now a safe (and legal) way to get there. I hope Parks & Rec can repair or replace the bridge quickly and that people will give them some grace during the process.
Reminder: City Council's Organizational Development committee meets today and will consider the ranked-choice voting paper (ORD. 2022-119). If you haven't yet taken the opportunity to reach out to your councilmember (and their liaison!) in support of this ordinance, you've still got time this morning. You can find all of their contact information here. Also, while we're talking City government, the Planning Commission will meet today with a couple interesting items on their agenda, but probably the most interesting to me is a presentation on the proposed zoning ordinance rewrite. A rewrite of the zoning ordinance is exciting stuff (if you're into zonings and rezonings) and would let us codify a lot of the zoning-related suggestions in Richmond 300—in fact, rewriting the zoning ordinance is itself one of Richmond 300’s six “big moves." It's a big move and a big project to tackle—something that would take a few years to finish given the proper amount of community engagement—and I'm excited to see the City's plan for getting started.
Big sigh, NASA scrubbed their Artemis I launch over this past weekend—this time because of a hydrogen fuel leak. They'll roll the big rocket back into a hanger somewhere and try again later. When later? Probably not until the end of this month at the earliest. If you're interested, you can see a neat calendar of all the upcoming launch windows and read through a list of constraints that define a successful window—like that the Orion spacecraft needs to splash down off the coast of San Diego during the day so recovery personnel can see it and snatch it out of the ocean. Cool stuff!
This morning's longread
Why Jackson’s water system is broken
I'm still thinking and reading about Jackson's drinking-water crisis (while Baltimore had their own, much smaller water situation over the long weekend). You'll definitely want to read this local piece from Mississippi Today—it gets into a lot of the history that led up to thousands of city residents stuck not only without clean drinking water but just flat out left with no water at all.
Academics who have studied government water systems recommend they regionalize in order to spread costs among struggling cities and more affluent suburbs. There’s just one recurring hitch to securing such an agreement: “Racism makes all of this so much harder,” Teodoro said. “These would be hard problems, but we could solve them if it wasn’t for racism.” The history of racial conflict, Teodoro explained, creates a scenario where Black residents of the city fear losing control of their services to the same people who have systematically oppressed them. And white residents of the suburbs, who chalk the city’s problems up to incompetence, don’t feel responsible to help. In the Jackson metro, not only is regionalization a tough sell, there are examples of the opposite happening. West Rankin Utility Authority recently splintered off to build its own wastewater treatment facility to become independent from Jackson’s Savannah Street Wastewater Treatment Plant.
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