Good morning, RVA! It's 57 °F, and, when I woke up this morning, fog had blanketed my entire world. It looked so peaceful out there but also a lot like the horror franchise Silent Hill, so I made my tea and quickly moved away from the window—you know, just in case. Today you can once again expect highs in the 80s with maybe a few more clouds than earlier in the week. We’ve got one more day of this perfect weather before cooler temperatures move in!
Water cooler
Today the City’s Urban Design Committee meets to consider a single paper—UDC 2023-18—the final location, character, and extent review for a Gateway Sign on Hull Street Road near the Chippenham Parkway interchange. I, like you probably, thought “boring!”, but then tapped through to check out the proposed signage and was surprised to see the City’s newish logo incorporated into the design. Then, reading the staff report, I learned that “staff is currently working (but has not finalized) with other City departments to expand that signage package throughout the City to create a set of unified signage themes across wayfinding, gateway, neighborhood identification, and other types of specialized signage.” This sounds cool and rings a vague bell! Also ringing a vague bell is an article that I am nearly positive exists about the artist who created the Greek columns that currently mark some of the City’s gateways—send me a link if you can find it, please! Finally, several large, square planters sit in the concrete median today, and I wonder how we could repurpose those? Harden a right turn? Protect a bike lane? Lots of options if we’re willing to be creative!
Not about Richmond, but this article, originally in the Daily Progress by Jason Armesto, is absolutely bananas: Racist remarks flood Charlottesville City Council meeting. The headline undercuts the intensity of remarks, which are, maybe?, related to Charlottesville’s recent decisions around people experiencing homelessness: “it is worth noting that several of the speakers, when they weren't using slurs or heiling Hitler, mentioned the city's recent decision to remove the curfew at Market Street Park, where many homeless people have now set up tents.” I’m glad the Council’s attorney agreed they could end the public comments and close the meeting, but you can totally see a situation where a city’s legislators (and its residents) are forced to endure hours of racist monologues used as a tactic to grind the work of government to a halt. Scary and frustrating stuff.
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers reports on our City’s efforts to expand its homelessness services by dedicating three locations for year-round emergency shelters, one on the Northside, one Downtown, and one on the Southside. The additions would increase the current shelter capacity by 54 percent, adding over 100 new beds.
I dont know if it means anything, but Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Urban One (the folks behind the casino) failed to “file public financial quarterly reports on several occasions [and] is under threat of delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Market.” I have no context for how much or how little of a story this is. Do companies often get threatened with delisting? Is it regular? No clue, but the story has made the rounds lately as a sort of anti-casino sick burn.
The Virginia Mercury has a whole entire guest column about how gas-powered leaf blowers are terrible and awful for both humans and the environment. The author lives in Maryland, and her locality has enacted an actual ban on gas-powered leaf blowers! Incredible! While I don’t know if Richmond has the authority to outright ban these loud and dirty machines, I do wonder if we could limit their use by tweaking (or enforcing) the existing noise ordinance somehow?
This morning's longread
This Supreme Court Term’s Grimmest Cases Share One Thing in Common
I would probably write about this in a different way, but I think the point this piece from Slate makes is really important: The majority of the Supreme Court intentionally selects certain cases to further their specific agenda, and we need to keep that in mind when we talk about this year’s stack of cases and their outcomes.
In our years covering the Supreme Court, we have both slowly grown to despise the obligatory journalistic “curtain-raiser” that drops at the start of each new term. Academic review of the seven or eight ostensibly “big” cases as a set of horse-race questions inevitably misses and occludes the bigger picture: the way in which the majority selects certain cases to further a specific agenda, and times the announcement of its decisions to minimize backlash to that agenda. At this point, the standard curtain-raiser listing out the important cases and handicapping how they may turn out next June feels somewhat analogous to fretting over the results of seven isolated chemistry experiments, without ever reckoning with the fact that the lab, the test tubes, the Bunsen burners, and six of the nine scientists doing the work have all been purchased by a clutch of billionaires in order to set the lab on fire.
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Picture of the Day
It’s more fun to run through a pile of leaves than a pile of bricks.
