Good Morning, RVA: Tuesday, we meet again

City council, school board, cookie doughnut beers! One of these things is not like the other.

March 15, 2016; 7:12 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Brian PDX

Good morning, RVA! Its 50 °F, and once these clouds move out of here, today’s gonna be great. Expect highs in the 70s and some sunshine this afternoon–looking good Tuesday, looking good.

Water cooler

Last night, Council met and passed the Consent Agenda quickly, and it seemed like we were in for a short night. Then discussion moved to the only item on the regular agenda, ORD. 2015-192 (PDF), which calls for the City to create a place on the internet to host documents related to major city projects. Basically a webpage linking to PDFs. A bunch of folks were there from the mayor’s administration (an odd thing in and of itself) to frustratedly speak against the paper because they felt like it’d be too resource intensive to pull together all of the required documents for some of the City’s larger projects.

I can’t help but think this is a case of technology people and non-technology people communicating in different languages. Here’s what the patron of the ordinance, Parker Agelasto, referenced as an example several times: the Forest Hill Avenue Improvement Project page. This is a page lovingly created and maintained by a human. It is not an automatically updating dashboard. It does not require disparate databases scattered across the city to communicate with each other. It requires someone to know some stuff and update a webpage every once in a while. This seems doable. In fact, one of the City’s technology people even said they’d be willing to provide a stopgap solution of creating a couple pages with some links to information–which is exactly what the paper requests! But fear and confusion over the city’s mostly unrelated migration to a new permitting system led to the ordinance being continued. The vibe in the room made me feel like this ordinance will not pass when Council takes it up again in a couple of weeks, which is a shame.

On a related tip, Ned Oliver recaps yesterday’s combined School Board / City Council / Mayor’s Office meeting. Pros: The meeting took place! Cons: The mayor and senior staff left after an hour and a half and were unavailable to answer some low-level questions the School Board had about the proposed budget.

Also from the RTD, Michael Paul Williams calls out Chesterfield County for owning half of the GRTC while simultaneously excising it from their county.

Brad Kutner at RVA Mag informs me that Strangeways and Sugar Shack have a Samoa Porter collaboration. That’s a beer that tastes like a doughnut that tastes like a Girl Scout cookie…?!

Today is both the Ides of March and the day a large chunk of Republican delegates will be decided by primaries in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi. A Trump sweep (which would include defeating Kasich and Rubio in their home states) would go a long way to securing the nomination for that guy.

Sports!

The NCAA Tournament begins tonight at 6:40 PM, when Florida Golf Coast takes on Fairleigh Dickinson in the First Four followed by Vanderbilt vs. Wichita State. No need to rush, though, you’ve still got until Thursday to submit your brackets. So, chill, Winston!

If you need help filling out your bracket, I suggest FiveThirtyEight’s round-by-round predictions.

This morning’s longread

An A-Z of Women Pushing Boundaries in Science and Tech

March 8 is International Women’s Day, and to mark the occasion we’ve put together a list of just a small sample of women currently doing groundbreaking work in the fields of science and tech. History has overlooked or undermined women’s achievements in these areas in the past, and there’s still a clear gender divide today: Women are underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and continue to face issues from unconscious bias to open harassment. Here are just 26 women across disciplines whose work Motherboard has been keeping an eye on.

This morning’s Instagram

if I'm lost, then how can I find myself

A photo posted by Joel Woods (@joelwoodsvisuals) on Mar 14, 2016 at 5:24pm PDT

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March 15, 2016 7:12 AM 0