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Ambulance charges may dramatically increase
$600 trips to medical centers could more than double
City Hall is pressuring the Richmond Ambulance Authority to nearly triple its charge for transporting patients to hospitals or other treatment centers based on a consulting firm’s recommendation, the Free Press has learned.

City voter registrar to host June 22 ‘Drive Up, Drop Off!’
Early voting in Richmond is jumping in popularity ahead of the Tuesday, June 23, party primary, and city Voter Registrar Kirk Showalter is taking an extra step to ensure mail-in ballots get counted.
NSU, VSU expect to enroll 400 to 500 fewer students this year
Fewer students enroll at NSU and VSU

Room to grow
Anna Julia Cooper Episcopal School seeks to expand with help from city
A private Episcopal school in the East End that currently offers a tuition-free education to l08 children mostly from low-income families living in public housing is working with the city to buy an acre of land for its first big expansion.

Training program for released convicts faces shutdown
Rodney Brown had just served a six-year sentence in prison in 2018 when he found his way to the nonprofit Adult Alternative Program at 4929 Chamberlayne Ave. in the city’s North Side.

RRHA to sell 26 homes to highest bidders
A major opportunity to create affordable homes for families with below average incomes in Richmond is going by the wayside.

A helping hand is just a call away
Need help with housing or utility costs? Want to learn about child care options? Looking for employment? So many people say they don’t know where to start to get the answers they need.

City starts down road to regulate short-term rentals
Want to use Airbnb, FlipKey, VRBO or other online websites to rent your Richmond home or apartment to travelers?

Supply and demand
City’s ‘housing crisis’ calls for 23,000 affordable living spaces
Seeking to put fresh emphasis on an issue that has been on the agenda for at least a decade, City Council on Monday followed through and joined Mayor Levar M. Stoney in “declaring a housing crisis in the city of Richmond.”

Lynx Ventures agrees to pay $500,000 for former school
The 5-acre site where the decaying and long vacant Oak Grove Elementary School now stands in South Side is on its way to becoming a complex of apartments and townhouses.

McQuinn may be unseated from Slave Trail Commission
For 12 years, Richmond Delegate Delores L. McQuinn has led the city’s Slave Trail Commission to bring attention to the history and legacy of slavery in Richmond.

Advocates charge transit plan ignores needs of regular riders
Despite an outpouring of concern that regular bus riders, largely African-Americans, are being ignored and overlooked, Richmond City Council voted 9-0 Monday to endorse a proposed overhaul of current GRTC routes aimed at speeding up regular service and connecting riders with the east-west Pulse bus rapid transit system now under construction.

Hanging around
City still mulling offers for city-owned Confederate statues removed last year from Monument Avenue and other Richmond locations.
Richmond removed in 2020 almost all of the city-owned Confederate statues that marred the landscape with their white supremacist message. But getting rid of the statues is proving to be harder.

Plans to house homeless citizens gain ground pending City funding
City Hall is preparing to shell out $615,000 to Commonwealth Catholic Charities (CCC) and other nonprofits or churches that have agreed to provide space to shelter the homeless during inclement weather, particularly the cold weather period that runs now through mid-April.

Harold C. Glenn, also known as ‘Soul Santa,’ dies at age 90
During a time that it was rare for a Black person to play the familiar holiday role of Santa Claus anywhere in the country, that fact did not deter Harold Cecil Glenn.

VSU, NSU have smallest freshman classes in years
Enrollment is continuing to retreat at Virginia’s two historically black public universities, Norfolk State and Virginia State. Both institutions apparently have admitted their smallest freshman classes in at least a decade, and total enrollment has declined to levels not seen in at least 15 years or longer.

Green light shines on Diamond District
The huge plan to redevelop 67 acres of publicly owned land around The Diamond baseball stadium has a green light — despite questions about the soundness of its financial structure.

Bus Rapid Transit
Can Richmond afford to maintain proposed expensive bus service?
Can Richmond afford to operate the proposed Bus Rapid Transit system that promises speedier travel and is described as the biggest revamp in public bus service in the city in at least 50 years?

Trump’s mob sparks violence
After spurring violence, chaos and an attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol, President Trump urged his mob of supporters to go home, telling them, ‘We love you. You’re very special.’
Thousands of President Trump’s supporters — with his encouragement — sought to seize the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Wednesday and halt the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives from completing the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election as the nation’s next chief executive.

$1.1M needed for new voting equipment
Richmond is hoping to borrow voting machines to use in the upcoming June 9 Democratic primaries. At the same time, the city voter registrar is seeking more than $1.1 million from the city government to buy new voting equipment to use in the November general election. The city is one of 30 localities facing an emergency situation involving voting machines. The upheaval is the result of Tuesday’s action by the state Board of Elections decertifying the WINVote touch-screen machines that the 30 localities have used in their elections for 10 years. The board’s action essentially bans the use of the WINVote machines in any future elections, including the June 9 primaries that will be held in Richmond and nine other localities.