Good morning, RVA: Regional transit funding, gun safety legislation, and an updated NoBro

Good morning, RVA! It’s 47 °F, and boy did it rain overnight—and might could keep raining for a while. However, things should dry up later this afternoon with temperatures sticking right around 50 °F.

Water cooler

I did a new thing yesterday and sent out some bonus GMRVA content in the form of a superlong explainer on HB 1541. That’s Del. Delores McQuinn’s bill which would (finally!) provide the Richmond region a couple buckets of dedicated transportation funding—even a bucket specifically for public transit (kind of). I love doing this sort of longer-format, more in-depth writing, but, turns out, it takes a lot of time. If you’d like to see more of it, you can join my Patreon to give me actual money. Please do! Related, Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch talked to the elected leaders involved and got a bunch of victory-lap quotes from all across the region 💸. It’s wild seeing such regional agreement on anything, let alone transportation. Martz also drops this bomb like it’s totally no big deal: “if legislation becomes law on July 1, Henrico said it would become a full member of the GRTC board of directors.” Whoa, huge if true. It really does continue to be a very exciting time for transit in the Richmond region. But! That doesn’t mean we can’t make HB 1541 better! In fact, if we don’t make a couple of changes to the bill as written, the region risks maintaining our unacceptable transit status quo for the foreseeable future. Tap that first link to see what should change and how you can get involved. This is a massive opportunity and we need to get it right. At this point, however, it’s not right. I do believe we can get it there, though.

I…don’t know what to make of this headline from Ned Oliver and Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury: “As Virginia Democrats advance new gun restrictions, militias organize, promising to resist.” The lede is even more bananas: “Opponents of new gun laws in Virginia are organizing militias in the state, but promise they’re not planning to use the new paramilitary organizations to launch a violent insurrection against the government.” And then, you gotta love this follow up sentence a couple of paragraphs down: “However organizers in King William either would not or could not say when pressed to describe a scenario in which they believed a militia might be useful in the context of the current gun debate.” Amazing. Later on in the piece, House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert gives these back-to-back quotes that try and minimize what all of these Bullet Bills are up to across the state while also using ominously threatening language towards Democrats: “They’re not arming up for an insurrection…They’re just trying to establish a legal definition that could perhaps offer them some protection,” and then he says, “I hope that the governor and Virginia Democrats are paying attention to what they’re provoking.” Anyway, writing about the honest fear I feel towards these pro-gun-violence folks is exactly what they want and probably advances their gross agenda—I will try to keep that in mind. Instead, scroll halfway down that Virginia Mercury piece and see all of the gun safety legislations that made it out of committee: a “one-handgun-a-month law, expand background checks on gun sales, establish a red flag law giving authorities power to temporarily take guns from people deemed dangerous and give local governments the ability to ban guns in public buildings, parks and at political rallies and other public events.” This is real progress.

Also at the Virginia Mercury, Ivy Main runs through the details of two climate/energy-related bills kicking around down at the General Assembly. This is complicated and dense legislation, and I’m thankful to have someone explain it to me.

Two quick City Council updates from last night’s meeting! ORD. 2019–328 which would allow a homeless shelter at 1900 Chamberlayne Avenue (and space from wrap-around services), got continued until January 27th. There was an issue with using the space, additionally, as a cold-weather shelter. ORD. 2019–352, Councilmember Gray’s ordinance to make it harder to build dense apartments on a handful of parcels across the City, passed unanimously. While that bums me out, I am pretty stoked for the amount of awareness and conversation that ordinance generated. It gets me honestly excited for whenever we decide to reform our entire zoning code to allow for totally terrifying things like “triplexes everywhere” and “accessory dwelling units.”

Tonight, at 6:00 PM, City Council will host another NoBro public hearing, this one at the Richmond Government Southside Community Services Center (4100 Hull Street Road). This meeting follows hot on the heels of Mayor Stoney’s announcement that, should the project move forward, CoStar plans to set up shop in the NoBro project footprint and bring 2,000 jobs to the neighborhood. Three other interesting notes in the aforelinked press release: First, Team NoBro does plan on shrinking the TIF should Del. Jeff Bourne’s HB 1345 pass. That’s the bill that gives the City access to the state portion of sales tax from an area that’s mostly the size of actual NoBro itself (not the 80-block BigTIF). I’m always in favor of taking more money from the State, and I’m interested to see just how small they can make the TIF when taking into account this new revenue. Second, they’ve “identified two opportunities within the project area to build units for residents between 40 and 60 percent annual median income.” That’s great, and I would like to know how many units they’re talking about. Third, it sounds like there’s a real opportunity to move the GRTC Transit Center from its suboptimal proposed location on 9th and Leigh. Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says they’re considering, with GRTC’s input!, the parking lot on Broad between 4th and 5th Streets. These are a lot of changes to something we’ve kicked around for over a year now, but I think it’s important and fair to acknowledge that Team NoBro is beginning to address concerns raised by folks in the community. You can insert my previous 600 rants about this project’s process here.

This morning’s longread

How a Journalist in Kyiv Responded to the Downing of a Ukrainian Passenger Plane

I’m a sucker for both a “how journalism works” piece and a “journalist reflects” piece. This one is both!

While they waited for official information about the crash, Kariakina asked a young reporter to go to the international airport outside of Kyiv to learn all she could about the eleven Ukrainian pilots, crew members, and passengers who had died in the crash. After the reporter returned, Kariakina assigned her to report on the life and work of flight attendants in general. Using another editor as a go-between, the reporter communicated that she was having trouble with the story. “She said that she couldn’t sleep because every time she closed her eyes, she flashed back to her conversations with the surviving relatives of the crew,” Kariakina told me. “She was upset that I was handing out these assignments so quickly, without talking them over. My immediate reaction was outrage at her being so sensitive. And then I thought, maybe I should be outraged at myself” for being insensitive.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.