Good morning, RVA: Two fun Council updates, regional transportation money, and voicing an organ

I never know what feedback to give on huge lists of transportation projects
other than "don't do any of the highway widenings."

Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and a bunch of cold weather and rain has snuck back in to our weekly forecast. Today, expect highs right around 50 °F with a significant amount of rain later this afternoon—bundle up a bit if you're headed outside. Meanwhile, lows tonight and tomorrow night dip down into the 30s! Good luck, outside plants!

Water cooler

I've got two fun City Council updates for you this Monday morning. First, Council will meet for Amendment Session #1 today at 1:00 PM. Amendment Session #1 is great because you get to see and hear where each individual councilperson's priorities differ from the Mayor's priorities. Sometimes those differences can mean multi-million dollar amendments, but, usually, they manifest in small amendments that are much easier to fund with similarly small budget cuts (or fee increases). Subsequent amendment sessions are usually tense affairs where Council really gets into the business of finding ways to fund nine different people's different priorities all while trying to avoid making huge, cascading changes to the Mayor's budget. See? Fun! I can't find any of the submitted amendments on the City's legislative website yet, but I imagine they'll show up later today or tomorrow. Second, Planning Commission will meet today and consider ORD. 2022-112, the ordinance which will transfer money to RPS for designing an 1,800-seat replacement for George Wythe High School. That ordinance sits on the consent agenda, so it should pass without much comment—I don't imagine the Planning Commission has any desire at all to get stuck in the middle of that whole situation.

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense sat down with Maritza Pechin, the City's Deputy director for the Office of Equitable Development, to talk about the Diamond District redevelopment project. Tap through for a bit of Pechin's history before working for the City, but make sure you read her thoughts on Council's laundry list of confusing changes to Richmond 300 (RES. 2021-R026, which pops back up on Council's agenda on April 25th). I'll spoil it for you a bit, though: "But a lot of council’s concerns that came up through their amendment requests are either related to things that are fundamentally not in a master plan – things that you wouldn’t include in a big land-use master plan document, that’s either way too specific or completely out of scope – or they’re things that will get done via implementation." Agree!

The Central Virginia Transportation Authority opened a 15-day public comment period on their FY 2023-2026 Regional Revenue Draft Funding Scenario back on April 13th—so you're already running out of time to weigh in! If you can't remember back a million years ago to when the CVTA launched: This regional body collects taxes and distributes cash to fund transportation-related projects—some of that money goes back to the locality in which the tax was collected, some of it goes to GRTC, and some of it ends up in a bucket to be spent by the region on regional projects. It's the latter that the Draft Funding Scenario is concerned about, and it lays out a big list of projects on which the region could spend $276 million dollars of shared transportation money. Honestly, I don't know the best way to give feedback on this PDF, other than "please fund all of the bike-ped projects and none of the highway widening projects." For context, the CVTA will consider a $680 million list of "highway projects" compared to a much, much smaller $28 million list of bike and pedestrian projects (just four individual projects). If you have smarter thoughts than the above sentence, please let me know; I'd definitely be interested in sharing an example of an intelligent public comment on this list of projects. Anyway, you can email <[email protected] data-preserve-html-node="true"> before 3:00 PM on April 28th with any of your (intelligent or otherwise) questions, comments, or concerns.

You're going to want to watch this fascinating video from Paul Roberts at VPM about how two Canadians tuned and voiced the organ in the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. How cool is this! "For this instrument, that means Robin and Alex will voice 25 stops (groups of pipes simulating other instruments), about 1,400 pipes total. It’s a long, detailed process that takes five to six weeks. Voicing focuses on a few main elements: timbre (or tone), pitch, volume, and attack, which is how a pipe initially reacts when a key is pressed on the console. This is also known as how the pipe 'speaks.'"

Reminder! Broad Street repaving continues, and DPW crews have already moved on to Phase 2, which stretches from Belvidere to Meadow. Yeah it's an inconvenience, but at least it's a fast-moving inconvenience.

This morning's longread
Early internet Interview with Grant - copied from Sheldon Brown's site

Even if you're not into bikes, you should read this interview from the 90s about how a small bike company thought the internet would impact their business. So much has changed in so little time!

It may affect our sales and profits, but not our margins. I don't know how others will react to it, whether they'll go direct more. We have to go direct...I think most dealers are more interested in high-tech add-on sales and accessories than they are in something like Brooks leather saddles or Carradice waxed cotton saddlebags. I'm just guessing, of course. I appreciate the internet, but it's still such a mystery to me, all that http:// - stuff. Some company sent me a free CD-Rom thing, and after I figured out where to put it and clicked a few buttons, some terrible things happened. I am not comfortable with the internet, not yet. I know it's important and has such potential, but it's not part of what I think about.

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