Good morning, RVA! It's 54 °F, and today looks beautiful with sunshiney highs right around 80 °F. In fact, the rest of this week’s weather looks amazing. Remember to, of course, spend some time outside if you can but also to water your garden / whatever plants you’ve got sitting outside. I don’t think we’ll see a good, soaking rain for a while, and it’s important for plants to stay hydrated, too.
Water cooler
City Council’s Organizational Development committee meets today at 4:00 PM and will consider a couple big important papers of note. First, they’ll tackle the two ordinances and one resolution needed to advance the if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed referendum on the casino: ORD. 2023-170, ORD. 2023-171, and RES. 2023-R027. Remember, all nine councilmembers sit on the OrgDev committee, so today’s vote (assuming they do actually vote) will act as a preview for the vote at full Council later this summer. I anticipate a pretty strong, nearly unanimous vote to approve. Second, the committee will consider ORD. 2023-172, which would greenlight the new amphitheatre down by the riverfront. Setting aside how I feel about the casino re-vote (a nauseated exhaustion), the City has really hit a stride in working together to move large projects forward. I can’t really tell if this is a shift from previous mayors and councils, or if it just feels like a lot of action after three years of COVID-19 standstill.
PlanRVA has wrapped up their West Broad Street BRT Corridor Analysis study, which you can download and flip through. This is just one of many necessary studies that our region needs to crank out before we can take the next obvious step with the Pulse and extend it westward. To spoil it for you: PlanRVA recommends a phased approach, with an initial extension all the way out to Parham Road. I really recommend scrolling through this PDF as it highlights all of the basic infrastructure improvements—think sidewalks and crosswalks—that need to be made up and down the length of this corridor. I’m not really sure what happens next, but, in the immediate future, PlanRVA will present the study to the GRTC Board of Directors and the Richmond Regional Transportation Planning Organization for formal adoption.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has an important update to the news that a fire hit one of the buildings at the Richmond Zoo last night: “All animals thought to have been lost in the veterinary building have been located and are alive.”
Via /r/rva, someone on Reddit lost a kayak and another person on Reddit found it for them! For me, that’s exactly how a local online community should work.
Cool opportunity alert! The YWCA is recruiting young people aged 14–18 to join their Empower RVA Teens 2023–2024 cohort. Seems important and cool: “Empower RVA Teens is a youth-led peer educator and social justice-focused leadership program that aims to prevent teen dating violence & sexual assault by empowering teens to teach their peers about healthy relationships, teen dating violence, sexual violence, and consent.“ Interested folks have until July 1st to apply using this form.
This morning's longread
How I evaluate sources
The Weekly Sift, a twice-weekly email mostly about national politics, is one of those things I save to read over the weekend as a special treat for myself. The writing is good, and the takes are hot but also thoughtful and well-reasoned. A couple weeks back he shared his method for quickly determining the trustworthiness of an online news source, and I thought it worth sharing—especially as we get closer and closer to another presidential campaign season.
This week, one of my social-media friends posted a link from a blog I’d never heard of. This particular article claimed Russia is winning its war against Ukraine, and criticized a Western leader for claiming that Russia would lose a war against all of NATO. These observations seemed unlikely to me, but I try not to write blogs off just because I disagree with them. (That’s a good way to trap yourself in an ideological silo.) So I asked myself: What is this blog? Is it a reliable source? These questions come up all the time, and by now I have a fairly standard technique for answering them.
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Picture of the Day
It’s coneflower season!
