Good morning, RVA: A district meeting, a budget work session, and a scaled-down project

Sometimes I read the recaps of public meetings and they just make me so, so
sad.

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and, according to my weather app, today has a 100% chance of rain. You can expect the wet weather to move in right before lunch and, unfortunately, stick around until basically tomorrow. I think I’ll try and stay inside under a blanket as much as possible today—I recommend you try and do the same!

Water cooler

Jessee, aka @BossRVA, livetweeted last night’s 3rd District meeting which featured Bobby Vincent, the City’s Director of Public Works. Full disclosure I didn’t attend or tune in to the meeting, so I can’t provide any context that Jessee may have missed, so maybe take some of this with a grain of salt. Regardless of context though, hearing the man in charge of safety on our city’s streets say he’s against speed tables and that we have to wait until someone’s hurt at an intersection to put down a crosswalk just...makes me real sad. I don’t know how we’ve come this far into Mayor Stoney’s tenure and are still failing to take big, serious, progressive steps toward making our streets safer for everyone. Look: I’ve said it six million times before, Vincent did incredible things at DPW when Stoney took office (and still does!), but Richmond needs someone who will champion proven ways to make our streets safer. Whether that’s finding a Director of Public Works who understands and has a passion for it, or, better yet, creating a true Department of Transportation that sits at the same level on the City’s org chart as DPW. It’s time to get thoughtful, strategic, holistic, and creative about how to make it safe for folks—everyone!—to move around the City.

Tonight at 6:00 PM, the RPS School Board will hold their first of four budget work sessions, this one at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School (or you can, of course, stream it via the District’s YouTube). This year, the Superintendent has asked for a $35.3 million increase over last year’s budget, with most of that funding teacher and staff pay increases. It’s a big number, and I’m not sure the Mayor or City Council will just want to hand it over—especially considering the last 12 months of School Board shenanigans and their inability to competently run last year’s budget process. Tonight, though, we’ll start to see if things have changed, and if the Board has it in them to make the tough choices required to deviate significantly from the Superintendent’s proposal. Fireworks or boring public meeting? We’ll see! If you do plan to show up or tune in, beware: There’s no public comment period at this particular session, although they do have a combined work session / public hearing scheduled for February 6th. That said, you can always listening in via the livestream tonight and then send the entire board an email with the best of your budgetary thoughts after things wrap up.

Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on yesterday’s gun buyback presentation and has the key detail I was looking for yesterday: “With the remaining funds in place, [Acting Chief] Edwards said the department plans to host another event in the upcoming months.”

Dang, the Chesterfield Observer announced that they’ll publish their final edition on February 1st. I don’t link to the Observer a ton, but it’s been around forever (since 1995!) and I really appreciated their coverage of GRTC’s Route 1 extension a couple years back. It’s always a bummer when we lose a local news source, especially when we don’t have a ton left to lose.

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense covered last night’s Henrico Board of Supervisor’s discussion around The Arcadia, the 1,000-home development planned in Varina. First, there’s almost never two hours of public comment at a Henrico Board of Supervisors meeting! Second, the Board voted to approve the development—but only with some last minute changes to the plan. Spiers calls the compromise a “scaled-down” project, which seems right. Tap through to read about some of the changes made, including an agreement to work with the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust on 20 of the homes.

Also in Richmond BizSense, Mike Platania reports on an inside-baseball brewery bill that would allow breweries to distribute their own beers without a distributor. Distribution is part of Virginia’s three-tier system (the other two tiers being retailers and the producers themselves)—it’s a whole complicated thing. This bill, though, sounds like it’d make it easier for local beers to end up in local stores. Sounds great, but I wonder how the wine and liquor people feel about it?

RIC Today has a fun list of Richmond’s most famous signs. Can we consider the Model Tobacco building a sign? I love that thing.

This morning's longread
Battles of the Sexes: Duels between Women and Men in 1400s Fechtbücher

You’re definitely gonna want to tap through and look at these amazing illustrations of women dueling men who are stuck in a pit. The accompanying text is pretty fascinating, too.

A form of legal trial, the duels often begin with the man in a pit or a tub, equipped with a wooden mace, while the woman circles above, slinging a stone wrapped in a veil or “loaded” into the sleeve of her chemise. The difference in height is meant to level any physical advantage of biological sex. Various painful scenarios play out. In one sequence from fencing master Hans Talhoffer’s 1467 Fechtbüch, the man somehow flips his opponent over, piledriving her into the ditch while flourishing his weapon as if emoting victory or assault. In another, the pinned woman executes a reversal on the pit man, putting her opponent into a headlock before proceeding to pull him backward out of the earth by his ears or groin. Submission, not death, seems to be the goal. Legal codes differed on what came next: the Stadtbuch von Augsburg (ca. 1272) called for the defeated to be buried alive, while the Freisinger Rechtsbuch (ca. 1328) suggested cutting off the woman’s hand and beheading the man.

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Picture of the Day

When in doubt, shallow depth-of-field.