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In the 1960s and ’70s, city planners around the nation experimented with pedestrian malls in an attempt to draw people to city centers.

But just a few decades later, many of those malls failed. Today, Charlottesville’s mall is one of only a few dozen remaining, like the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado.

“Fifty years means a lot, because it just shows that it has staying power,” said Mayor Juandiego Wade.

Read more here.

Man, it's a hot one. It feels like we're seven inches from the midday sun.

Temperatures are rising in Central Virginia, with a heat dome bringing high temperatures around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and heat indexes as high as the low 110s to the region for the next few days.

In response, cooling stations are open across Richmond and Central Virginia to help bring some relief from the heat.

Check out where to find cooling stations in the area here.

The James River is “lower than we’d like to see at this time of year,” Richmond Mayor Danny Avula wrote in his weekly newsletter on Wednesday.

Avula added that the voluntary water conservation measures aren't a sign of an impending water shortage. The aim is to reduce “extreme or unnecessary” water usage so daily water usage isn’t interrupted, the mayor said.

“The James River Regional Flow Management Plan sets specific metrics for conservation specifically to make sure our region keeps our water sources sustainable,” Avula wrote.

Read more here.

Oak, spruce and palm trees may share a few visible characteristics, but outside of their appearance, the only thing that connects them is the fact that they’re called “trees.”

So, how does someone determine what kind of tree they’re looking at — or if it’s even a tree in the first place?

Students at Libbie Mill Library in Henrico County were tasked with answering this question last Thursday, during an introductory course on how to identify and document tree types led by members of Capital Trees.

The nonprofit has worked to create, enhance and restore public green spaces in the Richmond region since 2010. Executive Director Shelly Barrick Parsons and others taught participants to examine canopy coverage and collect environmental data that supports the county’s long-term environmental restoration and preservation efforts.

Read more here.

Hanover County’s staff will develop a policy around data centers after supervisors discussed whether to further tax the industry, a subject that’s been widely contested by state lawmakers.

The board’s public hearing on Wednesday had been put off during the annual budget process, but supervisors opted to maintain the existing rate for computer equipment and devices used on data campuses at 45 cents per $100 of assessed value.

South Anna Supervisor Sue Dibble said it would be premature to raise taxes without fully understanding the impact.

“I think this decision, if we made it tonight, would be very worrisome for me, because I just don't feel like we've looked at it deep enough,” Dibble said Wednesday.

Instead, supervisors voted for the community development committee to draft an ordinance around data center development, while the county’s finance committee studies equipment tax rates across the commonwealth.

County staff presented supervisors with a preliminary report in April that shows Hanover's data centers are taxed at a relatively low rate compared to other localities.

Read more here.

Virginia lawmakers on Monday approved a budget for the upcoming biennium that will fully eliminate locally-maintained waitlists for a popular childcare program in the state.

According to Virginia Department of Education staff, the budget (which will run from July 1 to June 30, 2028) will eliminate waitlists for the federally- and state-subsidized Child Care Subsidy Program regardless of age and allow for a "moderate amount of growth," just shy of 10%.

Last June, there were nearly 13,000 children on a waitlist for the Child Care Subsidy Program, according to data VPM News obtained through public records requests. Now, that number is down to just over 2,000 — which VDOE attributed, at least in part, to a "targeted effort" to offer slots to eligible families and clear those who no longer needed the slots from the waitlist.

The budget deal — which has yet to be finalized after Gov. Abigail Spanberger announced earlier this week that she plans to make "technical amendments" to the spending plan — will generate roughly 6,700 new slots through increased funding for the program. VDOE officials told VPM News that they anticipate being able to fill those slots quickly.

Amendments to the current budget passed last year, which increased copayments for families, were projected to create an additional 2,900 slots a year, according to a VDOE presentation. The state last year also implemented a work requirement for families to receive subsidized care.

Read more here.

New regulations taking effect next January will shine more light on how much water data centers use in Virginia — though information on specific facilities is still protected as a trade secret. And a state budget amendment seeks to add more reporting requirements.

Instead of ordering data centers to report their individual monthly water usage, the new law requires waterworks operators to categorize their monthly sales reporting data.

