Good morning, RVA: A blue Virginia, a new 5th District Councilmember, and free pens

Good morning, RVA! It’s 43 °F, and we’ve got a beautiful day of sunshine with temperatures near 60 °F ahead of us. I hope you can find some time to get out and enjoy it.

Water cooler

Well, y’all. We did it: Democrats now control the entirety of the state government. In the House of Delegates, Democrats hold 55 seats out of 100, and, in the Senate, 21 out of 40. This is the first time that’s been true in over a quarter century! Assuming Governor Northam doesn’t lose his cool, there’s a lot of opportunity to pass all kinds of progressive legislation this coming General Assembly session. Senator-elect Ghazala Hashmi had the quote of the nightafter beating Glen Sturtevant, “I guess I’ve proven that Ghazala is truly an American name!” Hashmi is the first Muslim elected to the Senate. Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has some folks’ thoughts and feelings from throughout election night. Locally, Stephanie Lynch is the new 5th District City Councilmember; each of the incumbents won reelection in Henrico; and, in Chesterfield, despite two open seats, the Republican-Democrat split held at 4–1. There’s certainly work to do in Chesterfield. You can dig way into precinct-level election results over on the Department of Elections website. I’m kind of fascinated by the 5th District results: Lynch (1,982), Taylor (1,119), Williamson (1,092), Da Silva (1,014), and Chuck Richardson (876) made up the top five. Lynch, who I think is the first woman elected to represent the 5th, will jump straight in to a red-hot conversation about NoBro—I hope she has a couple dozen hours to listen to all of that audio from those public meetings! David Streever has a post-victory piece (dateline of 1:45 AM!) about Lynch over on Richmond Magazine.

The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong has a fun piece about write-in candidate incumbent Del. Nick Freitas (only a write-in because he screwed up filing his paperwork). The Freitas campaign had some “Write in Nick Freitas” pens made and distribute at polls, which turned out to be a pretty excellent idea. Vogelsong writes, “Why the fuss about the pens? This reporter tried one out and discovered that they are, in fact, very good pens. But, more importantly, they were also a critical part of Freitas’ efforts to ramp up voter recognition after he failed to file his election paperwork on time and was left off the ballot for the 30th District seat — despite being the incumbent.” One voter described the pens as, “It’s a free pen.”

Mayor Stoney wrote a backpage column for Style Weekly, making his case for NoBro. A good fact from the piece—and important to remember regardless of how you feel about the project—all of those cranes you see downtown are building tax-exempt buildings for VCU or the General Assembly.

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has a short update on the rehab of Abner Clay Park in Jackson Ward. The accompanying aerial photo really gives you an idea of how they’re starting with basically a blank slate. Once they finish up this time next year, you can expect new fields, a new basketball court, and a public art display.

The Board of Zonning Appeals is not a part of City government that I’m super familiar with. I don’t know much about their process or where folks can get involved. Are they part of a nefarious shadow government hell bent on appealing all of our zoning?? Probably not, but…who can really know? Today, the BZA meets and will consider BZA 46–2019, which will, yet again, attempt to block all or part of the conversion of the Lee Medical Building into apartments. Dang, the folks living on Monument Avenue really don’t want a couple dozen more people joining them there.

Have you ever wanted a really long list of streets folks in Richmond find terrible and unsafe? Check out this thread from /r/rva. It’s a little driver-centric, but there are plenty of bad streets to go around.

This morning’s longread

Twitter hates me. The Des Moines Register fired me. Here’s what really happened.

This is actually a pretty sad story. Look at how broken the incentives structure of local newspapers can be!

After two days of media furor, representatives from Gannett, the Register’s parent company, called me at the home of a friend, where I was staying out of fear for my safety. Gannett, they told me, had determined that my tweets had compromised my credibility as a reporter. The company gave me two options: quit the paper, or be fired with no severance. On the phone, in my friend’s bedroom, I chose to be fired. I then returned to the living room, where two police officers stood waiting. With the assistance of my partner, I walked the officers through the messages I’d received from strangers. Some threatened to kill me; others asked me to kill myself. This marked the conclusion of my time as the trending-news reporter for the Des Moines Register.

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