Good morning, RVA: A bunch of ordinances, a combined meeting, and homicide numbers

Is this the first time City Council and School Board have had a combined
meeting early on in budget season?

Good morning, RVA! It's 38 °F, and today looks cool and dry with highs right around 50 °F. Looking into the extended forecast and I think we’ve got around four, solid rainless days for the world to dry out a bit. Friday and Saturday look like excellent opportunities to head off into the forest and explore some of Richmond’s trails!

Water cooler

City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee meets today for the first time in 2023, and, aside from a ton of ordinances allowing the City to spend a bunch of State money on cool bike and pedestrian projects, I’ve got my eye on three different papers. First, RES. 2023-R005 would adopt RVAgreen 2050’s Climate Equity Action Plan as the City’s official sustainability plan. This is a chonker of a PDF—566 pages!—so, if you want to skip past all the great stuff about why climate work in Richmond is so important and get right down to the meaty action bits, you can scroll to around page 88. Second, ORD. 2022-375 repeals ORD. 97-105-173, which, yes was adopted back in 1997, and, maybe unintentionally, created a street light policy for the entire city. From the staff report: “The intent behind the [original] Ordinance was to outline a plan for creating special service districts for ornamental street lights and not necessarily to establish a perpetual street light policy for the City. Nevertheless, the Ordinance's broad language setting the 1997 Policy as the City's official street light policy has frozen the City's street light policy for over 20 years.” Amazing! Repealing the old policy would give the Department of Public Utilities the ability to figure out their own street light policies, which seems fine—but if anyone has street light conspiracy theories, I’d love to hear them. Third, ORD. 2023-029 updates the City’s scooter policies. Exciting! This ordinance would increase scooter operating hours from 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM, increase the fees for scooter companies by 25%, and “mandate shared mobility permittees in the City of Richmond deploy at least 20% above their permitted fleet maximum, South of the James River.” I can’t tell if that last one requires scooter providers to drop a bunch of scooters on the Southside or just stipulates that they can exceed their maximum number of scooters for free if they do so on the Southside. That’s a pretty nice list of ordinances for January, and I’m excited to see how the committee’s new members work through their business.

Related, City Council will host a joint meeting with the RPS School Board tonight at 6:00 PM (which you can stream on RPS’s YouTube). Looks like they’ll hear a presentation of the proposed RPS budget by the Superintendent and then have a discussion about it together. This is great, fascinating, and I can’t remember them doing it in previous years. Sure we’ve had the Education Compact—Mayor Stoney’s valiant, but mostly ineffective, attempt to get Council and School Board discussing critical crossover issues—but a special meeting to discuss the budget feels new. It makes a ton of sense, too, since, ultimately, City Council decides how much of the School budget to fund, and it’s probably really helpful to catch Council’s vibe early in the process. Having this conversation in January, should, with any luck, prevent shenanigans like last year, when the School Board left millions of dollars offered by City Council on the table.

Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reports on Richmond’s homicide numbers, which absolutely plummeted in 2022—from 90 to 57. That’s an incredible drop for a single year. Both Henrico and Chesterfield saw their homicides increase a small amount in absolute terms but a large amount by percentage: six in Henrico (a 50% increase) and five in Chesterfield (a 25% increase). In Richmond, Acting Chief Edwards attributes the astounding drop to “a mid year shift in strategy to focus patrols on gun violence hotspots identified by the department’s analysis team.” Oliver also has an interview with the Acting Chief that you should read. I continue to be really interested in his intentional shift in tone from the previous chief.

Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers has a financing update on Henrico’s GreenCity project (the County’s arena and surrounding development). Read it if you’re into that kind of thing, but note how Henrico passed a huge financing mechanism for a huge economic development project, and it barely even made the news!

No new news here, but Jahd Khalil at VPM covers the laundry list of changes that City Council wanted to make to Richmond 300 but ended up passing as sort of a “suggestions appendix” instead. It’s nice to see other people thinking and talking about this, but I’m glad, after two years, we can move on to other things. P.S. In case you’re wondering, the now longest-running ordinance on City Council’s agenda is ORD. 2021-097 which has to do with the back-and-forth over VUU’s signage. That paper was introduced 654 days ago!

This morning's longread
The enduring, invisible power of blond

Sometimes I’m like ugh New York Times, why do I subscribe to you?? But then I get Tressie McMillian Cottom’s email newsletter and carefully tuck it away to read as a special weekend treat. Last week’s email about blond hair, power, status, and class ended up as a column available to everyone and is definitely worth your time.

People who were born blond and now have dark hair were among the angriest. They insisted that being a “natural blonde” should matter more than their actual hair color. When pushed on what makes that matter, they got even angrier. People often get angry when I write about aesthetics and power. Most of us hate the idea that whom we are attracted to, for instance, has any political context. We hate thinking that the things we enjoy — like a soapy western with conservative tropes — mean anything. That is the thing about status. We all want it, but, should we acquire it, we don’t want it to mean anything. We don’t want to feel bad about having status. The real blondes let me have it because, they maintained, being blond should mean something for them but not mean anything for the rest of us. That is not how status works. I was banned two days after my video had almost one million views.

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

No joke, a family heirloom.