Bountiful Boxing Day Wishes to all!

A promotional edition of the newsletter on this non-holiday holiday

Hello everyone from north of Philadelphia where I am visiting family. It had been my intention to publish a regular newsletter and podcast today but I am aiming instead to publish on Wednesday morning. 

In the two and a half year history of this publication, I’m not sure if I’ve ever sent out an email such as this one. I want to thank each of you for following along and listening and being part of this experiment in local and regional journalism. I hope that your holiday season is going well and that this Boxing Day is the best ever!

What lessons can be drawn from a trip to New Hope, Pennsylvania, where the Delaware River did not freeze this weekend?

You may also note that yesterday there was no Week Ahead. That is because I can only find one meeting listed on the various calendars that I review each week, but I cannot seem to find an agenda.  It’s doubtful anyone is working today in local government.

Within the last hour, I did post an edition of the Fifth District Community Engagement newsletter. I’ve been publishing that now since the middle of May and hope to continue learning about the 18 localities that are not the usual ones covered here. A major goal is to learn more about how other jurisdictions do things to help me ask better questions. 

Tomorrow morning I will post the November 2022 property transactions before getting back on the road. These will go first to paid subscribers and then they will be posted to Information Charlottesville later in the week. In 2023 I will create more additional content as I continue to become more efficient in this work. 

Speaking of Information Charlottesville, I want to take this opportunity to explain a bit more about that experiment. I enjoy Substack and feel confident in their ability to help me grow. But, the format of this newsletter makes it difficult to find what I’ve written. Now there are hundreds of articles and in 2023 I hope to expand the site to invite columns from others. How will that look? Let’s look back in a year!

If you are interested in updates on when new newsletters are coming out, please join the chat function here on Substack. They are still rolling it out and it’s only available on mobile devices. I have stopped using Twitter and Facebook is not a good way to communicate. Substack has done a lot to help me grow the audience, and so I will continue to be part of their experiments, too. 

There are now over 1,800 of you on this list, and about a quarter of you are paying something to ensure I can keep doing this. There’s a definite market for information that’s intended to be written for everyone and I’m glad to be able to do this work full-time. 

For now, I have a rare opportunity to walk around on a nice day in a different state. I’m taking notes on how the local governments are set up here to satisfy my curiosity about how humans build and sustain civilization. That’s always been at the heart of my impulse to spend as much time as I can documenting the past, the present, and scenarios for the future.

I wish you and all you know well as this Boxing Day continues. I’m well aware that most Americans do not call this day after Christmas Day by that name, but for me it comes from a vestigial Britishness that I’ll never fully shake as a first generation member of this country. All I know is that I want as many people as possible to have the best lives they can. 

So, happy holidays, and please consider sharing this with others you think might want to be a bit informed as a very busy 2023 gets underway. I am to use these few days of rest to supercharge my work. I’m grateful to all of those who are supporting the work, and encourage you to join them if you have not done so already!