Good morning, RVA: Risk Matrix, a missed opportunity in Carytown, and Maymont’s Garden Glow

Good morning, RVA! It’s 30 °F, and that’s literally freezing! Not to worry though, temperatures will top out in the 60s this afternoon. The rest of this week looks delightfully fall-like with cooler temperatures rolling in as we get closer to the weekend.

Water cooler

City Council will host its next North of Broad work session today from 3:00–5:00 PM. On the agenda: Community benefits like affordable housing, employment training, MBE participation, and the GRTC Transit Center. Following that work session, Council will move into their Organizational Development committee where they do have the NoBro ordinances on their agenda(PDF). I have no idea if Council will actually discuss those papers or if they’ll continue them until the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission has finished their work later this year. Speaking of that commission, here’s the Risk Matrix PDF I mentioned last week. I’m not sure if I’m smart enough to understand it all (or even most of it), but maybe you are! There are a lot of dang moving pieces to this thing, and, at this point, they’re all moving in parallel—it’s a lot to keep track of. One thing this PDF does make clear to me is how focused almost everyone in entire city—the Mayor, Council, commissions like this one, Richmond humans in general—is on funding schools. Don’t get me wrong, schools need more money, and I’ve said as much for the last forever. But transit needs more money, public housing needs more money, streets, sustainability efforts, vacancies at City Hall—they all need more money! It’s a little weird to me that the frame for a lot of the conversations we’re having, this Risk Matrix included, is how will it impact schools funding without even mentioning our laundry list of other very expensive needs.

I definitely missed the neighborhood drama around the milling and paving of W. Cary Street, but it’s clear to me from this Department of Public Works email, if you read between the lines, that it was juicy: “There has been a great deal of concern regarding milling and paving on West Cary Street. To help resolve the concerns, the City of Richmond talked to the contractor and Mr. Kamran Shaikh, the President of the Merchants Association on how to resolve the paving concerns. We all agreed on the following solution – the contractor will pave West Cary Street between North Nansemond and South Belmont at night, weather permitting. There will be no on street parking allowed during the times listed above” (11/6 7:00 PM–7:00 AM; 11/7 7:00 PM–7:00 AM). This was definitely a missed opportunity to close Carytown to cars and pilot a pedestrian, bike, and bus-only space. The Merchants Association will never be convinced to remove parking and cars until they see firsthand that everyone will just make at ton more money. This was the perfect, low-risk chance to do so.

Janet Brooking from DRIVE SMART Virginia has a column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about Virginia’s need for stronger distracted driving laws, something Republicans killed in last year’s General Assembly session. Locally, Mayor Stoney has made some progress and just submitted a distracted driving ordinance to Council. We still need better legislation statewide, and you can, of course, help by remembering to vote tomorrow.

WTVR reports that a driver hit and killed a person walking along Mechanicsville Turnpike on Sunday afternoon.

I don’t really know what to make of this story in the RTD by Patrick Wilson and Justin Mattingly about the City’s bid process for building new schools 💸. The “Virginia Contractor Procurement Alliance,” folks who probably feel some kind of way about how procurement is supposed to work, say that the procurement process the City used is more expensive than what the Alliance would have recommended. Not only that, but Chesterfield uses this other process. Chesterfield! Sometimes, I…have a hard time caring about what Chesterfield does, you know? Anyway, I snark, but if the City is spending more to build the exact type of schools it needs on the exact timeline it needs them then, yeah, of course, they should fix that. But I’m also willing to entertain that the situation in Richmond is different than it is in mostly-rural Chesterfield.

This picture of Maymont Garden Glow via /r/rva is bowing my mind. I did not know this was a thing, and now I need to get tickets ASAP.

Reminder: Tomorrow is Election Day!

This morning’s longread

I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb

Well this is both fascinating and unfortunate. Staying in a neighborhood is just so, so much nicer than staying in a city’s weird downtown district, but, like, maybe you’re getting scammed by Becky and Drew??

It seemed as if one person or group might have created numerous phony accounts to run a much larger Airbnb operation. If that proved true, it meant whoever ran the five accounts I’d located was controlling at least 94 properties in eight different cities. How many other people who had been scammed out of money like me? Feeling as if I was entering Pynchonian nightmare, I sent a message to Airbnb alerting them to what increasingly seemed like an elaborate scam. But Airbnb, which plans to go public next year, seemed to have little interest in rooting out the rot from within its own platform. When I didn’t hear back from the company after a few days, and saw that the suspicious accounts were still active, I took it upon myself to figure out who exactly had ruined my vacation.

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