Good morning, RVA: Equitable paving, Confederate monuments, and conference committees

Good morning, RVA! It’s 44 °F, and today you can expect cooler highs in the 50s and a cloudy sky. I know it’s only Thursday, but this weekend’s weather looks amazing.

Water cooler

The Mayor announced that his budget, which drops tomorrow, will include “$32 million for the paving of roads and maintenance and placement of sidewalks.” Breaking down the paving portion: $15 million of that will come from Richmond’s local share of the new regional transportation money and $15 million will “come out of the city’s coffers.” That’s a lot of money for paving, but, to be honest, a lot of Richmond’s roads are in pretty bad shape. I think what I’d like to see, if we’re going to invest tens of millions of dollars into paving streets, is an equitable prioritization of where we pave. Take the pavement conditions map and then overlay the red lining map, the racial dot map, the life expectancy map—there’s tons of data out there—and figure out which neighborhoods to pave first. Not just the neighborhoods who complain the most, or the neighborhoods with the most cars, or the neighborhoods with the most traffic—but the neighborhoods where, due to systemic racism, we’ve spent the last century ignoring. As for sidewalks, they don’t state it explicitly, but $32 million - $30 million for paving = $2 million for fixing and installing sidewalks. There are TONS of new sidewalk needs, particularly on Richmond’s Southside. Again, if it were me, I’d equitably prioritize this money and spend the vast, vast majority of it in the 8th and 9th Districts. And because I can’t not: 1) All of this paving is a huge opportunity to stripe bike lanes everywhere, and 2) The more people we get out of cars and onto their bikes or taking the bus or walking around, the less often we’ll need to pave our streets.

Oh, hey, related: City Council’s Education and Human Services committee will meet today and consider RES. 2020-R013, which would request that the Mayor put $221,770 in the budget for racial equity training and an equity survey. Richmond is part of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, and this money would pay for those folks to train City leadership and staff as well as set up an internal Core Equity Team that “will pilot a racial equity tool within the City, utilize data to develop and track racial equity strategies and action plan.” The funds would also go towards an equity survey of current City policy. To me, this seems like money well spent—as long as the recommendations that come out of this process are implemented and taken seriously. Richmond loves a study, but doesn’t necessary love doing things with the results of a study. Sounds like the training and survey will take about six months, so, assuming this ends up in the budget, lets check back later this year and see how things have progressed.

Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says the General Assembly has agreed to give localities control of their Confederate monuments 💸. Finally! All that’s left is for them to decide whether to make the process localities must follow easy or hard. The hard version of the process includes requiring a two-thirds majority vote by the local legislative body which seems totally arbitrary, unnecessary, and, frankly, racist. Other than a last-gasping desire to preserve the Lost Cause narrative, I don’t know why, out of all the things a locality can enact with a simple majority, taking down a Confederate monument should require a two-thirds majority. The State would also require the localities to pay the Department of Historic Resources to study who the monument honors. For a lot of the smaller monuments, like the Soldiers' and Sailors' monument on Libby Hill, the bronze Confederate man is just a generic, cheap, mass-produced statue honoring…capitalism and industry? Anyway, the hard way is dumb, and the easy way—which is easy—is way better.

As the GA sorts out which version of the Confederate monument legislation to move forward, the Virginia Mercury’s Graham Moomaw describes how that process—“conference committees”—works. Not super transparent, that’s how!

This 90-unit condo development on Lombardy—literally adjacent to the highway—is interesting, and Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has the details. I’m not sure I would want to live on top of I-95 myself, but this proposal is a pretty dense use of land that currently sits mostly unused (maybe because it’s right next to the highway). Fingers crossed, Lombardy between Chamberlayne and Broad might be turning into a cool, little corridor! Now, let’s get some commercial use to anchor the corner right there, since Sugar Shack is on the way out.

This morning’s longread

The Fight to Preserve African-American History

This story opens with Richmond but broadens to the rest of the country and looks at folks working to preserve physical pieces of Black history.

Shockoe Bottom, as that valley is known, was the center of Richmond’s slave district. In the three decades before the Civil War, more than three hundred thousand men, women, and children were sold in Richmond, the second-largest slave market in the United States. Not every enslaved person who passed through left the city; many were made to work in its tobacco warehouses, ironworks, and flour mills. Between 1750 and 1816, most of the African-Americans who died in Richmond were interred in what was known as the Burial Ground for Negroes. After that, the graves at Shockoe Bottom were abandoned, and residents claimed more and more of the land for themselves, ignoring the coffins and bones. The city turned what was left into a jail, and then a dog pound; later, state and federal officials carved I-95 through its center.

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