Good morning, RVA: Gun violence, labor relations administrator, and a love letter to Richmond arts

I need a Richmond collective bargaining update.

Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and both today and tomorrow look great! You can expect dry skies, highs in the 60s, and the perfect weather for being grateful for the people closest to you. Keep an out for rain rolling through for much of the weekend, though. That totally works for me, because I’ve got a long backlog of horror films I need to work through over Thanksgiving break. Hope you find time to do the same (or find time to do whatever is your horror movie equivalent)!

Water cooler

Last night at least seven people were killed and five injured in a mass shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake. The Virginian-Pilot has ongoing coverage. This is the second mass shooting in Virginia in as many weeks.

120 days ago yesterday, Richmond passed the ordinance authorizing collective bargaining for City employees (ORD. 2022-221). I had written down on my super secret Good Morning, RVA calendar that the City must have hired a “labor relations administrator” by now, I think mostly because of this article in VPM. Looking over the text of the ordinance this morning, though, and 1) I again wish I was a lawyer or could at least read lawyer, and 2) I think that the City is not required to hire a labor relations administrator by yesterday, but, because they have not (as far as I know), a different process for addressing labor disputes is now in place. Honestly, I’d love a general collective bargaining update to sort all this out! Have the five collective bargaining units started to organize? Can they even do so without the labor relations administrator? Are good candidates for that position working their way through the hiring process? What’s the haps??

Beca Duval, writing for RVA Dirt, has, in what I hope will be an ongoing tradition, a great recap of this past Monday’s RPS School Board meeting. Hot topics Duval covers that you’ll almost certainly want to read more about: renaming schools, school zoning, a year-round calendar, and the School Board’s legal counsel. School Board is just...a lot...and this kind of long, exhaustive, persistent coverage is what we need to start holding elected officials accountable. For even more School Board coverage, Anna Bryson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the school-name-change piece of the meeting and gets some quotes from a few of the board members.

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports on a newly-approved eight-story apartment building coming to the 200-block of W. Broad Street. It’s absolutely wild we still have a handful of surface-level parking lots fronting Broad Street smack dab in the middle of Downtown, and it’s great to see these gaps getting filled in. Next up for filling: Grace Street. On Grace between Madison and Foushee, just three blocks, there are seven surface-level parking lots! Think of all the people that could live there instead!

Ashley Hawkins, executive director of Studio Two Three, has a nice column in Style Weekly about their decision to purchase a building in Manchester. It’s more a love letter to Richmond’s creative scene than anything else, and a great pre-Thanksgiving read.

Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond reports that, starting at some point in 2024, new Richmond phone numbers will have a 686 area code—assuming phones and area codes (and Richmond, I guess) still exist at that distant point in our future. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to old-man the first person I meet with a 686 area code!

Logistical note! Tomorrow (Thanksgiving) and Friday (officially “The Day After Thanksgiving”) are State holidays, so this newsletter will be taking both of those days off. I’ll return to your inboxes on Monday, and I hope over the next four days you find some time to rest, relax, read a PDF or two out of your library, and write a public comment about something you care deeply about.

This morning's patron longread
How to start fixing Baltimore City’s Department of Transportation

Submitted by Patron Sam. I don’t have first hand knowledge of what it’s like inside Richmond’s Department of Transportation—primarily because Richmond does not have a Department of Transportation at all and that works falls to Public Works—but this article about Baltimore evoked a lot of Richmond vibes for me. While we have made some progress toward having a cohesive set of priorities for the city’s transportation network over the last 5–10 years, dang, we still have so far to go.

It feels good to tell residents that we will work on their problems. It’s easier to pass a council member’s email on to the planner who is loosely responsible for that kind of request than it is to tell them we won’t be able to work on that in the immediate future. It seems like the right thing to do to jump to attention when the Mayor’s office calls about something. But its really just kicking the decision down the road. We have amazing employees that will try and bend space and time to make things happen, but there is nothing more demoralizing as an employee than to spend a lot of time working on a project that is supposed to be important, to only see it die on the vine when you hand it off to someone else who was not given the same priorities.

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Picture of the Day

Time to make the eggnog!