Good morning, RVA! It's 38 °F, and today looks like a cool, cloudy day. Expect highs in the mid 50s with a chance for rain late this evening, and, while the 10-day forecast doesn’t hold any temperatures in the 80s, I do see some upper 60s / low 70s in our future.
Water cooler
The results of yesterday’s firehouse primary for the (old) 9th Senate District seat are in, and Del. Lamont Bagby won with a commanding 72% of the vote. Alexsis Rodgers and Del. Dawn Adams rounded out the rest of the ballot with 21% and 7%, respectively. According to WRIC, Bagby will face Republican Stephen Imholt in the March 28th special election. Imholt has an incredibly up-hill battle ahead of him. The new Senate District representing Richmond is pretty compact, extremely Democratic, and unlikely to elect a Republican. It sounds exhausting to run a campaign for a seat that will only exist for a couple of months, especially when the new district that seat represents voted 76-20 for McAuliffe in the last gubernatorial election.
City Council will host their first budget work session of the 2023 season today at 2:00 PM! They’ll focus exclusively on setting priorities—both for the operating and the capital budgets. That means this afternoon is a great time to tune in, take a few notes, and hear about the City’s needs through Council’s lens. Remember, the Mayor creates the first draft of the budget, and while City Council can adjust it in whatever way they like, they’ve got to find the votes to make that happen. I can’t even remember a time when Council proposed and passed even moderately-sized changes to the Mayor’s budget—someone correct me if I’m wrong though. Then, after budget chats, we’ve got the the informal and formal City Council meetings, with light agendas of their own. The Regular Agenda is completely empty, and the two papers I’m watching have both been continued (RES. 2023-R011 and ORD. 2022-375).
In sort of state budget anti-news, the General Assembly adjourned over the weekend without passing one. Michael Martz and David Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch report that while the GA couldn’t agree on the billion dollars worth of tax cuts in the Governor’s proposed budget, they did pass a "'skinny bill' with urgent necessary updates to the budget." Part of the skinny does include more money for public schools, fixing the Governor’s $200 million shortage that School Districts only found out about a couple months back. Legislators and the governor will reconvene later this spring to hash out their remaining disagreements and get a regular, full-width budget passed (fingers crossed).
Via Richard Hayes at RVA Hub, the Friends of Forest Hill Park are looking for a Few Good Volunteer Gardeners to help maintain some newly-planted natives species. If you live over that way, it sounds like a great opportunity to get involved and get your hands dirty.
Someone sent me this absolutely bananas 1985 news report about the opening of the 6th Street Marketplace. Knowing the eventual outcome of the Marketplace, it’s hard hearing how city and state leaders had put so much hope into this one project to “save downtown.” Also, malls are so weird.
This morning's longread
Why governors put this over here, with the rest of the fire.
In this piece, Waldo Jaquith writes about large, government software projects—which, I know sounds thrilling. But! His view on how The Job of Being Governor works is really smart, and I think this piece is worth reading even if you couldn’t care less about software.
Serving as governor is to be presented with a never-ending stream of decisions to be made, all of which have been vetted through several layers of people. Those decisions are generally teed up to include options, in the form of a right option and a wrong option, with the governor’s advisors fervently hoping that their principal will simply make the “right” choice. There is rarely time for the governor to go deep in any area. A state is a stage full of spinning plates; the governor’s job is to go where directed and give a plate a quick push, and to repeat this many times each day, for 4–8 years. Decision-making at this level is all about triaging. The easiest option is the preferred option. It’s better to dispose of a problem permanently than temporarily, better for a longer time than a shorter time. The top priority is to get things off the governor’s desk.
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Picture of the Day
OK, I think spring has sprung.
