Good morning, RVA! It's 58 °F, and today we’ll most likely see some rain or even storms this afternoon. We’ll also see cooler temperatures for at least the next couple of days, with highs right around 80 °F. Honestly, get excited because it looks like an absolutely stunning weekend ahead of us (once we get past today’s rain). Enjoy!
Water cooler
I posted Council’s sixth budget session over on the Boring Show, which you can and should go ahead and listen to at 2x speed. This budget season, the first led by Councilmember Jones as president, has been extraordinarily smooth, well-run, and fun to follow. I mean, I’ve listened to these things for years now, and I don’t think I can remember another time when City Council and the Mayor’s Administration worked together so well—especially during the amendment process, which mostly wrapped up this past Wednesday. This year, Council came to the Admin with a couple million dollars worth of amendments and, unlike years previous, they managed to work out a path forward. Most impressive to me: Never once did they spend hours arguing about a trivial $50,000 amendment. Such an upgrade from some of the pre-pandemic years! Looks like Council will have one more meeting to finalize a few items, but, at the end of Wednesday’s session, it sounded like they already had the consensus needed to pass a balanced budget. Great work, everyone!
Mifepristone, the safe abortion-inducing medication, will remain on the market in Virginia as Republicans continue their nationwide assault on reproductive rights through an activist judge in Texas. VPM’s Whitney Evans reports that a federal appeals court judge “ruled late Wednesday that mifepristone can remain on the market‚ but it reimposed some restrictions that the FDA had eased in recent years.“ If you’d like a lengthy and thorough read on the merits of the mifepristone case, here’s one from this past March. It feels like this is destined for the Supreme Court, and we all know how they feel about preserving people’s rights lately.
Michael Phillips at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Regency mall site in western Henrico will soon host “the largest indoor pickleball facility in Virginia” (12 courts). Jon Laaser, formerly voice of the Flying Squirrels and now head pickle at Performance Pickleball RVA, will run the show. Once they get the place up and running (by the end of this year), they’ll even have a pro shop—for pickleball!
Richmond BizSense’s Jack Jacobs reports on the new Lego factory’s ceremonial ground breaking out in Chesterfield. The facility will cost around $1 billion dollars and will receive $56 million in state grants “if the company meets factory investment and hiring goals.” I still want to know if I can get a tour of the Lego factory and if we’ll get any factory-exclusive Lego sets.
Via /r/rva, a picture of something we’ll surely see more and more in the coming years: Electric vehicle charging cables stretched across the sidewalk. This is definitely a dangerous, janky tripping hazard, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered doing the same thing (with an ADA cable ramp, though) whenever we end up getting an electric vehicle. I think the City needs to get ahead of this and start installing tons of publicly-owned charging stations while also offering some sort of incentives for businesses to do the same. So many of Richmond’s residential units don’t have access to off-street parking, and we need to find a way for those folks to transition to electric vehicles. Just enforcing the code and preventing people from stringing extension cables across the city is not enough!
This morning's longread
A deadly fungal disease on the rise in the West has experts worried
Climate change causing the spread of a rare and exotic disease is scary, but this sort of thing is going to keep happening—and with a lot more boring diseases, too. Just think about any of the things you need to get vaccinated against before traveling to warmer parts of the world.
The disease is only endemic to certain geographic areas and it’s technically considered an “emerging illness,” even though doctors have been finding it in their patients for more than a century, because cases have been sharply rising in recent years. In some places, astronomically so. Valley fever cases in the U.S. increased by 32 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to the CDC. One study determined that cases in California rose 800 percent between 2000 and 2018. In most states where the disease is endemic, public health departments have been slow to grasp and advertise the breadth and potential impact of the illness, experts say, and the federal government could be doing more to fund research into a cure or vaccine for the infection. To date, there’s only been one multi-center, prospective comparative trial for the treatment of Valley fever. And, more troubling, researchers haven’t pinned down exactly what’s behind the rise in cases or how to stop it. One thing is nearly certain, though: Climate change plays a role.
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
Why?
