Good morning, RVA: This is Halloween, Henrico Q&A, and the mysterious case of the stolen sidewalk

Good morning, RVA! It’s 69 °F, today’s highs are back up near 80 °F, and there’s a persistent but small chance of rain throughout the day. Trick-or-treat o’ clock looks mostly fine. However! NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says that a cold front will move through later this evening and that you should be on the lookout for severe weather. The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s John Boyer says, “A line of storms containing damaging winds and heavy rain will sweep from west to east on Thursday evening.“ Sounds legit! If you’re out and about after the sun goes down, please be careful.

Water cooler

Today is Halloween! It’s a day full of inexplicably weird traditions and also candy. Honestly, it’s one of my least favorite holidays of the year, but I fully accept and acknowledge that lots of folks love today and its related inexplicable weirdness. In fact, some of my best friends love Halloween. However, Halloween is also the deadliest day of the year for child pedestrians. A recent study found that “children ages 4 to 8 were about 10 times more likely to be killed in the evening on Halloween than they were during other autumn evenings.” So, please, if you plan to drive tonight, take it slow—especially with the possibility for wind and rain later this evening. The streets will be packed with children blatantly ignoring cars in pursuit of that sweet, sweet candy—and, tonight of all nights, (inexplicable) tradition demands that they do so!

5th District people! Candidate Thad Williamson will participate in an Ask Me Anything over on /r/rva today at 11:00 AM. If you’re a reddit person, get over there and ask him all of your burning questions about budgets, combined sewer overflow, zoning—you know, all of the good stuff. I am 100% sure there will be plenty of questions asking him about his position on NoBro, so make sure some other topics get covered. While we’re talking about Williamson’s policy positions, check out this 71-page PDF he put together. It combines all of the policy statements he’s made into a single, comprehensive PDF. As a collector of fine PDFs, to see a candidate for public office do this speaks directly into center of my heart. P.S. His position on NoBro begins on page 45.

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense says that, while not perfect, the City’s permitting process has seen some positive progress. Read this article and pay attention to the bit where DCAO of Economic and Community Development Sharon Ebert talks about staffing the permitting office by moving folks around, reclassifying jobs, and taking advantage of the City’s voluntary retirement plan to hire new employees. To me, this says there are still too many vacant positions in permitting, and until Council decides to fully fund those positions its going to be catch as catch can. Remember this when we get to next year’s budget season and not funding vacant positions inevitably comes up as a way to “save” the City money. Blech.

WTVR says another person has been hit and injured by a driver, this time at 25th and Main Streets, adjacent to a Pulse station and a frequently used local service bus stop. This location is, as you might have guessed, part of the high-injury street network and somewhere we already knew was dangerous for people. In fact, I’ve had my own issues there / nearly been killed by some jerk in a truck. Will the City do anything to make this part of this street safer? Or nah?

C. Suarez Rojas continues the RTD’s series of Q&As with local candidates, and asks the folks running for Henrico Board of Supervisors a few questions. Additionally, RVA Rapid Transit asked the candidates a bunch of transportation-related questions that you can can also read through. Unlike in Chesterfield, where we’ll definitely have some new faces on that Board of Supervisors, in Henrico we might could could see the entire gang of incumbents reelected. They’ve certainly out raised each of their respective challengers. But! Money’s not everything, and Supervisor Tommy Branin is the only candidate running unopposed. So, if you’re a dedicated Henricoan and you’d like to see some changes to Henrico’s elected officials, you’ve gotta vote.

This story in WRIC about a woman coming home and finding her sidewalk stolen is amaaaazing. To quote from the article, “Coutlakis has lived in the area for 20 years and has never experienced someone taking her walkway.”

The Nationals won the World Series last night, making them the first team to bring a baseball championship to D.C. since 1924! That’s a long time ago, so I’m sure all of the Nats fans in our lives are all very excited. Please indulge them this morning by listening to their baseball chatter and maybe even exchanging a high five—or at least sharing in an enthusiastic double thumbs up.

This morning’s patron longread

The Great Land Robbery

Submitted by Patron Alistar. I learned a ton from this history of Black-owned farms in Mississippi.

This is not a story about TIAA—at least not primarily. The company’s newfound dominance in the region is merely the topsoil covering a history of loss and legally sanctioned theft in which TIAA played no part. But TIAA’s position is instrumental in understanding both how the crimes of Jim Crow have been laundered by time and how the legacy of ill-gotten gains has become a structural part of American life. The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.

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