Operators will have to split it up into usage by data centers with state air permits, domestic users, industrial and commercial users and all other non-categorized purposes. That usage will be split into potable and non-potable withdrawals.

State Sen. Kannan Srinivasan (D–Loudoun) carried the bill — passed into law at the General Assembly this year — which orders the new data breakdown. He said while presenting the measure to fellow legislators that it fills a gap in data.

"This is a transparency bill," Srinivasan said. "There's a lot of opaqueness, and that clearly hurts everyone, including the data center industry, because they've done a lot of innovation and it doesn't show in any report."

Srinivasan also said the reports would be an important tool for the state Department of Environmental Quality for water supply planning, particularly during droughts.

Read more here.

Are there bears living among us, even in the middle of Virginia's capital city?

When asked whether it's likely there's a bear in Richmond City right now, biologist Pete Acker's answer is unequivocal.

"Almost certainly, yes," says the terrestrial biologist with Virginia's Department of Wildlife Resources.

Acker was the one who relocated the Oregon Hill bear, and it wasn't his first urban bear extraction. He says he does about one a year.

To help figure out where the Oregon Hill bear had come from, Acker spent a morning with VPM News driving around the city to piece together bear sightings reported online alongside Acker's own strategy.

"I'll look at the satellite imagery and look for wooded areas, which are usually river systems, creeks, streams — the James River, in this case, potentially," Acker explains.

Read more here.

After already spending millions, Virginia's Department of Social Services shut down a two-year long IT project to overhaul the state's outdated child support enforcement system. 

By 2023, Virginia had the second oldest federally certified child support computer system in the US, which was set to reach the end of its useful life on June 30, 2024, per a statement of work between DSS and the company it chose to implement the system overhaul. 

State officials are now trying to figure out what to do with the system, which in 1998 Virginia's nonpartisan legislative watchdog described as "antiquated" and unable to perform vital functions. Since a second critical JLARC report, published in 2000, there's no readily available documentation showing the state tried to address ongoing issues until 2023. 

Shital Thekdi, professor of analytics and operations at the University of Richmond's Robins School of Business, said IT infrastructure is more vulnerable because it's less visible and ages quietly. 

"It doesn't gain as much attention, and I think that's what leads it to be somewhat neglected at times," she said. "Unfortunately, in the public sector, change doesn't happen unless it gets on the plate of the people who are in position to talk about it and make change."

Click here to read more.

After a nationwide search, the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors selected Kevin Catlin as the next county administrator. It’s the first time a Black person has been named to the local post.

Catlin, 35, comes to Chesterfield from Kalamazoo County, Michigan, where he was also the county administrator and controller. In that role, he managed a $325 million annual budget and a workforce of about 1,000, according to a press release. At $2.3 billion and roughly 4,000 people, Chesterfield’s purse and staff headcount are significantly larger.

“I'm not arriving with the belief that I have all the answers,” Catlin told the crowd at the 1917 Courthouse Monday. “And in fact, one of the reasons I was attracted to this opportunity is because of the strength of the team already in place.”

Catlin, who starts in the role on Aug. 24, replaces the departing Joe Casey, whose retirement (announced in December) is effective July 1. Deputy County Administrator Matt Harris will serve as the interim until late August.

Click here to read more.

Chesterfield County looks poised — perhaps in less than two years — to become home to 1,500 acres of Google data centers, as the tech company makes a $9 billion investment in data center "campuses" in three locations across the county. 

The first campus announced last year, Project Peanut, is slated to go into Chester on Bermuda Hundred Road. The second site, Project Skye, is to be built on Watkins Center Parkway in Midlothian. And the third center, Project Loch, is slated for Moseley Road, west of state Route 288. 

Chesterfield residents have voiced concerns over what they consider to be a lack of transparency, including use of nondisclosure agreements, from the county's board of supervisors, which greenlit the three projects in a public vote while concealing Google's involvement. An online petition is circulating demanding more accountability from the board. 

