Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, cold again, and that big rain I wrote about earlier in the week shows up tonight. After a day of cloudy skies and highs around 60 °F, you should expect the wet weather to start late this evening and continue straight on through until tomorrow afternoon. Sunday looks nice and crisp, though.
Water cooler
It’s here! Yesterday, City Council released their schedule for the 2024 (aka FY2025) budget season! I’m excited and want to point out a couple important dates for you to put on your calendar:
- This coming Monday, March 25th, Council will host their first budget work session—a sort of a pre-season game—to get everyone on the same page about shared priorities.
- Then, on Wednesday, March 27th at 3:00 PM, the Mayor will introduce his budget, and this show will finally get on the road for real.
- After that, we’ve got a handful of work sessions and public hearings before Council (theoretically) votes on a final, amended budget on May 13th.
Council is legally required to adopt a budget for Richmond Public Schools by May 15th and a budget for the City by May 31st, but, other than that all of these dates are tentative and can slip and change at any moment. But, honestly, the chaotic, late-night, hours-long budget meetings of the 2010s are mostly a thing of the past. In fact, the last couple of budget seasons have been pretty smooth sailing—a definite improvement, especially considering the level of uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
I’ll plan on relaunching The Boring Show next week—a podcast of the audio from all of these public budget meetings. That way folks who want to follow along can do so at 2x speed.
Budget season is one of my favorite times of the year, and it all starts next week!
Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury reports that if the Governor does not rename his “Office of Diversity, Opportunity and Inclusion” back to the “Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, the budget recently passed by the General Assembly will take the money allocated for that office and move it instead to...the Virginia Cannabis Equity Business Loan Fund. Is this petty? With a Governor who is “not interested” in the retail marijuana market? I think so, yes! But, before you feel too much of a way about it, remember that the current head of that office, Martin Brown, gave a speech at VMI saying “Let’s take a moment right now to kill that cow. DEI is dead...It was mandated by the General Assembly, but this governor has a different philosophy of civil discourse, civility...living the golden rule, right?” To be clear, this is the head of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion saying that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is dead and that, instead of working to undo hundreds of years of systemic inequity we should just be civil to one another? Honestly, I’d forgotten all about Brown, but now I’m worked up and excited to follow along with these shenanigans baked into the budget by the General Assembly Democrats.
I don’t know what it means, but Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “longtime Richmond-area business leader Bob Sledd has left his role as senior adviser to Gov. Glenn Youngkin a month after taking the job.” I mention it, because Sledd is somehow tied into the recent ABC budget mess—he even served on that agency’s board of directors before taking this most recent role as the governor’s adviser on “transformation and good governance issues.” Like I said, who knows what, if anything, this actually means, but it makes me go hmmmmmm.
Take five minutes this morning and fill out this Virginia Capital Trail Foundation survey and help them kick off their strategic planning process. The Capital Trail is one of our best things and we definitely owe all the excitement behind the Fall Line Trail to the Capital Trail’s unambiguous success and awesomeness. The least you can do is fill out a quick survey! You’ve got until April 30th to do so, but just knock it out right now.
This morning's longread
A Small Win Is Still a Win
This piece in Strong Towns about a rough budget season in Winnipeg made me feel a lot of feelings. I’ve got first-hand experience with excitement over money for urban trees, stressful budget cuts, pitting worthy priorities against each other, and heartbroken public commenters. It’s comforting, in a way, to know that these experiences are universal.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Richmond’s 2024 budget season—which is about to kick off any minute now—will open with this same sense of stressful austerity.
On a recent Monday morning, I hopped on a bus and headed downtown. My destination: city hall. It’s budget season in Winnipeg, and I was going to present our response to the preliminary city budget on behalf of our city-wide tree coalition. To our great joy, after five intense years of lobbying local government, our coalition had succeeded in getting some good policy in place and, critically, a budget to actually bring those policies to fruition. People rarely go to these meetings to support a budget or say thank you, but as a coalition we’d felt it was important. City councilors are people, too, and everyone likes to be acknowledged when they’ve done something right…especially when most of the other people would be there to oppose the budget.
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
Why do they all just throw their book bags in front of the stairs? Did they have a meeting about this and circulate a memo?
