Good morning, RVA: 12-stories are go!, an unsolicited offer, and an RPS budget

Good morning, RVA! It’s 45 °F and rainy. You can expect the rain to continue for most of the morning and dry out later this afternoon. By then, temperatures should have made there way into the 60s—looking like a pretty OK afternoon.

Water cooler

Last night, City Council adopted ORD. 2020–030, the Special Use Permit which will allow developers to build a 12-story apartment building with 168 places for people to live on the northwest corner of Broad & Lombardy. The vote was 7–2 (YES: Addison, Hilbert, Larson, Lynch, Robertson, Newbille, Jones; NO: Gray, Trammell), which I think speaks to the growing trend of Council passing (at least small scale) urbanist legislation. In recent memory we’ve seen the vote to kill the Brook Road bike lane ban, the rezoning of Scott’s Addition and Monroe Ward, approving a new shelter and services center for folks experiencing homelessness on Chamberlayne Ave, and now this dense urban housing on Broad. While it’s frustrating that we—the people who live in the city and want it and its residents to thrive—have to spend our time advocating for these small-scale projects, it’s exciting that we’re just winning a lot of them. What I’m looking for now is an opportunity for Council to act boldly and pass some Big Time urbanist legislation. I don’t know what qualifies at the moment, but I’ll know it when I see it!

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense says a D.C.-based developer has offered to “buy nearly 15 acres of the Navy Hill project site from the City of Richmond for $15 million.” My personal, uneducated opinion on this is that its an unserious offer—mostly because it expires May 18th. If we learned anything through the entire downtown arena process, it’s that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to figure out what we want from that city-owned land. Plus, honestly, a bunch of trust-building to do, too. An arbitrarily imposed couple-month deadline, while Council figures out the process of creating a small area plan, just isn’t going to cut it. If that dude is interested in helping to rebuild the neighborhood, he can hold his developer horses until the City gets its ducks in a row. Roberto Roldan at VPM has posted the letter to the City on which the developer has handwritten “I AM THE RIGHT GUY FOR THE JOB!!”

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Samuel Northrop was at School Board last night and says RPS now has their final budget in hand 💸, approved with a 6–1 vote (YES: Doerr, Barlow, Cosby, Burke, Page, Owen; NO: Young; ABSTAIN: Gibson, Sapini). Passing the RPS budget is officially the first step in Richmond’s budget season, and I’m, of course, very excited. We’ll now wait to see how much the State decides to pony up this year, and then it’ll be left to the Mayor to figure out how much he wants to put in his budget. Even with expected increases from the State, it sounds like Schools do not expect full funding this year. Here’s the actual budget PDF—you’re probably looking for the General Fund Operating Budget Revenues graph on page 18. This year’s budget reflects a 13.8% increase over last year ($42.8 million), with $24.3 million of that coming from the City and $16.4 of that from the State.

NBC12 has the news that now both chambers of the General Assembly have passed a bill deleting Lee-Jackson Day and creating a new holiday for Election Day. I’m glad to see the New Democratic Majority out there working to remove the legacy of the Lost Cause from our government—Lee-Jackson Day didn’t exist until 1904! As for voting on a holiday, it’s complicated and has mixed results. The State should continue working on ways to make voting easier for all Virginians, not just folks who can vote on holidays (which doesn’t include people working public safety job, bus operators, and all sorts of service jobs).

Mike Sarahan has a column in Style Weekly about removing the A.P. Hill monument at Hermitage & Laburnum, which is definitely something the City should do. It’s one of the most dangerous intersections in Richmond, and it’s adjacent to an elementary school! Let’s remove the monument to White supremacy and build a full, protected intersection in its place! Unfortunately, A.P. Hill himself is buried under the monument, so we’ll need to move his corpse first…

Oh no! Someone stole the La Milpa food truck! THIS SHALL NOT STAND.

This morning’s longread

American Bottom

Systemic racism through bad infrastructure is a real thing.

Almost all of the water that surrounds the houses and floods the roads is dangerously contaminated. The sewer system in Centreville works as poorly as the storm drains. Each resident’s yard has a sewer cleanout so sluggish pipes can be cleared with a drain snake—but many of them run backward. Small fountains of raw sewage bubble up into the yards twenty-four hours a day, flowing into fetid sluiceways that run between the houses. Some days, especially in the summer, the whole town smells like an outhouse. And when it rains, and the water begins to rise, the sewage follows the water, out into the drainage ditches and the roadways, across the yards, into the houses. Many of the houses in Centreville, even the best-maintained houses, bow in the middle, where the foundations are gradually sinking into swampy ground. It is easy to recognize in Centreville, which is 97 percent black, an outline of the African American past: segregation, rurality, poverty. More than one time I have heard visitors say, “It’s like Mississippi in the 1930s.”

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