Good Morning, RVA: What to wear?
Cold now, warm later. Decisions, decisions!
Photo by: sally_monster
Good morning, RVA! It’s 36 °F, but today’s highs will hit the mid-60s. It’s one of those days you’ll need to wear a lot more clothes exiting than you will entering the house. Layer up wisely!
Water cooler
On Friday evening the mayor’s office posted both the proposed admendents to the biennial fiscal plan (PDF) and the proposed 2017-2021 capital improvement program (PDF). You should at least read the mayor’s letter at the front of either of these documents. One big takeaway is the intense discrepancy between the amount of funds asked for by the public school system for school facility maintenance and the amount included in the mayor’s capital improvement program. I made a chart about it. The administration says, “Regular preventative maintenance will provide quality environments for the students of the City of Richmond with the added benefit of achieving operational cost efficiencies”–which, to be fair, is good advice that we should definitely give ourselves should we become time travelers and head back several decades to when we decided to stop doing exactly that. It’s a little late now, though. On the table to make up the funding gap are the real estate tax referendum and new legislation the mayor will introduced that will “allocate a percentage of all incremental new real estate tax revenue to fund school construction and renovation projects.” School Board will meet tonight to discuss.
Oh, also, if the mayor’s budget is approved by Council (there are many, many meeting between now and July 1st when the new fiscal year begins), we’ll all be paying an extra $2.50 a month on our utility bills for leaf collection.
Wednesday at 5:30 PM our own Susan Howson will co-host Richmond Ballet’s Studio Two: In Studio Rehearsal Viewing & Reception. It’s a chance for you to get even up-closer and personal-er with the ballet folks as they work through doing the amazing things that they do. Plus, afterwards, you can schmooze a bit with the dancers and feel truly ungraceful and trundley.
There was a Democratic debate yesterday–no one made any off-color jokes. The New York Times has a recap and a nice table of where all the candidates stand after this weekend. More primaries tomorrow (Hawaii Republican caucus, Idaho Republican primary, Michigan, and Mississippi)!
Sports!
MARCH MADNESS!
- Rams couldn’t hold on to beat Dayton in overtime, falling 68-67. They won a share of the A-10 regular-season title and will play the winner of Rhode Island and Massachusetts on Friday at 6:30 PM.
- Spiders lost to George Mason, 73-83. Richmond and Fordham meet at 12:00 PM on Thursday in the Atlantic 10 Tournament.
- #4 Wahoos finished out the season with a 68-48 drubbing of Louisville. They’ll take on the winner of Clemson and Georgia Tech at 7:00 PM on Thursday.
- Hokies handled #7 Miami 77-62 to earn a 6-seed in the ACC tournament. Tech will face the winner of Florida State and Boston College on Wednesday at 9:00: PM.
This morning’s longread
The rise of American authoritarianism
Here’s that Trump piece everyone is talking about. You should defintiely read it–it gives you a great framework to understand what’s going on in America right now and hints at what the political landscape might be like after the elections.
And so the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians. And although the latter two groups are presently forced into an awkward coalition, the GOP establishment has demonstrated a complete inability to regain control over the renegade authoritarians, and the authoritarians are actively opposed to the establishment’s centrist goals and uninterested in its economic platform.
This morning’s Instagram
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Ross Catrow
Founder and publisher of RVANews.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
The cranky old man in me can’t help but gripe abut $2.50/mo for a service that residents use incorrectly (because leaving the leaves on my lawn kills the grass[the horror] I must push them into the streets, block travel lanes and clog the storm drains), is bad for your lawn in the first place (I have a great idea, let’s collect all the leaves that should be feeding our lawns and send them all to rot in one place and then go to [Big Box Home Stuff Store of Choice] and buy a bunch of chemical fertilizer type stuff to feed our lawn) and everyone complains about because after they push all their leaves into their road it does something crazy for winter like snows and then the road can neither be plowed nor cleaned. I say we charge a non-mulching and/or composting penalty rather than a service fee.