Good morning, RVA: Congratulations Julie Timm, a handful of Council updates, and bike races

Ranked-choice voting for City Council sounds great, let’s make it happen!

Good morning, RVA! It's 53 °F, and was that not a perfect weekend? Expect more of the same today with highs in the mid 80s, lots of sunshine, and not too much humidity. Storms move in midweek, though, so get out there and enjoy today and tomorrow!

Water cooler

Whoa, big news: Seattle’s Sound Transit will hire GRTC’s Julie Timm as their next CEO. Sound Transit runs Seattle’s regional rail, light rail, and express buses, and, no shade intended, is a huge step up from GRTC. I mean, it’s Seattle! One of America’s few transit cities! So, while I’m incredibly nervous about what this means for Richmond’s tiny regional transit system—especially as GRTC’s entire governance model has just shifted—I’m pretty stoked for Julie Timm.

I’ve got three interesting City Council updates for you this morning! First, Council’s Organizational Development committee will consider the rank-choice voting ordinance (ORD. 2022-119). Remember, OrgDev is made up of all nine councilmembers, so today’s discussion should give you a pretty good sense of where the full Council would vote on this paper if forced to do so today. Second, OrgDev will also hear a presentation on a Fiscal Efficiency Review requested by Council a while back. This is a big document (104 pages), and I haven’t had the time to read through the whole thing, but, flipping through the executive summary and a couple thing stood out! 14 years ago, when we first started electing mayors in Richmond, I would have never guessed that “strong city financials” would be one of our City’s strengths, and that “the current city charter does not enable the Mayor-Council form of government” would be one of our weaknesses. We’ll see how Council intends to act on this document which is full of interesting suggestions. Finally, Planning Commission will meet today and consider ORD. 2022-157, which would allocate money to improving the site of an African burying ground at 1305 N. 5th Street and connect it into the larger work of memorializing Devil’s Half Acre. I’ve written about this piece of land before; it’s currently home to a billboard and an abandoned building.

Axios Richmond’s Kari Peifer pulled together median rent prices from a handful of Richmond neighborhoods (using CoStar data), and, dang! I know I am an old person who can remember back to when rent one block off of Carytown was $600, but $1,650 for an apartment in Scott’s Addition seems bananas.

Ian M. Stewart at VPM has a good piece about the bike races in Bryan Park, which have been going on for literal decades. Scroll down and check out the video to see what it feels like to whip around Bryan Park at 30mph on a bike. Too intense for me, but I’m glad it exists!

From Doug Allen on Twitter: “There are many great Amtrak vistas in VA but the A-Line over the James might be the best.” On this beautiful morning, take 30 seconds and watch this beautiful video.

P.S. Today is the sixth anniversary of the end of RVANews, or, to put it another way, the sixth anniversary of the start of this newsletter as a standalone thing. At this point, I wonder if more subscribers of this email have never heard of RVANews than not! Anyway, local news is critically important to a city, yet near impossible to make into a sustainable business (at least in the way I’d do local news). So this morning, if you have a favorite local journalist or news outlet, take the opportunity to support them financially however you can—whether that’s subscribing, donating, joining a patreon, whatever. Without local reporting, it’s hard to know what’s going on and even harder to know how to advocate for change.

This morning's longread
NASA 1972 Moon Buggy Review- Fun, Fun, Fun

Wired reviewed the 1972 moon buggy—like, in last week’s issue—and I’m not sure why! As you can probably tell, I’m getting way into humanity’s reinvigorated plans to return folks to the moon, so this was a well-timed read for me.

The frenetic pace of gear releases means it is inevitable that WIRED cannot get to all of them in a timely fashion. But if they are important, rest assured, we will catch up eventually. Yes, some may take a little longer to materialize than others, however, at 50 years late, this review is, I admit, pushing loyal readers’ patience. Yet, as this is an appraisal of such an iconic EV, none other than NASA’s Lunar Roving Vehicle, or LRV (more popularly known as the moon buggy), I hope you’ll forgive the tardiness.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.