Mary Finley-Brook, a professor and researcher at the University of Richmond and a Chesterfield County resident, has been studying issues relating to data centers — in particular, their environmental impacts and the effects of NDAs on the public's access to information about them. She first heard of Google's plans to build data centers in Chesterfield last summer. 

"As I'm talking about how this is going down in other locations, it was actually happening in my own community, and I didn't know because of a nondisclosure agreement," Finley-Brook told VPM News.

Click here to read more.

Virginia Commonwealth University has affiliated childcare options for students and faculty at three Richmond locations, but all are at capacity and have long waitlists. That's why two VCU medical students, who are also new moms, say the university must expand access on or near campus.

“We really think that there is the potential to reshape what childcare looks like at VCU,” said Emily Notari, one of the students. 

The students are framing the problem as a workforce issue. After surveying more than 100 parents who are also students, researchers and resident physicians at VCU, more than half reported lacking reliable childcare while balancing academic obligations. The majority said they’d considered stepping back from their programs — or leaving them altogether.  

A VCU spokesperson said in a statement the university is “not currently prepared” to expand its Child Development Center but is “interested in finding opportunities to support more families in the future, particularly in providing infant care, which is highly desired by new families in the area.”

Click here to read more.

A coalition of Virginia’s tribal nations is rallying to protect what they describe as one of the most significant Indigenous sites in the commonwealth’s history — a place deeply tied to the origins of Chief Wahunsenacawh, more commonly known as Chief Powhatan.

Development plans for the site of Tree Hill Farm have sat idle for several years after being initially approved in 2007, but a real estate developer announced an agreement in 2024 to buy the property and revive those plans.

Ashley Spivey, a member of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe and an anthropologist who works with tribal communities to preserve important cultural and historic resources, is one of the drivers of an effort not just to preserve the Tree Hill site, but to ensure that Indigenous people have a greater say in what happens to sites that are important to their culture and identity.

“We know that it’s in our best interest to come together and work together to ensure a place like Powhatan’s village or birthplace is protected,” Spivey said.

Click here to read more.

It has been three months since lawmakers adjourned the 2026 legislative session without a budget over disagreements on whether to end a sales tax exemption for data centers. The disagreement is not between parties: Democrats' control the House of Delegates, State Senate, and governor's mansion, which Republicans frequently reference.

Both chambers were scheduled to meet in a special session on the budget: The House of Delegates was set to meet Thursday but abruptly canceled. In a statement, House Speaker Don Scott (D–Portsmouth) said, "No budget agreement has been reached yet, so there is no reason for members to show up Thursday. The House is firmly committed to passing a full, balanced budget, and we will not return until we have one ready to vote on."

The Virginia Senate gavels in on Monday. The commonwealth's fiscal year ends June 30.

Spanberger spoke to VPM News at the Patrick Henry Building on Monday. Tuesday, the Senate Finance & Appropriations Committee released more details on a proposal that would put a fee on data centers based on their permitted generators, taking in $1.7 billion in the next budget cycle, which runs from July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2028.

Click here to read (or watch — there's a video) the interview.

Just a month ago, Spanberger's compromise with state Sen. Lashrecse Aird (D–Henrico) and Del. Paul Krizek (D–Fairfax) appeared unlikely due to their divisions over how to set up a cannabis marketplace.

Spanberger's veto of Aird and Krizek's cannabis market bills seemed to doom Virginia's chances of having a retail cannabis market sooner than later, but a deal emerged after weeks of negotiations.

"We all wanted to deliver a marketplace that the commonwealth could implement effectively for the long term," Spanberger said Tuesday alongside Aird and Krizek. "We have always had this same end goal, an end goal that has been years in the making."

Though the budget needs to be finalized for the compromise to become a reality, the deal likely marks the end of Virginia's wait for retail recreational marijuana.

Click here to read the full article.

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Editor's note: I'm fully delighted to have achieved yet another headline on vpm-dot-org. —dmpl

The two-year, $73.7B spending plan includes funding for a number of state Senate priorities, according to a summary document:

• a 3% teacher raise
• funding for additional school construction projects
• grants to localities with critical drinking water projects 
• money for local dam repairs and improvement

It also maintains the data center tax exemption. (Senate Finance Chair L. Louise Lucas has not provided comment to us yet.) And yes, as WVTF's/Radio IQ's Brad Kutner already reported, it includes retail weed (but linking it is kinda wonky rn).

