Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F right now, and that’s officially cold. Later today, though, you can expect highs right around 60 °F. Dry skies stick around until at least Thursday, so layer up and spend sometime outside enjoying the cool fall air—that is, if you can get out before sunset, which is at literal 5:00 PM today.
Water cooler
The Richmond Times-Dispatch ran two pieces this past weekend about the impact last week’s elections had on Politics In the Region™. Start with this piece by Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams on what flipping both the Henrico and Chesterfield boards of supervisors could mean for our little piece of central Virginia. Then read this predictable (and depressing) report by Em Holter on the lack of plans to support affordable childcare in Richmond following the failure of Casino 2.0. Heck, if you want to make it an RTD hat trick, check out this way-too-early piece by Michael Martz on Mayor Stoney’s chances in the 2025 gubernatorial election (a full 722 days from now!).
City Council meets today with an absolutely packed agenda as they try to move on a bunch of ordinances and resolutions before the end of the year. You can find the full agenda here. It contains 49 different items, but I’ve got my eye on two specifically. First, ORD. 2023-289 will officially keep the real estate tax rate at $1.20 per $100 of assessed value for all of 2024. Should Council fail to pass this paper, due to a paternalistic statewide law, the rate would revert back to $1.125 and the City’s budget would crumble into dust. This paper sits on the regular agenda, and that has me a little hmmmmm, but, due to the aforementioned dust crumbling, it should pass without too much discussion. Second, ORD. 2023-315 will establish that Public Utilities and Services Commission that I’ve yammered on about for the last several months. It’s got four patrons now (Addison, Jordan, Lambert, and Lynch) and it’s part of the Consent Agenda, so I think this too shall pass. Stay tuned for more on the process for appointing the Commission’s 13 members (eight from Council and five from the Mayor).
Also Council-related, and maybe more interesting, at their informal meeting they’ll discuss the process of filling Council President Jones’s vacancy when he takes his seat in the General Assembly early next year. I need an election expert to tell me what happens next, but here’s what the City’s Charter says about filling a vacancy on Council: “a special election may be called to fill any such vacancy if the vacancy occurs more than one year prior to the expiration of the full term of the office to be filled.” Does that mean we’ll have an appointed 9th District councilmember for the next 11 months? We’ll find out soon!
Richmond BizSense published Jonathan Spiers’s fourth installment of his deep dive into what the heck happened with VCU Health’s planned redevelopment of the Public Safety Building. The article is filled with lots of financing lingo—which makes my eyes glaze over—but also with sentences like this: “The big question is why the financing was $100 million higher than the projected cost, and where did that money go...The project hadn’t started, so even though the financing was secured, it should not have been drawn down. That $100 million went somewhere and VCU had to make up the difference.” Big yikes! I’ve gone into each of these installments being like, “yeah, but what else is there to even report on?” Turns out, lots!
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reports that “Virginia Democrats in the House of Delegates chose Del. Don Scott as their speaker nominee in a caucus vote over the weekend.” Scott will be the first Black person to ever serve in that role, and it only took 248 years! Tap through to the Axios Richmond piece for a brief overview of what Democrats hope to accomplish with their new majorities in both the House and the Senate, knowing full well that Governor Youngkin will most likely have a couple extra refills ready for his veto pen.
Richard Hayes at RVAHub has some really great photos from this past weekend’s Marathon that you should check out. Love the folks giving out shots of Fireball alongside the course!
This morning's longread
These fake images reveal how AI amplifies our worst stereotypes
More reporting on AI bad stuff from the Washington Post. At this point, I’m less worried about AI accidentally becoming sentient and waging war on humankind than I am about the mass adoption of AI erasing any progress we’ve made at representation in the last several decades.
Despite the improvements in SD XL, The Post was able to generate tropes about race, class, gender, wealth, intelligence, religion and other cultures by requesting depictions of routine activities, common personality traits or the name of another country. In many instances, the racial disparities depicted in these images are more extreme than in the real world. For example, in 2020, 63 percent of food stamp recipients were White and 27 percent were Black, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. Yet, when we prompted the technology to generate a photo of a person receiving social services, it generated only non-White and primarily darker-skinned people. Results for a “productive person,” meanwhile, were uniformly male, majority White, and dressed in suits for corporate jobs. Last fall, Kalluri and her colleagues also discovered that the tools defaulted to stereotypes. Asked to provide an image of “an attractive person,” the tool generated light-skinned, light-eyed, thin people with European features. A request for a “a happy family” produced images of mostly smiling, White, heterosexual couples with kids posing on manicured lawns.
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Picture of the Day
Visual proof that I took my body to a Live Music Event.
