Good morning, RVA: That’s no moon, Diamond District financing, and Virginia serifs

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and today looks absolutely lovely. Expect clear skies for most of the day and, after lunch, highs in the 70s. Other than some rain Thursday evening, this week’s weather look great. I hope I’ll see you out there!

Water cooler

Reminder! We’ve got a partial eclipse (of the heart) today! The astronomical party starts at 2:02 PM and runs through 4:31 PM, but peaks right at 3:19 PM. Schools have changed schedules, business will have rescheduled meetings, and people will probably stare up into the sun while driving their cars. Enjoy, because the next eclipse visible from the Commonwealth will take place on May 11th, 2078.

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City Council will hold Budget Session #3 today at 12:30 PM, and you can stream the meeting from the City’s website. From the recently updated budget meeting schedule, it looks like Council will hear an overview of the Mayor’s proposed budget (both operating and capital) and then discuss “revenues from estimated interest income.” Just like how last week’s budget session was an excellent way to grok the RPS budget, I imagine today’s budget session will be your best best at understanding—at least at a high level—this year’s proposed budget.

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Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports on a potential change to the financing of the Diamond District redevelopment plan: “In a proposal that will be presented to City Council today, administrators are recommending that the city issue its own revenue bonds to fund the stadium and infrastructure for the development’s first phase, rather than having bonds issued through a community development authority (CDA)...The city would assume more risk with the approach. It would be responsible for repaying the general obligation bond debt should the developer default or the project not succeed in paying for itself over time through incremental financing of tax revenues generated by the development.” Stressful! But, on the positive side, interest rates for the City are about half of what they would be for the CDA, and the City’s CAO says Richmond’s current debt capacity would not be impacted (that’s the amount of money the City can borrow). Also, I keep thinking about this sentence I read in the Richmond Times-Dispatch over the weekend: “Currently, the Squirrels pay the city $200,000 a year and VCU pays $134,000. Both are expected to pay significantly more at the new stadium — possibly more than $3 million for the Squirrels and $500,000 for VCU.” Who knows if that’s true, but maybe that extra $3.2 million—plus any incremental tax revenue—covers the bond payments? Municipal finance: Who can say!

Anyway, I’m interested to see how Council reacts, because the lower level of financial risk was one of the big differences between this project and Navy Hill.

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Remember a couple weeks ago when Governor Youngkin stumped around the state standing behind a podium that said “THE BACKWARD BUDGET”? Well, today, at 1:00 PM, he’ll reveal what he thinks is a compromise, and this one also has a proper-noun name: the Common Ground Budget (TBD if it’s stylized in all-caps or not). Stay tuned for more details tomorrow—including whether or not the Governor found a way to wriggle out of rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

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OK, this post on Mastodon from Taber, a person I’ve know on the internet for forever, absolutely blew my mind: “do appreciate about Virginia how it’s the only state that stamps car license tags in a serif typeface.” Not only that, but this incredibly comprehensive but very early-90s-looking website purports that Virginia’s license plate is the only fully-seriffed license plate seen in any western country. That’s pretty neat, but there’s probably a reason for this, right? Like readability? The aforelinked website continues, with a disapproving tone, “The serif style of the alphas is different, with characters inconsistent in form and weight from one character to the next.“ I dunno, I think I’d miss our inconsistent form and weight if it were gone.

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Northsiders! The James River Association will host a cool, tree-related volunteer opportunity this coming Friday, April 12th, at the North Avenue Library. They need about 35 people, for both a morning and an afternoon shift, to come out and help plant trees around the library and expand the neighborhood’s tree canopy. You know what they say: The best time to plant a tree next to the local library was 30 years ago, but the second best time is this coming Friday, April 12th!

This morning's longread

Friendship Ended With GOOGLE Now KAGI Is My Best Friend

I switched to a paid Kagi account a couple months ago and haven’t once looked back. Even if none of Kagi’s advanced features speak to you (like prioritizing certain websites, building custom search “lenses,” and AI whatevers), I guarantee that using an ad-free, user-focused search engine will make your day better. It’s definitely worth the $10 per month!

For some additional reading, here’s a Cory Doctorow post about Google Search’s decay in which he writes about switching to Kagi, and here’s the Daring Fireball post that got me to first give it a try.

After more than three months of using it, I am pleased to report that it is worth every penny and that I will probably not ever switch back to Google unless Kagi becomes significantly worse or Google reverses years of annoying interface and search decisions that have prioritized ads, sponsored results, spammy affiliate content, and AI-generated results. Besides not having ads itself, Kagi also “will actively down-rank sites with lots of ads and trackers in the results and promote sites with little or no advertising.” The nicest thing I can say about Kagi is that it has fully faded into the background of my life, and that I do not really realize or think about the fact that I am using Kagi. I mean this in a good way.

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

Weird shadows from our last eclipse back in 2017.