Good morning, RVA: New City Council leadership, buying Mayo Island, and stadium zoning

It’s always exciting to see how the first budget season goes under new City
Council leadership.

Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and our streak of weirdly warm weather continues. Today, while you can expect highs near 70 °F (!?), which sounds great, you should also get ready for some rain to move through, which sounds less great. I hope you spent some time outside yesterday, because today looks soggy.

Water cooler

Unlike the U.S. House of Representatives, City Council successfully elected their new leadership last night: 9th District Councilmember Mike Jones will serve as president and 4th District Councilmember Kristin Nye will serve as vice president. You can check out the new committee assignments here. I’m bummed to see Jones leave the Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee, which now consists of Councilmembers Addison (chair), Robertson (vice chair), and Lambert. Also of note, Councilmember Trammell remains the chair of the Public Safety committee, with Lambert and Nye joining. Interestingly, Public Safety is Trammell’s only committee assignment other than the Organizational Development committee (which the entire Council sits on). Like I said yesterday about School Board, the role of president doesn’t hold a ton of power, but the president does get to run the meetings which can certainly set the tone for how the group works together—especially during budget season. We’ve seen more and less effective presidents over the years, and I’m excited to see how Jones fills the role.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s editorial board has basically endorsed keeping Acting Police Chief Rick Edwards around, at least until the end of Mayor Stoney’s second term. Beware if you tap through: There are some right-wing talking points sprinkled throughout the piece. On the whole, though, I agree with the RTD. With only two years left in Stoney’s time at City Hall, I just don’t think the head job at the RPD will attract top-tier candidates in a national search. If Edwards can avoid major missteps—like, oh, I don’t know, inventing a fake mass shooting plot—I say give him a chance.

Last month, Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond reported that the Capital Region Land Conservancy had started piecing together grant money to purchase the privately owned Mayo Island—a long time goal for the City and for people who’d love to have another amazing island as part of the James River Park System. At the time, the Conservancy had raised $1.5 million from the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation, which, to me, seemed a little drop-in-the-bucket for a piece of land—in the middle of the river!—listed at $19 million. Well, last week, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation awarded the City $7.5 million for “Mayo Island acquisition.” Bite my tongue, because this is no longer drop-in-the-bucket money but real-deal, messing-around cash! In fact, in the application for this DCR grant, the City says they’re aiming to acquire the island for “just” $11.4 million. That would leave $2.5 million to raise from other sources, which seems totally doable! Keep an eye out for further announcements about closing this funding gap soon (or maybe even a line item in this year’s budget).

Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers has a nice update on some new zoning planned for the Diamond District (certainly of interest to readers of this email). Earlier this week, Planning Commission set the process in motion to rezone the area around the Diamond away from its current and good TOD-1 zoning to a new “Stadium” zoning district. I had a skeptical face about this when I saw it on Planning Commission’s agenda, but Kevin Vonck, the City’s planning director, says, “The framework for this [new zoning] will be TOD-1, with some things changed in it to reflect the nuances that are proposed in the development plan...It should be pretty familiar, and I think that’s why we can propose something rather quickly.” Some of those nuances are permitting the actual stadium itself, which seems important, and allowing for taller, 20-story buildings, which sounds great to me.

Want to be the City of Richmond’s next poet laureate? Well, you’ve got until February 1st to apply. I think this is a pretty neat opportunity for the right someone, so if you, like me, have absolutely zero poetry prowess consider sharing the application around with folks who might. You can check out the City’s current poet laureate, Roscoe Burnems, and some of his poems over on Instagram.

This morning's longread
How Tall Is Too Tall?

I’ll admit that I started in on this article in the Atlantic about super-tall buildings thinking it’d be your typical NIMBY blah-blah-blah. Now, after reading the piece, I’m pretty sure the Jurassic Park Maxim applies to these structures: They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Building engineers, like judgy modeling agents, have varying definitions of superslim, but they usually agree that such buildings must have a height-to-width ratio of at least 10 to 1. To put that in perspective, the Empire State Building (one of the world’s first supertalls, completed in 1931) is about three times taller than it is wide—“pudgy,” as one engineer described it to me. Steinway Tower is 24 times taller than it is wide—nearly as slim as a No. 2 pencil, and the skinniest supertall in the world. (The developer’s official name for the building is 111 West 57th Street.) These superslim buildings—and supertalls generally—have relied on engineering breakthroughs to combat the perilous physics that go with height. A 2021 article in the journal Civil Engineering and Architecture declared: “There is no doubt that super-tall, slender buildings are the most technologically advanced constructions in the world.”

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Picture of the Day

Sometimes I want to grow a wilderness beard, walk into the forest, and never come back.