Good morning, RVA! It's 30 °F, and I feel like we’re stuck in a bit of a weather-related time loop. Today you can expect highs in the 50s, sunny skies, and for that general vibe to continue for at least the next three to four days. I think we’ll have to wait until the weekend to see significantly warmer temperatures and all the way until next week for a chance of rain. So! Get used to it and get your best layers out.
Water cooler
Today, City Council’s Organizational Development committee meets and will hear a presentation on Participatory Budgeting by Matthew Slaats, Council’s newish Senior Civic Innovation Manager. A bunch of years ago, way back in 2019, Council passed legislation creating real participatory budgeting in Richmond, and now, five years later, it looks like all of the pieces are in place to kick off the process this fall. Tap through to the aforelinked presentation to see an overview of the process and proposed timeline, and then, when you’re ready, dive in to the People’s Budget Richmond Rulebook, 2023–2024 (a surprisingly readable and interesting PDF!). I’m pretty excited for this kickoff—the City has set aside $3 million in the capital budget for this first round of participatory budgeting. That’s real money that can build real things. Stay tuned for more information on how to...participate...in this process!
Also of note and totally unrelated: The Organizational Development committee will discuss “Proposed Amendments to Council’s Rules of Procedure.” Tell me more!
VPLAN, the Virginia Progressive Legislative Alert Newsletter, is my favorite General Assembly session reading material. It provides solid insight at a level I can understand with just enough voiceyness that reading an entire email about in-progress legislation feels like a special treat I need to save for when I have a moment to myself. You’ll definitely want to read their recap of week four to see what lives, what’s dead, and what’s just mostly-dead-slightly-alive. You’ll also learn all sorts of other interesting stuff, like, did you know David Hogg spoke at the Firearms Subcommittee meeting last week? I did not!
Also, check out their update on the GA’s attempts to create a legal marijuana retail market: “House GOP members said in subcommittee this week that they recognize the need to create these markets to ensure safe products are sold.” I know that lots of the reporting on marijuana legislation this year has been “Governor Youngkin plans on vetoing anything weed-related,” but he hasn’t actually said those exact words out loud. I wonder if, with bipartisan support, the governor could be convinced to set his red pen aside?
This morning, from 10:00–11:00 AM via virtual meeting, Sports Backers will release the Fall Line Vision plan, a 100-page document that “compiles and organizes the place-making, possibilities and community amenities along the trail. From trail heads to public art, access points and recommended spurs, historical interpretation and community narrative, this plan presents a menu of options that will make the Fall Line the best version of itself.” A 100-page PDF about place-making? Where do I sign up?? (via the aforelinked form, that’s where you sign up)
Can’t get enough of virtual public meetings detailing expansive PDFs? You’re in luck, because tonight, from 5:00–7:00pm, the City’s Planning Department will host a virtual public meeting to review the results of a recent community survey about the Cultural Resources Management Plan. This is a boring name for what we’re calling our policies and practices around historic preservation, which, in a town with old bones like Richmond, ends up having a big-deal influence on new development. It’ll be interesting to see the balance the Planning folks attempt to strike between an everworsening housing crisis and preserving important pieces of the City’s history. I look forward to their PDF! If you can’t make tonight’s meeting, hold tight, because they’ll post the survey results for asynchronous review and comment later this week.
This past Friday, the YWCA announced the 2024 class of Outstanding Women Awards Honorees, and you’re gonna want to tap through to read about these eight women who are leading our region forward. The YWCA puts together a whole whole celebration and leadership forum to fête these ladies, and you grab your tickets for those things or watch last year’s event over on their website.
As promised! Thank you to Reader Mary who sent along the link to Susanna Gibson’s new PAC, MyOwn, which Gibson set up to support candidates who are “dedicated to legislative reform pertaining to gender-based sexual violence, as well as intimate privacy violations.” You can learn more about MyOwn’s mission and the folks who currently make up their board here.
This morning's longread
What's inside this crater in Madagascar?
A longwatch! I typically can’t hang with long YouTubes, but this 20-minute Vox video about a tiny town they found while poking around on Google Earth sucked me in right from the start. It reminded me of Mystery Show and Reply All in the best of ways.
Madagascar. An island off the coast of Africa. It’s one of the most biologically diverse places in the world. Almost all of its plants and animals aren’t found anywhere else on Earth. And when we looked at it from space, we saw a spot. A massive dark circle, almost perfectly round, over thirteen kilometers in diameter, and big enough that roads are diverted on either side of it. Looking at it from the side, we could see it was a mountain. And if you zoomed all the way in, you could see a village nestled in the crater at its center. Eight kilometers from the closest labeled town on Google Maps. Isolated in a remote part of a remote region of a geographically isolated country. It looked like it could have been there for generations. But if you looked backward through time…each year…it gets smaller and smaller…and before 2008, there was no one there at all. I wanted to try to answer one question: Why did these people move to such an incredibly isolated place?
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Picture of the Day
Slow down!
