Good morning, RVA! It's 71 °F, and today looks a lot like yesterday: Cooler, cloudier, and rainier than last week. Ahead of us we’ve got sub-80 highs and a decent chance for rain most of the day. These less oppressive days should stick around until the weekend, so enjoy!
Water cooler
Thad Green at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the horrible fencing around the circle at Monument and Allen (for which we really need to land on a more permanent name) could come down as soon as this week! Tap through for some drone photos from Daniel Sangjib to give you an idea of what 6,000 plants worth of landscaping looks like.
I found this report, in the RTD by Eric Kolenich, about the future of development in Goochland super fascinating. I’m all about building as many homes as we can, but I’m also about density and reducing sprawl—and Goochland is way, way out there. Building a bunch of low-density, disconnected neighborhoods and strip malls is not only an extremely inefficient use of land, but it’s also really expensive to run utilities and build roads to connect all of these once-rural places into the more developed parts of the region. I’m sure County officials see the impending development and have already started to count up those tax revenues, but what if they just said no to sprawl and enforced a sort of one-sided ubran growth boundary instead?
Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania sat in on a recent Richmond Economic Development Authority meeting and has an update on the future of the Intermediate Terminal building (sort of). This is the building-on-stilts down by the Capital Trail that, a million years ago, Stone Brewing planned on converting into a restaurant. Stone has since backed out on that plan, and now the building sits unused and in limbo. It’s such an interesting space with an incredible view that it seems a shame to tear it down and replace it with something generic. That said, it’s 103-years-old and has sat empty for who knows how long, so I would not be surprised if the entire thing was on the verge of collapse and unsalvageable. While Platania couldn’t sneak into the Authority’s closed session to get all the details of what they’ve got in mind, he does report that the EDA is in “the early stages of exploring its options for the terminal property and the acreage across the street.” Maybe more news soon?
Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury reports that, on Friday afternoon, General Assembly negotiators announced they’d finally reached a deal on this year’s super-late budget. I guess all of the T-crosses and I-dots are still in flux, but, despite that, Vogelsong says “the final version will include a one-time tax rebate of $200 for individuals and $400 for families and increase the standard deduction to $8,500 for individuals and $17,000 for joint filers. It will also reinstate the state sales tax holiday, which lawmakers allowed to lapse, and remove the age requirement for the military retiree subtraction.“ I read this as mostly a win for Democrats as the Governor’s permanent tax cuts for the rich did not made it across the finish line, and he celebrated the deal by saying “he was ‘willing to accept’ a compromise.” I too am often forced to accept things that I wish turned out otherwise! Such is life! Locally, there’s a small chance this budget could prevent Richmond from putting Casino 2.0 on this coming November’s ballot, but, I honestly don’t think that’ll happen.
This morning's longread
Project 4K77
Dedicated fans have taken it upon themselves to restore the first Star Wars film to its original theatrical glory, removing George Lucas’s post-release special effects, multiple different times. I love this! The aforelinked FAQ about this particular restoration process is way, way over my head but I really enjoy reading about smart people doing interesting things, and this definitely qualifies.
97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print so if it goes from blurry to sharp, grainy to not grainy, bright to dark, that’s because it also did that in 1977. Color correction was a single correction per reel – the optical audio track was used to white balance the image, and the contrast adjusted to ensure that there was no clipping of the highlights or crushing of the blacks, so if the color changes from shot to shot, or it goes from very dark inside to very bright outside, that’s how it is on the print. Film has a greater contrast range than home video, and of course was graded for viewing, reflected off of a giant silver screen.
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Picture of the Day
My yard is full of pollinators.
