Good morning, RVA! It's 68 °F, and today you can expect cloudy skies with highs right around 80 °F. I’d keep an eye out for rain throughout the day—which is probably good advice for the rest of the week, too. Summer is here and, as often as possible, I plan on enjoying its random, pop-up storms from the my screen porch. How good does a summer shower smell—can’t beat it!
Water cooler
It’s Election Day! If you haven’t already, you have until 7:00 PM to make your way out to your polling place and cast a ballot in this very important Primary Election. If you need to get grounded and do a quick bit of day-of research, that’s OK, and the Virginia Department of Elections has all the information you need, including candidate lists and polling locations. Do make sure you double and triple check your polling place, though, because a handful of the regular sites are closed due to RPS’s summer school. Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond details some of the drama in a lot of these races, but, starting tomorrow, after the votes are counted and winners declared, we put the drama aside and get serious about taking back the majority in the House of Delegates and preserving the Senate’s Democratic Brick Wall . As we’ve seen over the last couple of years, elections are important!
The RPS School Board meets tonight, and you can find their full agenda here, which includes final votes on a bunch of school renamings. Related, RVA Dirt has a recap of the Board’s June 5th meeting, where they discussed an array of topics, but I think you should tap through to read a perfect example of why I keep saying we should only rename schools after plants or places.
The City’s Planning Commission meets today and will consider, among other things, ORD. 2023-174 a Special Use Permit to allow a day care on Seminary Avenue. I bring it up because usually these sorts of SUPs are extremely contentious with neighbors submitting angry public comments about parking and neighborhood character and other mostly made up concerns. I was pleasantly surprised to find that every single letter submitted about this SUP is a letter of support—with many of them mentioning the critical lack of childcare in our city.
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that Shamin Hotels bought the old Hardee’s on the corner of Arthur Ashe Boulevard and Broad Street, bringing the potential for an anchoring building to a major intersection that’s, at this point, utterly unremarkable. To get a sense for how underused this space is—which, again, is the intersection of two of our majorest roads—take a look at this map where I’ve colored all of the desolate wasteslands pink. That’s a whole lot of pink! Platania says Shamin has no current (or currently public) plans for the property, but you can bet whatever the plans may be they’ll be more interesting than a 40-year-old Hardee’s.
The Office of Equitable Transit & Mobility has a cool opportunity for two people to join their team as paid summer interns—with one focusing on outreach and one on planning. Both seem fun, interesting, and great opportunities to meet folks and make connections. If you’re interested, you’ve got until July 14th to submit your resume.
This morning's longread
The Plutocrat vs. the Monopoly
Virginians, and especially Richmonders, should read this piece in the Atlantic about Dominion and the Commonwealth’s broken campaign finance regulations. Also, after finishing this article, I spent a long time daydreaming about what the last five years would have looked like if Tom Perriello had won his gubernatorial primary against Ralph Northam.
In 2017, Gilmore was on leave from the Foreign Service (he has since retired) to work for the gubernatorial campaign of Tom Perriello, a Democratic former congressman from Charlottesville. The campaign took on Dominion over the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, its proposed gas pipeline through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Opposition to the pipeline united property-rights libertarians, environmentalists, hunters, and climate activists, and Dominion eventually had to cancel the project. Though Perriello lost in the Democratic primary to the reliably pro-Dominion Ralph Northam, who was elected governor that November, the pipeline controversy, the Dominion giveaway bills, the Charlottesville murder, and the Trump presidency all combined in two successive elections to bring to the general assembly a wave of younger Democrats who were less likely than their older colleagues to jump at the monopoly’s command.
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Picture of the Day
I’ve found that I’m way more likely to try and fix things now that I have a really rad toolbox.
