Good Morning, RVA: More budget stuff (I know, I know), bus routes, chickens, and floods

Clouds, rain, clouds, rain, clouds, rain.

May 3, 2016; 7:17 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: -Qualsiasi

Good morning, RVA! It’s 65 °F, and today we’ll see highs in the mid-70s. We’ll also see more rain, probably on-again-off-again, with a chance of thunderstorms this evening. Stay dry and unstruck by lightning, y’all!

Water cooler

Budget folks! Whoa, where to even begin. City Council met last night to, fingers crossed, finalize some sort of budget. After eight hours, Ned Oliver filed this story with the RTD. Two hours later, the meeting adjourned with plans to meet again today at 4:00 PM. So after talking for one half of an entire day, what was decided? Not much. Some highlights: $4 million will go to the RPS facilities budget; the city will not implement a cigarette tax (one that every other city in Virginia has and would have raised $5 million); $300,000 will go towards finalizing construction of the T. Tyler Potterfield Memorial Bridge; the Ambulance Authority will lose $250,000; and a couple million bucks were found by rejiggering some (but not all) of the City’s revenue projections. Note that all of those changes are significantly less than the $18 million RPS requested for their operating budget, and pennies compared to their facilities needs. To get caught up, scroll back through the #rvacouncil hashtag on Twitter, but don’t get too attached to anything you read. Council’s still got hours of meetings ahead of them. And if you see Ned Oliver (he’ll be the bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived reporter) buy him a beer or two. He’s already had a long week, and it’s only Tuesday!

Transit folks! The Richmond Transit Network Plan people will hold two public meeting this week to talk about transit choices and trade-offs. Stuff like: should we have more frequent buses along more centralized route, or less frequent buses heading out to each and every bit of the city. These are tough choice we’ll have to make as we work together on redesigning our bus system. Learn more tonight at the DMV from 6:00 – 8:00 PM, and if you can’t make it, take their online survey to catch the vibe of the types of things we’ve got to decide.

4th District folks! You have a newly declared councilperson! Kristen Larson, current 4th District School Board representative has decided to run for the council seat in that district. You do know which Council district you live in, right? If not, you can use the City’s parcel mapper to find out–which makes me realize…maybe we need a better way to answer that question for folks than sending them to the parcel mapper!

Folks who can’t vote! Virginia’s Republicans have hired a lawyer to sue Governor McAuliffe for restoring the voting rights of 206,000 felons. Proactively seeking to disenfranchise humans gives me the shivers.

Folks who sometimes want to own a chicken! Headline of the day, from WRIC: “Rent-A-Chicken now available in Richmond”

Folks for or against a new baseball stadium! This video of the visiting dugout at The Diamond during yesterday’s rain is nuts.

Folks who want to support Good Morning, RVA in a tangible way! Get thee to our Patreon.

Sports!

Leicester City has won the Premier League in a crazily unpredictable and totally SPORTS! moment. Now they party.

• The Squirrels game against Bowie was postponed due to weather yesterday, and I sure don’t hold out a lot of hope for tonight’s double headers slated for 5:35 PM.
• Nats picked up a win against the Royals last night, 2-0. Tonight’s game begins at 8:15 PM.
• Caps lost 2-3 to the Penguins and now trail 1-2 in the series.

This morning’s longread

The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here’s the Proof.

The title of this piece is kind of misleading, but I loved the pictures of this tiny, cold North Dakotan town.

Most cities change. Sometimes a corporation opens a factory on the edge of town, or it closes one. A city can endure a spurt of gentrification, or it can battle a meth epidemic. Over the span of years, a civilization can boom, like Austin, or it can bust, like Atlantic City, or it can do both, like Detroit. Cities morph – a bridge connects one neighborhood to another, a crime wave swells and retreats, a chain bank seizes a storefront, a Whole Foods disrupts property values, or a record store disappears. (The record store always disappears.) Inevitably, most places become something different. But not Napoleon.

This morning’s Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/p/BE7pNdMRyAo/

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May 3, 2016 7:17 AM 1