Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and temperatures rebound today, heading back up into the upper 60s / maybe 70s. Expect some wind this afternoon, but, other than that, we’ve got some really excellent weather in front of us. In fact, this may be the warmest, most spring-like day in our 10-day-forecast future—make sure you get out there and enjoy it!
Water cooler
Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the Virginia ABC’s $100 million revenue shortfall. Pressured by the Governor’s “chief transformation officer,” the ABC forecasted a 5% growth in sales revenue last summer but, adjusting for reality, has only seen an increase of 1.4%. Now folks are scrambling to figure out what went wrong and how to fill the sizable gap left in the state’s budget. Just to be super clear here, we’re talking about the Governor pushing the state’s liquor monopoly to find ways to sell more alcohol to more Virginians because it’s a core money generator for his budget. Seems like a legal retail marijuana market would also generate a ton of cash for the commonwealth, but, for some reason, the Governor’s “not interested” in that, and it’s hard for me to understand the difference between the two things!
Yesterday, I saw a bunch of stories similar to this one by Elizabeth Holmes at WTVR: “Why Henrico Police will no longer respond to certain marijuana, shoplifting, and noise calls.” As you can probably imagine, the good people of Henrico County Had Some Questions, and, by yesterday evening, the Henrico Police Department ended up walking back / clarifying how they will actually be reprioritizing their resources; Holmes reports that the Department is currently short-staffed by about 64 positions. I promise, it’s not for schadenfreude reasons that I like watching stories like this evolve and unfold, I just love how important the words we use can be.
John Murden at South Richmond News reports important news: Richmond has its own local pretzel makers, and, not only do they exist, but they’re called Butter Boys. From their Insta, these look like pretty delicious pretzels, especially those cheddar parmesan jammers.
Related: I’ve had a ton of success with Alton Brown’s soft pretzel recipe over the years. It’s easy (but does take forever from start to finish) and will definitely impress your friends. They make for an excellent Saturday project.
A look back
Last night I was talking with some folks about the City’s participatory budgeting process and wondering how best to not only get the word out about, you know, participating when the time comes but also how to let people know that the City even has a participatory budgeting process at all. It’s so hard to reach folks, and it’s even harder to get folks involved.
That’s true now and was certainly true back in 2020 as the reality of the early pandemic started to solidify. Here’s what I wrote four years ago as Council cancelled some of the opportunities for Richmonders to weigh in on the budget: “I keep thinking about how folks can stay civically involved while stuck at home and incredibly distracted. My current take—and I'd love to hear your opinions—is that City Councilmembers need to reach out to people and organizations already in their networks directly to collect thoughts, feelings, and emotions on pending legislation. It's a lot of work, but just Facebooking or emailblasting about a thing isn't going to get useful results.”
I still think this is true! While Council’s email game has stepped way, way up in the past four years, just sending (sometimes overwhelmingly comprehensive) emails isn’t enough. And, as a tool to reach and engage residents, social media seems far less effective than it did four years ago. Honestly, I don’t have a great solution, but I do think there’s some space for a creative legislator to experiment and do something more interesting than weekly email updates and quarterly in-person district meetings—or do something more interesting with those pretty standard tools.
Also, while we’re talking about it, here are all the City Council newsletters that I know about. If you know of one I’m missing, please let me know, and I’ll update the list.
This morning's longread
Hot take: It’s okay if we don’t consume all of the world’s information before we die
This piece, ostensibly about the Trim Silence feature in your podcast player, mixes poetry and prose in a really well-balanced way—which is a bizarre sentence to type. Expect some strong language, but I think it works in the context of what the author set out to achieve.
It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice. This post is about how much I hate the Trim Silence feature. I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.
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Picture of the Day
A backyard standoff.
