Good morning, RVA: Municipal finance, building permits, and a reader quesiton

Reader question! If you commute by driving, at what price is gas so
expensive you’d consider switching modes of transportation?

Good morning, RVA! It's 36 °F, but this first day of spring looks lovely. Enjoy highs right around 70 °F, sunshine, and the start of a great week.

Water cooler

City Council meets today at 1:00 PM for their third budget work session. This one will focus on the thrilling topic of municipal debt! Because of capitalism, the City can only borrow but so much money at a time and retain its credit rating (usually AA+ or Aa1 or some similar combination of As). With a “good” credit rating it’s cheaper for the City to borrow money and, therefore, cheaper to do big projects that require tons of cash. But, since we’re limited in how much we can borrow, debt decisions now impact future Richmond’s ability to take on new projects. For example, scroll to slide five in the aforelinked PDF to see how much of our existing debt until 2030 is soaked up by the jail and new school construction. That’s about as deep of a municipal finance explainer I can give before I get lost and confused. I’ll definitely be tuning in (once I get the audio up on The Boring Show) to learn more, especially about slide 12 which shows the projections for new revenues needed in the coming years to support our existing debt payments. I don’t see how that aligns with the Mayor’s plan to reduce the real estate tax, but, like I said, I hope to learn more soon!

Homeward has released its 2022 Winter Point-in-Time data, which shows the number of folks in our region experiencing homelessness. From the report: “The January 2022 PIT count found that the number of people experiencing homelessness in the Richmond region decreased by 11 percent compared to the PIT count in January 2021, from 736 people in January 2021 to 654 people in January 2022.” Seems good, but: “The January 2022 PIT count revealed a 35% percent increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness compared to the July 2019 PIT count, which occurred before the pandemic.“ The report points out an important lesson learned, which seems like an evergreen lesson: “Emergency shelter is a life-saving intervention, but quality and affordable housing, steady income, and supportive services that support housing stability end homelessness for our neighbors.”

Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers has a long report on the City’s building permitting process that you should read (part one of three!). I feel atwixt about this: On the one hand, permitting has been a source of frustration for years and years and years; on the other hand a pandemic, a hiring freeze, and an onslaught of new projects has probably created an perfect storm of workload badness. I’d like to know the long term way forward, and I’m interested in the second and third part of this reporting to see what’s planned.

Back on February 2nd, I wrote this: “Remember, Youngkin's nomination of Wheeler [as Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources] was always intended mostly to make liberals angry. Even if he's not appointed, he'll still float around the administration.” Over the weekend, we leaned that the Governor has indeed appointed Andrew Wheeler, former Trump EPA head, as a Senior Advisor to the Governor. So while Wheeler won’t have any direct say in destroying the agencies in the Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources’s portfolio, he’ll still get to whisper climate denials in the room where it happens.

Related, Patrick Wilson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Youngkin also appointed Susan Beals, former legislative assistant to Sen. Amanda Chase, as the new Comissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections. I don’t know anything about Beals, but it doesn’t seem great to put Virginia’s elections in the hands of someone who worked on a variety of election-related Republican fever-dream bills and a handful of anti-vax legislation.

Finally, I’d like to close with a question for readers: If you currently commute by driving, is there a price at which gas is so expensive you’d consider switching to some other mode of transportation (walking, bikes, buses, carpooling)? You can just reply to this email and let me know, or @ me on twitter (@rosscatrow).

This morning's longread
How the Ukraine Crisis Led to ... Nickel Hoarding

That sound you hear is dozens of people explaining to their exhausted, blank-staring partners, “No, no, you’re not getting it. Each nickel is worth sixteen cents!”

During all of this, of course—of course—some Americans found a roundabout way to make some money: hoarding nickels. Yes, the coin is worth just five cents, but the metal it contains—75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel—has long been worth more than that. According to Coinflation.com, a website that tracks the value of the metals in coins, the “melt value” of a single nickel currently stands at eight cents. Last week, during the height of nickelmania, it ratcheted all the way up to 16 cents. Actually melting down those nickels for profit is illegal, but that hasn’t stopped opportunistic investors from zigzagging between banks and credit unions to gather nickels, with the hopes of one day selling them off for more than five cents.

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