Click here to read the whole article.

Scott Hempling's address to state lawmakers in a Tuesday meeting of the Energy Commission of Virginia on the proposed $67 billion mega-merger of Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy started out complimentary.

"I want to state how impressed I am with this committee's work plan, and with the fact that it's talking about a merger before the merger has happened," Hempling said. "I've never seen this type of legislative attention in advance, and so I want to applaud you for that."

He should know: Hempling's a national utility merger expert who has worked on more than a dozen of them in his career.

But his tone changed when he learned that legislative action is unlikely to happen before the merger proceedings at the State Corporation Commission wrap up.

"If you're making a decision that there will be no statutory change before the merger is processed by the commission, the only thing you could do at this point is get them more resources," Hempling said. "That, to me, seems like a position of weakness that you don't deserve."

The issue is timing: Once a merger application is filed to the SCC, a statutory 180-day clock begins. And the General Assembly isn't scheduled to convene on new legislation until Jan. 13, 2027 (some 200-odd days away) — though it will meet later this month to finish the state spending plan.

Click here to read the full article.

In early June, dozens of volunteers tucked alewife floater mussels into the stream bed, where they will filter contaminants out of gallons of water daily, serve as a food source for fish and aquatic mammals and reproduce with the help of river herring. 

None of this was possible two years ago, when the nearly 200-year-old Ashland Mill Dam still stood about nine miles downstream of the new mussel habitat, preventing the migratory alewife and other species from moving further upstream. The dam was removed in 2024, reopening 42.1 miles of river and streams to fish, according to The Nature Conservancy.

Due to the freshwater mussels’ unique life cycle, the dam effectively caused any upstream mussel populations to go extinct, according to Joe Wood, chief staff scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

“These organisms are kind of like living rocks,” Wood said. “They’ve got a foot, they can nestle around a little bit in the sediments, but they live in systems that generally go one way and so they’re at risk of being washed out.”

Habitat biologists see mussels as a key species in the effort to clean up the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Like oysters, they filter gallons of water each day for food, making the water more clear.

Click here to read more.

Chesterfield County Public Schools approved the calendar for the 2027–28 school year during its meeting earlier this month. And while it includes holidays for periods covering Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah, the finalized calendar did not add Diwali.

That means Suchit Gandhi will have to wait to realize his vision of having CCPS recognize Diwali, the “Festival of Lights” celebrated by religious faiths primarily within the Indian diaspora — including Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism.

“We’re disappointed as a community,” said Gandhi, who has a daughter entering sixth grade at Tomahawk Creek Middle School. “I found that I’m kind of not sure what the process is to move the needle. … From our perspective, it just becomes a black-box process.”

Gandhi, who launched an online petition last fall to urge CCPS to adopt the holiday, told VPM News he was frustrated, but wasn’t giving up.

“I'm going to restrategize and try to figure out how else I can come to the board,” Gandhi said. “The petition hasn’t worked, speaking to the board hasn’t worked. I’m not sure what else I could do.”

Click here to read more.

Much of the current impasse over Virginia's budget hinges on whether the state's business reputation will be thrown into question if a sales tax exemption ends early.

Virginia provides a lucrative tax break for data centers, exempting certain computer equipment from state sales taxes. It was first implemented in 2008 and exempted the industry from paying between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2025. (Computer equipment makes up most of the investment involved in running a new data center.)

ICYMI: The General Assembly gaveled out of its regular legislative session in March without a statewide spending plan — in part over a dispute around the exemption:

• The Virginia Senate is seeking an early end to the tax break, which is set to run until June 30, 2035.
• Both the House of Delegates and Gov. Abigail Spanberger have said they would prefer it to continue.

Much of their argument centered on the potential hit to Virginia's standing as a business-friendly state. Critics of the sales tax exemption point to agreements with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership to argue the exemption is not, in fact, a guarantee.

Virginia's 2026 fiscal year ends June 30.

Click here to read more.