Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and today, tomorrow, and the next day you can expect temperatures at least in the mid 60s—and maybe even some moments that hit 70 °F, depending on where you find yourself. This is clearly not normal and about 20 degrees above this week’s average temperatures, but I say put aside your existential dread and spend some time outside. Spring has nearly sprung! Take some time to get out there and appreciate it!
Water cooler
Gross billboard update: Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “Richmond officials on Friday rejected a proposal by Lamar Advertising to remove a billboard on the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground in exchange for help finding locations for additional advertising in the city.” Good for the City! Holter also has this new-to-me tidbit: “The company in November sent the city Planning Department a proposal that said it would surrender the Shockoe Hill billboard if the city found six other locations to house 12 front-facing billboards.” Just wow.
Today, City Council meets and will consider three papers I’ve got my eyes on—all of which sit on the Consent Agenda. In fact, as of right now, Council has zero items on their Regular Agenda, which, theoretically, makes for a quick meeting.
Here’s the short list of ordinances I’ve been tracking over on the GMRVA Legislation Tracker that Council should consider tonight:
- ORD. 2024-039 — Pay liaisons more. Not only is paying liaisons more a great idea because liaisons need to, like, buy groceries and make rent, but raising the possible salary increases the candidate pool and, with any luck, will help our councilmembers craft more interesting and progressive legislation.
- ORD. 2024-048 — Make Evergreen and East End (and Forest View) Cemeteries city-owned, Part 2. I think—and for reasons unknown to me—the original legislation to make this property transfer happen got pulled (it was, after all, over a year old at this point). Now we’ve got new legislation that sits on the Consent Agenda, implying that all parties involved have worked out whatever issues they had with the previous attempt.
- ORD. 2024-034 — Add the Shockoe Small Area Plan to Richmond300. Updating or adding to the City’s Master Plan is a big, serious deal, but the Shockoe Small Area Plan has been in the works for a good long time.
Also, in case you want to fully dive in tonight: Jason Roop, the new host of City Council, gave me the definitive list of how to catch his pre-game show at 5:45 PM. If you’ve got a repeating City Council calendar event (don’t we all!), just add this information to the notes field:
- Over the Air: Channel 57.1
- Verizon Fios: Channels 524 / 24
- Comcast: Channels 797 / 24
- DIRECTV or DISH: Channel 57
Tonight, Roop will speak with Councilmember (and newly-announced candidate for mayor), Andreas Addison.
Speaking of newly-announced mayoral candidates, I’ve set up a new Trello board to track all of Richmond’s 2024 mayoral, council, and school board candidates. It’s still in pretty rough/early shape, so consider it a work in progress—but if you have feature requests, please let me know!
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has an update on the redevelopment of Reynolds Crossing, out by the intersection of Broad Street and Forest Avenue. It sounds like we’re still a ways off from seeing any of the proposed development come to life—although Platania says “plans call for the new buildings to reach as high as 10 or 12 stories, with townhomes or low-rise condos in the center of the area.” The bigger picture—the slow change to that entire part of Henrico County—is super interesting. You’ve this huge piece of land, plus Willow Lawn, Scott’s Addition 2.0 (over by the Cookout), and the old Anthem campus (on the other side of the Cookout) all looking to convert surface-level parking lots into actual, usable space. It’s pretty neat, and I hope the County has cooked up some great infrastructure plans to (safely) connect all of these new neighborhoods together.
RVAHub’s Richard Hayes has put together a great “Incomplete Floodwall Fauna Guide,” a map for close encounters with your favorite critters down by the River. He’s even got some tips for putting together your very own naturalist scavenger hunt, too. Sounds like a great way to spend a sunny, spring(ish) weekend.
Whoa, this seems rad: UR will host Atifete Jahjaga, Kosovo’s former President, “as she reflects on her presidency post Kosovo-war [and] her initiatives for women, advocacy for sexual violence war survivors, and efforts towards fostering peace in the Balkans.” This is event is free, open to the public, and sounds like it’ll be fascinating.
This morning's longread
Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden
First, I disagree with this Ezra Klein longread about finding a different Democratic presidential candidate other than Joe Biden at this stage in the game. In fact, everyone reading this newsletter should double, triple check their voter registration and make a plan to get lined up early in November to vote for Biden—regardless of whether he’s your top choice or not. The consequences of note voting are too terrifying to do anything else. Second, I still thought Klein’s analysis and access to insider info was pretty interesting to read.
Tomorrow, I’ll share an oppositional response from Jamelle Bouie, so make sure you read this one first.
And then there’s the argument you’ve heard on my podcast. An argument I’ve made before. Biden doesn’t look like a strong candidate, but Democrats keep on winning. Biden won in 2020. Democrats won in 2022. They’ve been winning special elections in 2023. They just won George Santos’s seat in New York. There’s an anti-MAGA majority in this country and they will come out to stop Trump. And I think that might be true. I still think Biden might win against Trump, even with all I’ve said. It’s just that there’s a very good chance he might lose. Maybe even better than even odds. And Trump is dangerous. I want better odds than that. I think one reason Democrats react so defensively to critiques of Biden is they’ve come to a kind of fatalism. They believe it is too late to do anything else. And if it is too late to do anything else, then to talk about Biden’s age is to contribute to Donald Trump’s victory.
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
Huddle up.
