Good morning, RVA: A must-listen, the James River Branch trail, and pollen

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and whoa it rained hard up here on the Northside last night. Today, you can expect highs in the mid 50s, so I hope you didn’t pack away all your flannels and big shirts (what my house inexplicably calls sweatshirts). I think we should see the sun at some points both today and tomorrow, so maybe by this weekend things’ll have dried out enough that all the mountain bike trails will be open and ready to shred!

Water cooler

As foretold, I spent my bus trips yesterday with an absolute must-listen episode of The Boring Show. No joke, City Council’s second budget work session, which features a presentation about the Children’s Funding Project and then Superintendent Kamras walking through his proposed budget for Richmond Public Schools, is really something anyone interested in supporting RPS and our city’s kids should give a listen.

First, the Children’s Funding Project! Earlier this week, I’d forgotten I’d written about the Children’s Funding Project back in October. Back then, at one of Council’s Education and Human Services committee meetings, they’d teased a “fiscal map” that would lay out the funding streams for any and all things supporting children. They’ve now completed that map, and it seems like a really cool tool for doing deeper analysis which you then hope leads to better and more-informed decision making. Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the tool at the moment, but you can watch a demo of it here (staring around the seven minute mark).

Second, I really, really hope y’all will go listen to Kamras’s budget presentation. It’s excellent. He lays out the District’s needs, highlights the ~$10 million gap between his budget and the mayor’s, and then clearly explains why that’s the State’s fault. I specifically appreciate his explanation of the “LCI,” or Local Composite Index, which is a formula Virginia uses to judge what percentage of school funding a locality can afford. Because we live in a hellscape where the General Assembly and the Governor punish Virginia’s small, independent cities, the newly-updated LCI formula says Richmond can afford a larger percentage of school funding than Henrico, Chesterfield, or Hanover. This obviously does not match anything close to reality, and those recent changes to the LCI have cost Richmond Public Schools somewhere between $10–20 million dollars. That’s why the responsibility for RPS’s budget gap belongs with the state. Anyway, give the whole thing a listen; Kamras’s portion starts around the 45 minute mark.

Council’s next budget session, their third, will take place on eclipse day (this coming Monday). Make sure you bring your shades!

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Today, the Urban Design Committee will consider UDC 2024-10, the location, character, and extent review for the James River Branch Trail. This project is SO cool. It’s a unique rail-to-trail conversion that, yes, will create two miles of new paved multi-use trail in the city, but, more importantly, it will serve as a solid piece of transportation infrastructure. First, check out the trail map. The James River Branch Trail will cut across the Southside (almost like a radial bus route) and connect Hull Street Road and Midlothian Turnpike in a totally safe, car-free way. Second, scroll through these engineer diagrams (if you dare), and see how the trail has a bunch of spurs connecting it to nearby neighborhoods and streets. Don’t think about this trail like the Capital Trail which runs alongside a major thoroughfare. Instead think of it as a bike and pedestrian major thoroughfare with its own (car-free!) off and on ramps. Third, crossing Hull and Midlo on foot or by bike is objectively terrifying, so read through this “Evaluation on Uncontrolled Pedestrian Crossings” memo. It’s still a little car-brained for me, but it does show that they’ve thought through how to make these major street crossings safer. I mean, check out these recommendations for the Midlothian crossing:

1. warning signs at and in advance of the crossing
2. lighting
3. a pedestrian hybrid beacon with passive pedestrian detection
4. to reduce the width of the trail crossing, the right through lane on westbound Midlothian Turnpike is proposed to be merged into the left through lane in advance of the trail crossing
5. a curb extension to reduce the crossing distance

That’s all good stuff, and I’m so excited for whenever this project starts to get off the ground.

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Here’s a depressing couple of sentences from Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense: “The planned redevelopment of an entire block of Scott’s Addition could be on ice for the next 16 years after a recent court ruling. Last week a Richmond Circuit judge ruled that North Carolina-based developer Hem + Spire has the right to renew its lease on a 51-space parking lot at 3210 W. Marshall St., potentially keeping the lease active through 2040.” Vomit. But! Platania reports that it’s unclear what Hem + Spire will actually do with their lease, and I have to think the various pressures to build more housing on such a big lot will ultimately force some other solution than sixteen more years of surface parking.

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Bleh, via /r/rva: “Who wants to splash around in the pollen puddle?” Unfortunately, the pollening is upon us, and everything outside is coated in a fine yellow horrible dust.

This morning's longread

A Few Rules For Predicting The Future by Octavia E. Butler

I think everyone should read Octavia Butler’s Parable books, which were written in the 90s. So when she talks about looking at the neglected problems around her and giving them “30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters,” she’s envisioning our world right now. And, I tell you what, she’s spooky / terrifyingly accurate in a lot of ways.

“SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. “I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’

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Picture of the Day

Azaleas at their peak look like alien plants.