Good morning, RVA: Local redistricting, tree trimming, and bike racing

I think I need to get more stoked on the local redistricting process.

Good morning, RVA! It's 29 °F, and we’ve got a pretty nice-looking week ahead of us. Today, you can expect highs near 60 °F, with similar fall-like temperatures straight on through until Sunday. It sure doesn’t seem like December weather, but I’ll take it.

Water cooler

Richmond’s City Council meets today at 6:00 PM with a packed 54-item agenda. Before that, though, they’ll have their regularly-scheduled informal meeting that includes this thrilling-to-me presentation on “Congressional Appropriations and Infrastructure Overview.” Most interesting is the section on “congressionally directed spending,” a form of federal funding that I know almost nothing about, but this PDF tells me that “FY 2022 represents the first year back from a decade-long moratorium on such congressionally directed spending.” Assuming this federal funding makes its way through Congress and actually ends up in the City of Richmond’s bank account, we can expect $1 million for Southside parks, $5 million toward the replacement of the Mayo bridge, and about $4 million for upgrades at the airport. I’m particularly excited about getting some money from the feds to kick off the replacement of the old, scary, and dangerous Mayo bridge—with any luck, we’ll see that finished at some point in my bicycling lifetime. After their informal meeting, Council will embark upon that hefty agenda that, honestly, has too many items on it for anyone to really grok. Two that stick out to me, though: RES. 2021-R026, the laundry list of conflicting and unnecessary changes to Richmond 300, is on the regular agenda; and ORD. 2021-315 would authorize the City to take down a few more Confederate monuments that are still hanging around on City-owned property.

Not so fast! There’s one more interesting thing on tonight’s City Council agenda, and that’s the legislation required to kick off the decennial redistricting process. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been jealously waiting for Richmond to even start their redistricting while all the other adjacent localities are wrapping their processes up. Turns out, that’s because Richmond will miss a state-mandated December 31st deadline to daw their new council maps. Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has more details on that whole situation. If you’re interested, you can read through the draft redistricting criteria that Council will consider here and their proposed redistricting schedule here. The former are all pretty straightforward, and I don’t think any of the criteria would result in major changes to Richmond’s Council Districts. However, if, as reported by Suarez, the Richmond Democratic Committee gets their way and has district compactness included as a priority, I can think of at least one long, skinny district that might could use some reshaping.

I thought this was neat: Over the next two weeks, DPW will close a couple lanes on a few roads (Hopkins, Forest Hill, Warwick, Overbrook, Hermitage, and Chamberlayne) to trim trees as part of a traffic safety initiative. Specifically, the “Systemic Sight Distance Improvements at Signalized Intersections Project” hopes to “improve traffic signal visibility and help reduce crashes.” First, heckuva project name. Second, I love practical things like this that can improve the safety of our streets. Yes, I know that some of these corridors are just too dang big and fast and need actual infrastructure improvements to slow vehicles down, but trimming trees is way cheaper and can happen immediately. Why not both!

Meg Schiffres at VPM talked to some experts about what kind of impacts Governor-elect Youngkin’s ill-conceived tax cuts would have on the Commonwealth, and it’s about as upsetting as you’d expect. From the piece: “K-12 education and transportation initiatives in Virginia will each lose $227 million in revenue annually. Transportation revenue, according to the institute, will also lose about $114 million if the grocery tax cut is approved,” and if the gas tax moratorium is implemented the State would miss out on $268 million per year. Local governments then, of course, would have to backfill the new funding gap with cuts to other services. So, how much money would you, the average Virginian, save in exchange for these huge cuts to education and transportation? About $9.80 per month. Well, if you’re rich and in the top 1% of earners, you’ll save $26.40 per month. Is that worth it?

Richard Hayes at RVAHub has some great pictures of a recent cyclocross race at Gillies Creek Park. Street, gravel, trail, hike-a-bike—cyclocross has it all!

This morning's longread
Omicron: A Big Deal About Small ‘O’

This is a longread about language, not disease. You’ll enjoy it, I swear!

What I love is that these evolutions are normal. Each word is just the current rendition of something always in flux. “Darn!” someone says. But English speakers just two centuries ago wouldn’t have recognized it as a real word. It started with people exclaiming, “By the eternal God!” That, like many frequently used expressions, shortened: to “By the eternal!” Then, just as some people voiced “learn” as “larn,” many said, “By the ‘tarnal,” and then just “tarnal” as a stand-alone adjective. Mid-19th-century cartoons and commentary are replete with it. One said “tarnal” in the same situations in which you might also at the time have said “Damnation!” Thus, people started exclaiming “Tarnation!” And since there was also “damn,” it felt natural to figure there was both “tarnation” and “tarn” or, sounding even more like “damn,” “darn,” emerging from a veritable buffet of changes.

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