Good morning, RVA: Vacant properties, tax fixes, and a cool parks hangout

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today we’ve got more of the same ahead of us: Highs in the upper 50s and clear skies. I’ve got my eye on Saturday, which, according Weather.app, will dump over two inches of rain on our just-dried-out city. I guess if you’ve got outside plans, make sure they get done either today or tomorrow, because it’s gonna rain!

Water cooler

John Murden at South Richmond News has put the City’s list of vacant properties onto a Google Map that you can scroll around on. I love this sort of citizen data project, and, almost 17 years ago (gasp!), I put together something similar with the help of a dear friend who died back in 2018. Daniel was so smart and kind and curious, and I’m constantly wondering what creative projects he’d have thrown himself into to support his community through the pandemic. What a loss for Richmond!

Anyway, here’s my one story about running a website dedicated to highlighting the details of Richmond’s vacant properties: A thousand years ago in 2007, a couple of weeks after launching VacantRichmond.com, some random man showed up in my office and threatened me with...I guess violence? He wasn’t specific about his intentions, but he was pretty upset about how I’d highlighted the fact that he owned a bunch of vacant properties, had for years, and was, at least partially, responsible for a bunch of safety issues in several neighborhoods across the city. It was scary and we called the cops!

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Today, City Council’s Finance and Economic Development committee will meet to talk about a lot of stuff that’s way over my head and you can find that full agenda here. Still over my head, but low enough that I can just reach up and grasp it, two papers that try and clean up some of the meals tax collection issues from the past couple of months (ORD. 2024-081 and ORD. 2024-082). The first requires the Department of Finance to notify tax payers of any _over_payments to their accounts, while the second requires the Department of Finance to send a bill for unpaid taxes and fines 45 days before their due date each year. The first has broad support on Council and from the Mayor, while the second (at least so far) just lists Councilmember Lynch as its sole patron. I’d love to learn more about why and am interested to see if this paper makes it out of committee or falls down into the infinite blackhole of continuance. We’ll see!

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Dave Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the next round of bills the governor vetoed or signed into law. On the chopping block: A bunch of papers related to immigration, police, and drugs. Making its way fully through the bill-becomes-a-law process: HB 688, which permanently allows the sale of to-go cocktails.

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Stop by Basic City Beer Co (212 W. Sixth Street) tonight from 6:00–8:00 PM to hear James River Park System Superintendent Giles Garrison and Friends of the James River Park Executive Director Josh Stutz talk about what’s in store for one of Richmond’s best, wettest, and most important parks. These are two smart and excellent people that will probably have a smart and excellent conversation, so don’t miss out on the chance to learn a thing or two and the opportunity to ask either of them your most burningest JRPS questions.

This morning's longread

Make better documents.

Here’s some great advice about putting together your Very Important Business Documents. Honestly, whether you’re a bizperson or not, it’s something anyone who needs to share information with another human should read. Two important takeaways:

1. Please, please, please internalize the animated gif about formatting data tables. If you’d like to go further, and I hope you will, find a copy of Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information and prepare to have the way you look at chartsandgraphs forever changed.
2. The below excerpt is mostly about slide decks but is also great writing advice. Really try to limit what my good friend Susan calls “throat clearing.” Just get straight to your point already!

It's not a murder mystery. Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be building dramatic tension in a professional context; this isn't a thriller where you're trying to surprise them with twists and turns. It's perfectly fine to open with a key question or conclusion, step back to walk through the logic and context that leads to that point, and then restate at the end to drive towards your goal. But more often than not, if you don't set the stakes and make your point clear up top, you'll exhaust your audience, or leave them distracted trying to guess where you're headed all along the way.

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Picture of the Day

Just finishing up some work in the hammock.