Good morning, RVA! It's 54 °F, and today looks cloudy with highs...right around 70 °F? On the third day of January? Seems ominous, but I’ll take it. You can expect more warm weather, plus a chance for rain, tomorrow and Thursday. As for today, I think you should get out there and enjoy this unreasonable unseasonable weather while it lasts!
Water cooler
Hello again, and welcome to 2023—a year so far into the future that whenever I type it I feel like I’m in a science fiction movie. I typically don’t do end-of-year recaps, mostly because, for me, the end of the year is often a slow, injured limp to the finish line, and I can’t bring myself to do the mental work necessary to reflect back across an entire year. Despite my sluggish brain, though, I really did want to look back at some of the more important legislation Richmond’s City Council passed in 2022, and, luckily, I have an entire Trello board that did most of the mental work for me.
Below you’ll find, in my estimation, some of the most interesting legislation passed by City Council in 2022—plus a few thoughts on each:
- ORD. 2022-010, City Center Small Area Plan — After the whole Navy Hill situation, it felt real good to start the year off with City Council approving a new small area plan for the City Center—one that doesn’t include an arena! Pieces of this solid bit of planning are coming together as we speak, and we should see the Coliseum come down in the not-too-distant future.
- ORD. 2022-112, George Wythe Money — Remember what a disaster funding the construction of a replacement for George Wythe High School was? The RPS School Board, at the peak of its 2022 dysfunction, couldn’t get their act together on a plan and it got bad enough that City Council and the Mayor stepped in to deny them access to the necessary funding. Eventually School Board took the L, compromised with Council, and moved on to their next middle-of-the-night meeting. P.S. If I did do a year-end recap, much of it this year would have focused on the School Board.
- RES. 2022-R055, RVA Diamond Partners LLC are go for Diamond District — Thankfully, the Diamond District process, also a large-scale neighborhood redevelopment plan, successfully avoided the monthslong pot of community anger stirred up by Navy Hill. Most of that is because the Diamond District plan is just a better plan, but some of it is because the City learned—and applied!—some lessons from the doomed Navy Hill process. I think the jury is still out on the final, final plans for the Diamond District (another Big Question for 2023), but I feel decent about how we got here.
- ORD. 2022-221, Collective bargaining compromise — After dueling collective bargaining ordinances floated around on Council’s agenda for a while, we finally ended up with a compromise the Mayor and Council could both live with. How—and if—this gets implemented is one of my Big Questions for 2023, because it’s already running behind schedule.
- ORD. 2022-261, Civilian Review Board compromise — Just copy/paste the above paragraph about collective bargaining, because it’s an almost identical situation. Watching how the as-yet-implemented CRB interacts with the new RPD leadership is another one of my Big Questions.
- UDC 2022-16, The plans for The Circle at Monument and Allen — City Council didn’t have much to do with this one, as it was mostly a Urban Design Committee affair. Unfortunately, because UDC took too long to approve the landscaping plans for the circle, the horrible fencing is still up and still looks horrible.
- ORD. 2022-270, $1.20 real estate tax rate — After some dangerous flirting with lowering the real estate tax rate, Council decided to keep the rate where it’s been for ages. Disaster narrowly averted! The State requires Richmond to pass this same paper each and every year (or the rate auto reverts to an even lower, even more asinine level), so we will revisit this conversation soon. In the intervening time, it’ll be critical for the Mayor and a majority of council to come up with a sound plan for how to deal with the impact rising assessments have on folks with lower incomes.
- ORD. 2022-304, Do a real estate tax rebate — The plan to rebate some of the real estate tax was part of the multi-pronged plan to address the negative impacts of rising assessments while also not screwing Future Richmond. Without it, the above ordinance would have never passed. While it worked this year, it doesn’t feel like “just do a rebate if we need to” is a long-term strategy.
If I were to draw one thematic line through these ordinances and resolutions it would be that while Council did passed a lot of important legislation last year, most of it set the stage for execution at a later date. This year, Council—and the Mayor’s administration—need to follow through, execute, and make sure we take advantage of some of the good plans put together over the last 12 months.
Now, if only I had a good Trello board for tracking my hopes and dreams, maybe I could throw together a good set of prediction for the coming year. Maybe in 2024?
Related, City Council will meet tonight to elect a new president, vice president, and reshuffle committee members. While Council President doesn’t hold a ton of power, they do run the meeting, which, as we’ve seen with School Board, can really have an impact. Speaking of, School Board elected their new leadership last night (Twitter): 5th District’s Stephanie Rizzi will serve as chair and 7th District’s Cheryl Burke will serve as vice-chair.
NBC12’s Henry Graff has a look at how Acting Police Chief Rick Edwards plans to run his police department. I think the RPD deserves all the skepticism it gets—especially after the last three years. That said, the tone the new Chief uses when speaking to the media about Richmond and, specifically, about the summer of 2020 is just so different from the previous guy: “Not just because of COVID but civil unrest changed, you know how some of our officers felt about being a police officer in the city, so it’s my goal to get us back to where we were when we were fighting crime, but doing it in a way that didn’t alienate the very people in our community that we need to successfully address crime long term.” So much less defensive! Like I said, I do think it’s OK to be skeptical while we wait to see if the new tone translates into new action.
Tonight, from 5:30–7:00 PM, the Valentine will host an in-person conversation about “segregation in schools and the learning leaps and deficits post COVID-19” featuring the Commonwealth Institute’s Amy Wentz and VCU’s Genevieve Siegel Hawley. If you’re looking to start your 2023 off with a conversation between two smart people about an incredibly important topic, look no further!
Via /r/rva look at these beautiful pictures of a foggy sunrise on the James River. Come on!
This morning's longread
Human this Christmas
Despite the titles, this isn’t a late longread about Christmas but a couple of good thoughts on how AI impacts higher education by Tressie McMillan Cottom. Will educators see AI-generated essays start to show up in their classrooms? Probably (if they haven’t already)! Will it be The End of Higher Ed As We Know It? Probably not.
I would be worried, except my profession has been declared dead so many times that I’ve bought it a funeral dress. Humanities are not dead. Writing isn’t dead. And higher education will hobble along. You know why? For one, because this technology produces really creepy stuff. A.I. writes prose the way horror movies play with dolls. Chucky, Megan, the original Frankenstein’s monster. The monster dolls appear human and can even tell stories. But they cannot make stories. Isn’t that why they are monsters? They can only reflect humanity’s vanities back at humans. They don’t make new people or chart new horizons or map new experiences. They are carbon copies of an echo of the human experience.
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
I know Erosion Creek at Pine Camp is bad, but it’s so beautiful.
