Good morning, RVA: Weather, Council priorities, and the new stadium

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today you should expect cloudier skies with highs in the 60s. A bunch more rain shows up tomorrow morning and will probably hang around until Thursday evening, so get ready for another couple days of squishy, soggy weather.

It sure seems like it’s been a wet March, doesn’t it? I wanted to know if my gut feeling matched reality, or if I’m just annoyed about how all the wet weather keeps me from riding my bicycle as often as I’d like. So, I turned to my favorite, overly complex weather website, which says that days with “at least 0.04 inches of liquid or liquid-equivalent precipitation” are considered wet days, and in March we typically see 8.5 wet days. Turns out, so far this month, we’ve had seven wet days—just the regular amount! As is often the case, my gut is just frustrated and wishes it were riding a bicycle.

Water cooler

While I await the video from yesterday’s Budget Season kickoff meeting with City Council, Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details to tide me over. To get ready for the Mayor’s budget presentation on Wednesday, Council has put together five big buckets to hold all of their own priorities: Strong futures for children and families; safe and clean neighborhoods; strategic infrastructure projects; planned growth, economic progress, and affordable housing; and responsible, accountable, and innovative government. If you really want to dig in, you can scroll through this 48-page PDF—hop down to page 30 for the list of specific priorities City Council wants funded and how much each of those priorities will cost. Next up: On Wednesday we’ll get to see how closely Council’s vision aligns with the Mayor’s vision.

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Charlotte Rene Woods, also at the RTD reports that, surrounded by cake pops, the Governor signed the “cake pop bill” (HB 759). This new law allows folks to market “low-risk foods, like baked goods and pickles” via social media without drawing the ire of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. If you decide to read the aforelinked article, prepare yourself for a lot of Republicans tramping around shouting about reducing regulation and the limiting the size and scope of government. Mostly, I think it’s neat that this lady, Kelly Phillips of KP’s Kake Pops, will now have a cool story to tell about how she changed state law. I wish I had a story like that!

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Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers got ahold of the first renderings of the City’s new baseball stadium. Make sure you orient yourself property to the article’s header image! Notice how the new stadium will nicely front Arthur Ashe Boulevard, unlike The Diamond which puts two huge triangles of parking along the street and totally kills the vibe.

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A couple weeks ago I linked to the Newlin Music Prize—an award given to Richmond’s best new album—as a great source of new, local music. Yesterday, they announced that Butcher Brown’s Solar Music has won the $2,500 cash prize plus a bunch of honor and bragging rights. Tap through to see the full short list of nominees and make sure you add them all to your queue.

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Early this morning a huge container ship ran into one of the piers supporting the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and the entire thing immediately collapsed. The video is terrifying, like a horror film, and I can’t stop watching it. I think because we don’t often see infrastructure collapse in such an acute way in America—typically our infrastructure decays over decades. As of about 6:30 AM, emergency responders were conducting a rescue effort for people who were driving across the bridge when it collapsed.

This morning's longread

The Publicly-Traded Presidential Candidate

I’d sort of missed / ignored the news about Trump’s social network, Truth Social, going public. Snooze fest, right? Well, maybe not, since major corporations or foreign governments can just dump a ton of money into this publicly traded company, and, as the stock prices go up, directly enrich a presidential candidate. This longread calls it the first “publicly-traded presidential candidacy,” and that feels scary and new.

Will there be any restrictions on who can own stock in DJT? Such limitations would be difficult to enforce, particularly if there are intermediaries or big funds involved. This means the Russians, Chinese and Saudis could each take huge institutional stakes in DJT as a publicly-traded company very much tied to the possible future president. This would make the notion of foreign governments renting rooms at Trump hotels look quaint by comparison. Imagine come 2025 that big, wealthy buyers hold commanding stakes in Trump’s net worth, and he is now the president. What wouldn’t he do to stay in their good graces? Our jurisprudence around the Emoluments Clause isn’t set up to handle such a situation. I’ve read many pieces about how Trump is set to be worth $3.4 billion more next week, but I’ve seen nothing so far warning of the dangers of a publicly-traded presidential candidacy. We are in wholly uncharted waters.

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Picture of the Day

Floral carpet.