Good morning, RVA! It's 30 °F, and today looks chilly and sunny—colder than yesterday, for sure. You can expect highs in the 40s while we wait on tomorrow’s big storms and warmer weather to move in. If you’ve got outside stuff to do (like taking down your holiday decorations), don’t put it off, because everything gets soaked again tomorrow!
Water cooler
Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has some more reporting on...changes? tweaks? worrisome updates?...to the City’s Diamond District plans. Remember last week, when BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers reported that Richmond’s Economic Development Authority would chip in $1 million to “help advance the new [baseball] stadium’s design and development”? Now, Kolenich says, “The city of Richmond intends to delay buying Sports Backers Stadium as city leaders and developers prioritize building a minor-league ballpark...In an effort to lower costs, the city will defer $25 million owed to Virginia Commonwealth University. The move is designed to get the baseball stadium across the finish line, as the city quickly approaches a 2026 deadline. But the delay freezes VCU’s ability to build an athletics village on the other side of Hermitage Road.” As one unnamed source says in a well-timed baseball pun, “It’s quite the curveball at the 11th hour.” While details are sketchy (and anonymous!), it doesn’t sound like the shape or content of the larger Diamond District development will change, but it does sound like the timeline for redeveloping the area—at least outside of rushing to get the new baseball diamond built on time—is sort of in flux. I’m sure we’ll see more reporting on this in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
It’s time for another bike lane survey! Henrico County would like your feedback on a “proposed bicycle and pedestrian improvement design for the Willow Lawn area” aka cool new bike lanes out by Willow Lawn and beyond. Tap through for a bunch of engineer diagrams that, I think, show two, fully separated multi-use paths—like, separated by a curb or even a grass median—on Libbie and Monument Avenues. Both of these seem like great improvements and, with a few additional connections, could be hooked in to the City’s bike network and—gasp!—folks could ride all the way from Downtown out to the Target in actual bike infrastructure!
Patrick Larsen at VPM brings us this week’s Combined Sewer Overflow news, reporting that the Department of Public Utilities may have found a way to decrease the billion dollar price tag of upgrading Richmond’s sewer system—now it might just cost $650 million dollars! Still, that’s a toilet-full of money, and it’s pure fantasy to think that the City can pony up that kind of cash on its own. Mayor Stoney has asked the General Assembly for $300 million over the next three fiscal years to help cover some of the costs, and now we wait and see if the GA will actually contribute the funding needed to make this project happen by their own (arbitrary) deadline of 2035.
Over in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Roslyn Ryan has an interesting note: The Powhatan County School Board voted not to adopt the Governor’s model policy on trans students. I liked the remarks from one of the Board’s members who said the policies do the exactly opposite of what the say they do, and that their actual goal is to “make our students pawns in a political game.” Powhatan is NOT Richmond, and voted 71% for Trump in 2020, so I think this move by their School Board is just fascinating.
This morning's longread
It’s time to ban ‘right-on-red’
I wrote about banning right-on-red last month after a driver hit a person in a crosswalk on Broad Street. This piece in Fast Company goes over why it makes sense to get rid of rights-on-red citywide and even lists a couple localities who’ve already done it—you know, if we wanted to shoot them an email to talk through best practices. So, now who on City Council will start advocating for this?
Last fall, the District of Columbia’s city council voted to end it, and this spring, Ann Arbor, Michigan, banned it throughout its downtown. Last month, Seattle adopted a citywide ban on right-on-red, and a recently introduced bill would curtail it across Washington state...Opposition can be particularly problematic in red states whose legislatures habitually preempt Democratic cities from implementing their own policies. In Indianapolis, for instance, local officials have moved to end right-on-red throughout much of the city, but a Republican state legislator recently introduced a bill that would prevent Indianapolis—and only Indianapolis—from regulating such turns.
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Picture of the Day
Do not fall into this plant.
