Good morning, RVA: Strategic CIP, a new bikeshare station, and pickelball

I got real into City Council's sixth budget session, and you should, too!

Good morning, RVA! It's 52 °F, and how nice was yesterday?! Today, though, you can expect highs in the mid 60s and a chance for storms most of the day. Stay dry, stay safe, and keep an eye on your weather app of choice!

Water cooler

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams reports on a really interesting governance situation at Montpelier, the estate of James Madison, fourth president and enslaver of hundreds of people. I had no idea but, "Montpelier, the estate of James Madison, became the toast of the museum world with a June 2021 board restructuring that gave descendants of the enslaved there 'structural parity' on its foundation's board." Sounds like a really bold and progressive move that was maybe a little too bold and progressive for the board, who has since dialed back some of that structural parity. Williams puts it this way: "French and others describe an insular foundation board at a crossroads of inclusion and national acclaim, uncomfortable at taking the next step. Montpelier was poised to stand out. Now it's standing out for all the wrong reasons. The board has a choice: It can engage in true power-sharing with the descendants of the enslaved in modeling an expansive vision. Or it can maintain an exclusionary death grip on a diminished institution."

I took advantage of yesterday's amazing weather to ride my bike around the 1st District while listening to City Council budget sessions four through six. I'm here to officially recommend you give the sixth session a listen—especially Director of Budget and Strategic Planning Jason May's walkthrough of the Capital Improvement Plan. May replaces previous director Jay Brown (also one of my favorite budget season characters), and has only been with the City since 2019 so you may not yet have had a chance to hear from him. He delivers a clear, straightforward look at not only how the CIP works but how it should work. You can flip through his slides here, but I'll tell you right now that the presentation is magnitudes better than the slides. It's refreshing to hear someone speak plainly on the decades of deferred maintenance in the City and the strategic, long-term investments we need to make to address them. I feel a little inspired!

What's this? A new RVA Bikeshare station? All the way up on the Northside?? It's true: The Battery Park Pool now has its very own bikeshare station, bringing the total number of active stations to 17. I appreciate the bike share network expanding beyond it's Fan-centric roots into the Northside, deep into Church Hill, and even a planned station out at the Broad Rock Library. However, these far-flung outposts (relatively speaking) need to be connected back into the existing network by a breadcrumb trail of additional stations! The planned Broad Road Library station, which would be the only one on the entire Southside, is a five mile ride to the next nearest station (down on the Canal Walk). While maybe this makes sense for commuting from the immediate area around the library into Downtown, it doesn't give folks the opportunity to get around their neighborhood using the bike share system. Listen, it's progress, so I'll chill on complaining too much!

Hey, do you want to get into pickleball? I mean: "The game, a combination of tennis, badminton and Ping-Pong, is fast-paced with lots of hot net play and ground strokes that either lob over opponents’ heads or try to bunch them up to miss the shot." If small tennis sounds fun, Peter Galuszka at Style Weekly reports on the local pickleball scene if you want to get involved. I will, however, dispute that "the game came to the Richmond area in June 2010," because I definitely had to play pickleball in gym class all the way back in the nineteen nineties!

The Richmond Night Market returns to the 17th Street Market this coming Saturday (and every second Saturday through November). The temperatures are up, COVID-19 is down, and it seems like a lovely weekend to get out and enjoy some Richmond stuff—especially breezy outdoor hangs like the Night Market.

Logistical note! I am taking tomorrow off, so the next email you get from me will arrive on Monday morning. I plan on spending my Friday free time catching up on email newsletters, playing Elden Ring, and eating chips. Have a great weekend!

This morning's longread
The world’s oldest pants are a 3,000-year-old engineering marvel

Here's an article about the world's oldest pants. I mean, how can you not read something like this?

For the makers of the world’s oldest pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago, the answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber. The world’s oldest-known pants were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man. He wore the woven wool pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, ankle-high boots, and a wool headband adorned with seashells and bronze discs. The pants' basic design is strikingly similar to the pants most of us wear today, but closer inspection reveals the level of engineering that went into designing them.

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