Good morning, RVA: Budget Session #3, the fiscal map, and finish the lyrics

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and if you can squeak past this morning’s chance of light rain, I think you’ll have a warm and dry day. Expect highs in the upper 70s and lots of clouds. For me, I’m definitely riding my bike in slip ons with one pant leg rolled up—my final form.

Water cooler

The City posted the video from this past Monday’s third budget session, and I’ve gone ahead and put it up on the Boring Show. This is when I make the joke about listening at 2x speed—which, for me, is not a joke and definitely what I actually do, and to hear Councilmembers speak at 1x speed when I see them in real life makes me feel like I’m dodging bullets in The Matrix. Anyway, this week’s episode clocks in at just over three hours, so you’re gonna want to set aside some serious time if you plan on listening. I’ll most likely permit it to pass over and through me during a couple bike rides and laundry foldings—you should do the same! If you’d rather just scroll through some slides, make sure you grab all three decks: the operating budget, the City’s revenue, and its compensation and benefits plan.

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Also, later on in the same day, Council held their regularly scheduled meeting and introduced two papers that we mostly already knew about, but I mention them just in case you want to add them to your own legislation tracker. First, ORD. 2024-111 would authorize the City to issue $170 million of general obligation bonds to cover the new ballpark and associated infrastructure. There are a couple related papers, too, that when grouped together enable the City’s new Diamond District financing mechanism. Second, ORD. 2024-110 will accept $100 million from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to help fund fixes to our aging sewer system. I’m pretty sure that this is not new money but state money from a previous budget or two we’d already heard about, but, still! It’s exciting to see ordinances accepting a hundred million bucks—especially for sewer repairs.

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While we’re talking about Council and their budget process, I found the presentation from the first budget work session about the “Richmond Children and Youth Fiscal Map.” Not only that, but here’s a public link to the fiscal map itself if you want to dig around and see if anything interesting pops out at you. I haven’t spent a ton of time with the tool yet, but I just lost 10 minutes of my morning exploring various services and their funding streams. There is a lot in here!

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Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the City’s new Diamond District financing mechanism will “free up money, allowing the city to buy Sports Backers Stadium earlier...VCU, in turn, will use that money to build a new track and field stadium across Hermitage Road.” This is the original plan from a couple yeas back, but VCU had hit pause on their new athletic facilities because the City had delayed buying Sports Backers Stadium. The whole thing sort of stumbled to a halt as economic conditions across the country shifted and the City reevaluated their options. Now, with the newly announced financing plan, both the Diamond District and VCU’s Athletics Village get back on track...but with the City taking on a lot of the financial risk. Is this good or bad? I bet we will hear a lot about it from a lot of folks in the coming weeks. P.S. For context, seven of nine councilmembers have already signed on to the above mentioned ordinance authorizing the new financing.

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Via Axios Richmond, this incredibly charming (and viral!) reel of students at Armstrong High School playing Finish the Lyrics. So good!

This morning's longread

An Ode to Women Who Walk, From Virginia Woolf to Greta Gerwig

I loved this piece about “women in films who walk through cities.” It sort of reminds me of my obsession with the way less interesting “sad men who ride buses in the rain and stare out the window.”

To be a Woman and a pedestrian in the city can be combative and exhausting but sometimes it reminds me that I am in charge and that I will propel myself forward, always forward. I love shots of women walking through cities in films. I like that they are alone and alive and, usually, wearing a nice coat. I like that even though they are a part of a bigger story, something grand or trivial, for those seconds they are removed of their storyline, the knots and tangles, and they are simply people, immersing themselves in the city, disappearing for a moment and allowing the noise of the world to eclipse the noise of their lives.

If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.

Picture of the Day

I sort of can’t believe these fiery tulips are real.