Good Morning, RVA: Councils, marches, voters, team ups, and patrons
What beautiful weather to start the week with!
Photo by @avareavesimages
Good morning, RVA! It’s 51 °F, and highs today will bust into the 80s. Expect tons of sun with some clouds rolling in around dinner time–all in all, a great start to the week.
Water cooler
It’s City Council night in RVA! Check out the full agenda, keeping in mind that thing is subject to change at the drop of a dang hat. There are a whole slew of budget amendments on the agenda, but based on the progress made in their last budget work session I’m gonna guess that they have a lot of sessioning left to do at today’s budget meeting (12:00 PM – 4:00 PM). Tune in tonight on channel 57 at 6:00 PM, and follow the #rvacouncil hashtag on Twitter.
Before the council meeting tonight, folks will march from Martin Luther King Jr. Middle to City Hall in support of fully funding Richmond Public Schools. If that sounds like your jam, meet in the MLK parking lot at 5:00 PM. If observing from afar is more your scene, expect to see lots of folks wearing white and red “Support RPS” shirts in City Council chambers tonight. Point of order: I don’t think there will be a public hearing on education-related things tonight, so don’t expect an endless hoard of public commenters like last time.
On Friday, Governor McAuliffe announced that he’d restored voting rights to over 200,000 felons, building on the work done by former Governor McDonnell. Virginia is one of only a handful of states where felons cannot vote until their rights are restored by the state, and previously this had been done on an individual basis. And who in the governor’s administration was in charge of voting rights restoration until super recently? Why, none other than newly-announced mayoral candidate Levar Stoney.
The Byrd Theatre will have two showings of Purple Rain this week: Wednesday at 9:30 PM and Saturday at 12:00 AM. I defintiely think that if you need a communal Prince singalong, this is your best opportunity.
Richmond Magazine’s Harry Kollatz Jr. has a bizarre story about how imprisoned developer Justin French contributed to this year’s RVA Street Art Fest. Worth reading if only to remember that Justin French was a thing.
If you’re not listening to Marc Cheatham’s Hip-Hop podcast, RVA Mag tells you why you should be. If hip-hop is not your thing, then check out his new show called The Table: A recording of community leaders talking about community issues. Creators! We need more things like this in Richmond.
What the butts! Beyoncé released a new album?!
Here’s a weird thing: Ted Cruz and John Kasich are teaming up defeat Donald Trump. This is like that time when Godzilla and Mothra teamed up against Ghidorah.
Speaking of weird things, we now have a Patreon! We get a lot of requests from our readers (and from our own brains) to try new things, but there are definitely more things to try than budgets we have. In fact, setting up a Patreon was one of those requests we got from time to time, and hopefully it’ll help fund further experiments–like bringing back the Good Morning, RVA podcast. Take a look, pledge some bucks or not, and let me know what you think.
Sports!
- Kickers fell to Charlotte, 2-3.
- Squirrels lost all three games against Altoona over the weekend. They start a new series with Bowie today at 6:35 PM.
- Meanwhile, the Nats won all three games against the Twins over the weekend.
- Caps beat the Flyers 1-0 on Sunday to advance to the next round of the Stanley Cup. They’ll face the Penguins at an as-yet-undecided time.
This morning’s longread
Jarrett Walker: Empty Buses Serve a Purpose
We will definitely be having tough conversations like this in 2016. Get ready, Richmond!
These conversations are becoming more and more essential as tight budgets and limited federal funding are bringing more scrutiny to transportation spending. Although transit agencies are generally serving more riders with less money, they are constantly asked to prove that they’re not wasting taxpayer funds. “One of the ways you can answer that kind of public demand is to have the ridership/coverage conversation,” Walker told Streetsblog, “because to the ordinary suburban voter’s mind, an empty bus driving around their subdivision looks like government waste. They don’t understand that it’s actually the result of conscious policy, namely a coverage policy, and that their own city leaders may have been fighting hard for that policy.”
This morning’s Instagram
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Ross Catrow
Founder and publisher of RVANews.
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