Good morning, RVA! It's 46 °F, and, dang, was yesterday nice. For me, the overwhelmingly pleasant evening turned into drinks on the front stoop with—as foretold!–the setting sun shinning on my face. So good! Today you can expect even more of the same: Highs right around 80 °F and plenty of sunshine. I think I will not wear socks. Temperatures do look like they’ll drop a bit come Monday, but not before the incredible weekend just around the corner. Enjoy.
Water cooler
On Tuesday, I wrote about how the General Assembly wants VCU to terminate the agreement that requires them to pay PILOTs as part of the deal to redevelop the Public Safety Building. That such an agreement even exists is such a huge shift from how things typically happened in Richmond 15 or 20 years ago, when we handed out our precious and finite city resources for free to anyone willing to look our way. Times have changed, and, thankfully, Richmond can set the terms in some of these development negotiations and demand that they work out to the advantage of Richmonders.
Along those lines, yesterday the Mayor released this statement that I wish I could just quote in full because it does a great job of explaining why the PILOTs are important and how the City worked to get a deal that would benefit its citizens. I loved this part:
Just because VCU Health System has had limited responsibility for paying real estate taxes historically, does not mean that’s the way it should always be. The VCU Health System community makes many contributions to our city and we’re glad to partner with them on a myriad of projects. But, VCU Health System should not be looking for ways to get around paying their fair share and the state should not be in the business of negating legally-binding contracts.
Make sure you tap through to read the whole thing.
Related, Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports that maybe GRTC wants to build their permanent bus transfer facility at the Public Safety Building location. The bus company has narrowed their list of potential sites from five down to two: the current transfer station location and the Public Safety Building. As for what GRTC’s got planned on those sites, you shouldn’t picture today’s situation—basically a huge parking lot—with four walls and a roof: “While initial designs for the mixed-use piece differ between the two finalist sites, both feature ground-floor retail and hundreds of apartments. The Public Safety Building site would feature 30,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, while the plans for a permanent facility at the current temporary bus hub would include 10,000 square feet of retail. Both sites would feature about 500 apartment units.” Jacobs also reports that site selection is just step zero in a nearly decade-long process and that construction wouldn’t start until at least after 2025.
The Commonwealth Institute has put together a really wonderful 12-page PDF that compares the four (four!) different versions of the State’s budget: The Governor’s, the House’s, the Senate’s, and the Conference (aka the compromise between the House and Senate). 12 pages of tables sounds like a lot, but I promise it’s readable and interesting. For example, check out page four to see the difference in statewide K–12 per-pupil funding: The governor pitched $8,137 while the conference budget ended up with $8,553. Or scroll down to page 11 to find the $10 million in Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative funds that the Conference budget allocates towards manufactured home parks and down payment assistance programs, something the Governor did not include at all. Now, all parties involved just need to get on the same page and hash out something they each can live with. Piece of cake, right? Ha! Kim Bobo, Executive Director of Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, puts it plainly: “Many of the Governor’s priorities were not included in the General Assembly budget so negotiations could be lengthy.”
Yesterday, the USL W League announced the team name and branding for Richmond’s new women’s soccer team: The Richmond Ivy Soccer Club. While I immediately want some logo gear—especially a dad hat—did they really name the soccer club after English ivy, one of the most invasive plant species we’ve got? I mean maybe that’s the point, like, invasive plants are sort of ferocious plants? Like how lions, tigers, and eagles are ferocious animals? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t to live in city teeming with tigers. Anyway, this is a classic plant-person response, and you should ignore me. I love the new crest and am excited to give them my money in exchange for some sweet-looking merch.
OK. You’re gonna want to steel yourself and then tap through to see this picture of someone at the Richmond Wildlife Center wearing a fox mask while feeding an orphaned red fox kit. Yes, it is horrifying, but also, that’s pretty awesome that they go out of their way (like, way, way out of their way) to make the little baby foxes feel comfortable as they get nursed back to health. You can learn more about the Richmond Wild Life Center—and how they do more than forevermore haunt your nightmares—over on their website.
March 14th is Pi Day, and, to show off, here are the digits of Pi I’ve got memorized: 3.141592653589793. I haven’t committed any new digits to memory in decades and that seems like something I need to fix, so let’s check back in a year and see if I’ve managed to tack on “238” to the end of that long string of numbers.
This morning's longread
Kate Middleton and the End of Shared Reality
Charlie Warzel (Anne Helen Petersen’s partner!) writes about The Kate Middleton Picture for the Atlantic and how it marks out unfortunate progress on our continued journey into a media world where nothing is real or true. That’s kind of scary! We’ve all chuckled over Pope Coat and gossiped about Kate Middleton Photo, but we haven’t yet had to deal with a real, indistinguishable-from-reality misinformation campaign about something truly important. It’ll happen, and it’ll probably happen soon.
Most important, as Hall notes, people have recently lost trust both in the Royal Family as an institution and in the organizations that cover the monarchy. In part due to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s departure from royal life, there is a newfound sense of the royals as conniving and manipulative, and the press plays into this. This trust vacuum, when it collides with a still-new technology such as generative AI, creates the optimal conditions for conspiracy theories to grow. It seems clear, at least in the case of the Royal Family, that the institutions aren’t sure how to handle any of this. It makes sense, then, that two of the biggest “Is it real?” image controversies of the past year have centered on figures from archaic cultural-political organizations: the papacy and the monarchy.
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Picture of the Day
Springtime shadow self portrait.
