Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, and today looks a bit warmer than the last couple of days. Expect highs in the mid 50s, clear skies, and a bunch more of this sort of weather until Sunday (when we’ll probably see some rain move through). This past Monday’s unexpected snowy morning got me wishing for a white winter holiday, and, looking at the extended forecast, there’s absolutely no way of that happening. Bummer!
Water cooler
Just when you thought it was safe to forget City Council existed for a couple of weeks, I’ve got two small updates worth noting this morning.
First, Council appointed a new, full-time City Auditor: Riad Ali. Ali comes to Richmond from Broward County, Florida, and you can read more about him in the City’s press release. The auditor is an interesting City position and, depending on how spicy they want to get, can have a pretty big (or at least consistent) impact on the public’s perception and trust of local government. If you’ve never looked at all the reports issued by the City Auditor’s office, it’s worth doing—they’re usually extremely readable and give you some useful insight into the inner workings of day-to-day municipal government stuff. For example, here’s the most recent report which focused on collection of motor vehicle taxes (Finding: The City has $19.5 million of delinquent personal property taxes on the books). I’ll keep an eye on the Auditor’s webpage for the first report issued by Ali, and we’ll see if anything changes with how that office wants to get to work.
Second, the Governmental Operations committee meets today with an extremely light agenda, but will talk through “next steps on the re-establishment of the Charter Review Commission.” Fascinating! Council sort of ran out the clock on asking this year’s General Assembly for significant changes to the City’s Charter, and I guess a re-established Commission would get tasked with updating timelines for moving along some of the more interesting changes? Keep in mind that we elect a new Mayor and City Council this coming November, and that fresh-faced group will certainly want their own say on if/how we remake Richmond’s government (with the explicit permission of the GA, of course).
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s, Eric Kolenich reports that VCU has undercounted on-campus rapes for the last couple of years: “Earlier this fall, VCU reported five instances of rape on the Monroe Park Campus in 2022. On Tuesday, John Venuti, VCU’s Chief of Police, announced that it had underreported the data for two years and issued an apology. In actuality, there were 20 instances of rape in 2022, the most in at least eight years and increases in other forms of sexual assault.” A four-fold increase marks a serious, orders-of-magnitude mistake. Data reporting seems boring, but when so many of our policy and funding decisions are data-informed, you’ve gotta have accurate information from the start. I’ll bet, with the correct data in hand, we’ll see new sexual violence policies from VCU—something that maybe would have already happened had they accurate data.
Em Holter, also at the RTD, has a less important update: The newly renamed Rose Pedal Alley is not a typo but a fun, bicycle-related play on words. I celebrate it! Obviously, I’m into renaming as many things as possible with bike and bike-adjacent terminology.
Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports that the Henrico Board of Supervisors approved a massive new development at the old Anthem campus on Staples Mill and Broad (right by the Cook Out). Platania says we can expect “nearly 700 apartments, an eight-story hotel and multiple new office buildings,” which all sounds pretty rad to me. At some point, though, with all of these new residential units coming online just a couple blocks from Willow Lawn, the County will need to get serious about improving pedestrian connections—or folks are gonna get hurt attempting to walk over to the mall.
Senators Warner and Kaine announced $10 million of new federal funding to “address safety issues at 13 different corridors across the city.” Tap through our see the, by now familiar, list of things the City is focusing on—high-visibility signal backplates, LED street lights, pedestrian hybrid beacons, and more. But! What’s this at the very end of the list...”permanent bicycle lane separation.” Sounds like concrete, and I’d like to know more!
Rolynn Wilson at WRIC has the thrilling conclusion to the Mysterious Case of Richmond’s Airline Chickens, which includes this quote: “Those are my chickens. Oh my God, those are my chickens.”
This morning's longread
Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist
Ed Yong—who’s written a ton about COVID-19 over the past few years—has this essay in the New York Times where he reflects on his longcovid work and how it’s changed him as a journalist. I love his takeaways about experts, deadlines, and beats and think they’re applicable well outside of reporting on longcovid or public health.
People who had been sick for years or even decades said it was the first time they had seen their lives accurately, fully and compassionately reflected in the press. This is a damning indictment of my profession, my prepandemic self included. I am far from the only journalist covering this topic but clearly there aren’t enough of us. How could so many people feel so thoroughly unrepresented by an industry that purports to give voice to the voiceless? In covering conditions like long Covid and M.E./C.F.S., many journalistic norms and biases work against us. Our love of iconoclasts privileges the voices of skeptics, who can profess to be canceled by patient groups, over the voices of patients who are actually suffering. Our fondness for novelty leaves us prone to ignoring chronic conditions that are, by definition, not new. Normalized aspects of our work like tight deadlines and phone interviews can be harmful to the people we most need to hear from. We cannot afford those weaknesses.
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Picture of the Day
Even the huge, terrifying cobra gets into the holiday season.
