Good morning, RVA: The Mayor’s budget, USPS, and City Stadium

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 44 °F, and rain should move into the region before lunch. As you’re trapped inside or hiding under eaves and awnings, you can expect highs in the mid 50s. The wet weather will most likely continue straight on through to tomorrow afternoon, dumping upwards of two inches of rain onto our already sodden region. Hang in there, because clear skies and a beautifully warm weekend sits just around the corner.

Water cooler

Today at 3:00 PM, Mayor Levar Stoney will introduce his FY25 budget at City Council Chambers. He’ll give some prepared remarks, which usually serve as a sort of budget executive summary, and, should you find yourself with some time to spare this afternoon, you can stream the whole thing live over on the City’s legislative website. PDFs of both the Annual Fiscal Plan (operating budget) and Capital Improvement Plan (capital budget) should be available online shortly thereafter. I’ll make sure to get the Mayor’s speech up on The Boring Show as soon as I can, because I’m sure it’ll be worth a listen.

By the way, I put this past Monday’s City Council kickoff session up last night, so, if you hurry, you can listen to that before the Mayor gets to speechifying later this afternoon. It’s only 38 minutes long—just 19 minutes at 2x—and something you could crush out on your morning commute or maybe even while eating breakfast. Oh, also, you should just subscribe to The Boring Show in the podcast player of your choice, too.

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Participatory budgeting—where you, a Richmond resident, get an actual say in how the City spends $3 million of its money—has been a long time coming. Now the wheels have started to turn, the opportunities to get involved have started to pop up, and I’m starting to get pretty excited. If you’d like to learn more about the process, you can head on over to the Powhatan Hill Community Center tonight at 6:00 PM for the second participatory budgeting workshop. If you tapped through the previous link, also got excited, and don’t want to wait all the way until this evening, then I recommend downloading the really well-put-together People’s Budget Richmond Rulebook. It’ll give you some of the PB specifics and slake your PB appetite until tonight’s meeting.

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Hayleigh Colombo and Luca Powell at the Richmond Times-Dispatch have an interesting report on the situation with Richmond’s mail delivery. I think, anecdotally, we all know that Something Is Amiss with the Postal Service, and I had sort of chalked it up to underfunding and the wrongheaded idea that USPS needs to fully fund its own operations—a more general set of issues facing post offices all across the country. However, what I didn’t realize is that the Trump-appointed Postmaster General decided to implement his grand vision for “fixing” the mail in Richmond’s own Sandston facility: “Richmond’s Sandston facility was the first facility in the country to undergo DeJoy’s efficiency makeover, which began in 2023.” So maybe the issues facing our region’s mail delivery really are specific to Richmond? We’ll learn more soon, because USPS’s Office of Inspector General plans to release a “thorough examination of systemic failures” in the next couple of weeks. Yikes, that’s some intense framing on that future PDF!

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Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania has good news for soccer fans: The Kickers will install a new, 65 foot x 35 foot video scoreboard in City Stadium this coming summer. City Stadium is old, like 95 years old, and I love that we’ve found a fun way to keep it in use while also slowly modernizing it here and there.

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Congratulations to VPM’s Ben Paviour who “was recently selected by The New York Times to become a part of their 2024-25 Local Investigations Fellowship cohort.” Paviour will continue to work in Richmond but will focus on “Virginia’s judicial appointment system.” Fascinating, and I’m looking forward to reading what comes out of Paviour’s fellowship...with the actual New York Times(!!).

This morning's longread

The Magic of Bird Brains

This article’s subhed is great: “Crows are smart enough to pick up trash. Why won’t they?” And it’s like, I dunno, humans are smart enough to pick up trash, too, and you don’t see us doing that either.

Klein, the inventor of the “crow vending machine,” has called himself a “passionate hacker of all things,” but, the more I watched crows in the Jardin des Plantes, the more I wondered who was hacking whom. I saw crows fish McDonald’s bags out of trash cans and follow strollers and toddlers, knowing that children were more likely to drop crumbs. They visited the garden’s menagerie, one of the world’s oldest zoos, to raid food from the llama and rhea enclosures. Evolution had empowered crows to expose the weak spots in our designs, and I found myself admiring their mischief as a rebellion against our hubris. “Crows and ravens have co-evolved with us since the time of Neanderthals, and yet we’ve never domesticated them,” Marzluff, the Seattle ecologist, told me. The real mark of crow genius may be its ability to maintain independence in spaces that humans think of as their own.

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Picture of the Day

Bringing Up Baby spoilers.