The Boring Show

Good morning, RVA! It’s 25 °F, and, highs today will hit the upper 50s. I think that’s a wonderful excuse to get outside and move your body through space in whatever way makes you feel good. You’ve got three more days of warmish weather before cold temperatures return—take advantage of them!

Water cooler

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Mel Leonor reports that, unless something dramatic happens in the next couple of days, the General Assembly will ban mask mandates in schools. Yesterday, the Democratic-controlled Senate approved legislation that would “prevent local school boards from levying mask mandates and from punishing students whose parents opt to send their child to school without a mask.” Legislation that bans mask mandates is a whole different ball of wax than an overreaching, hastily issued Executive Order, and I don’t know that local school boards—Richmond and Henrico’s included—would have much leeway to do anything about it. Katelyn Jetelina said it early this week: Population-level solutions are so much more effective at keeping people safe and preventing the spread of disease than individual-level ones, and the GA’s Democrats are making an incredibly short-sighted decision to forever strip a useful public-health tool from Virginia’s tool box. This isn’t just about COVID, either! The next time—and there will be a next time—we encounter a dangerous airborne illness we will be without an important population-level mitigation measure unless the General Assembly passes a law. So dumb.

The Mayor delivered his 2022 State of the City Address last night, and I thought it was pretty good! You can read the speech here, or watch it on the City’s Facebook page or YouTube channel. I think we already knew most of the Mayor’s announcements, given that the more exciting ones come from ARPA funding and we’ve already seen a bunch of presentations on how the City plans to allocate that huge bucket of cash. I hadn’t heard about the $500,000 for a gun buyback program which seems pretty cool, though. Chris Suarez at the RTD has a short summary of the speech which includes pictures of the mayor’s podium surrounded by a dozen ferns. If anyone at the City is looking to re-home some of those plants, please let me know, OK?

VPM’s Patrick Larsen reports that the Virginia Senate voted to block Governor Youngkin’s nomination of Andrew Wheeler for the State’s Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources. Larsen helpfully reminds us that, “Before heading up the EPA, Wheeler worked as a coal lobbyist after serving as a staffer to James Inhofe - the Oklahoma Senator who famously threw a snowball on the floor of the U.S. Senate in an effort to prove global warming was a hoax.” The Senate will vote once more today to, fingers crossed, fully and finally block Wheeler’s nomination.

Yesterday, I wondered aloud about the reason for draining the canal (as seen in this picture via /r/rva). The best municipal social media account in the region (maybe the state?), @rvah2o, followed up with me and, super relevant to my interests, the City has “emptied Kanawha Canal so we can survey, assess, Closed-Circuit TV, and clean [Combined Sewer System] outfall #34.” This has been your weekly sewer update. Thank you for tuning in.

The real meat of the City’s redistricting process kicks of tonight at 6:00 PM with a “Public Drawing of Richmond Voter District Map Options” meeting. Maps are thrilling, but redistricting is all about minutia—will this meeting turn out boring or fascinating? Time will tell! It’s my night to cook dinner, so I may just put this on in the background while throwing together this cornbread tamale pie recipe from the New York Times(which, by the way, tastes just as good using Impossible Burger’s beef substitute).

Did you know that any RPS student or staff (and up to three guests) can visit the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia for free during the month of February? More details in RPS Superintendent Kamras’s email from last night, including a reminder that they have some RPS + Black History Month gear over in the RPS Bonfire store.

My family’s current Shared Show™, the one we watch together after dinner, is Cobra Kai(we’re currently working our way through the fourth season, so no spoilers!). I find it delightfully charming and self-aware, unlike a lot of other shows about teenage karate gangs. So, as you can imagine, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s bonsai exhibit, which runs through February 25th, feels pretty timely. Did you know there are different words for trees collected from the wild (yamadori) and trees collected from urban settings (urbandori)? I feel like I could get way into the bonsaiverse give the opportunity!

This morning’s longread

What Germany’s Effort to Leave Coal Behind Can Teach the U.S.

Despite the title, I’m not sure what the U.S. can practically implement from Germany’s plan to ditch coal—at least not while King of America Joe Manchin has other plans. Still, though, this is an interesting climate read from the other side of the world.

But there’s one crucial difference between the two places. As part of its Energiewende, or energy pivot, Germany has embarked on a formal effort to exit coal, with a national commission and subsequent legislation setting specific closure deadlines for mines and plants, and distributing billions of euros in compensation to coal companies, workers, and the regions themselves. In the U.S., the coal exit has been haphazard. Federal attempts to move beyond coal went dormant under President Donald Trump, and under President Joe Biden they are now running up against the opposition of Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who holds both the crucial fiftieth vote in the Senate and a stake in a family coal business that earned him nearly five hundred thousand dollars in 2020.

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Picture of the Day

The front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch from February 9th, 1922.

Good morning, RVA! It’s 57 °F, and when was the last time we saw early morning temperatures in the 50s?? Today you can expect highs in the upper 70s, some gentle sunshine, and to find me in a hammock for at least part of the day.

Water cooler

Frank Green at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Virginia Supreme Court has finally cleared the way for the Lee Monument to come down. As for the timing, “Removal will be a multiday process, and no action on the statue is expected this week, officials said.” I’m interested in the Department of General Services plan to remove this thing and really hope they keep the plinth as it stands today. I also wonder if, after the monument and fencing come down, the space will resume its role as a high-traffic gathering place for folks. We all saw how the community turned the bland grass circle into an actual place last year. So let’s use some of that ARPA money and make some permanent upgrades! Chris Suarez, also at the RTD, talks to a handful of local folks about the impending removaland has this interesting fact I did not know: “Georgia now leads the nation with 109 monuments standing. Virginia, which has removed or relocated more monuments than any other state in the country, led the nation before last summer.”

All that rain a couple days ago triggered a combined sewer overflow event, and the @rvah2o account (winner of a recent fake award I made up one morning) has a nice thread about the plans and funding required to make that sort of thing less frequent. Remember, combined sewer overflows happen when our centuries-old sewer system can’t handle the amount of stormwater gushing through it and discharges whatever its got at that moment into the river—which includes untreated wastewater (aka pooptown). @rvah2o points to state legislation that will fund some immediate fixes, plus longer term plans that will completely modernize our 19th century infrastructure (seriously, it’s centuries old). They estimate the total cost at around $850 million! You can sign up to get email notifications of every CSO event here, if that’s your sort of thing.

The Virginia Mercury’s Graham Moomaw has this promising headline: “Virginia’s Redistricting Commission has its first draft maps. They look…normal?” The maps released by the commission’s consultants yesterday are for the Northern Virginia region and are definitely more compact, or, as Moomaw puts it: “The initial result was maps with more straight lines and less meandering squiggles.” Sounds great. Now we’ll see how the Commission reconciles the two versions of the maps and how incumbents impacted by the new maps handle possibly having to primary one another. Yikes.

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about the number of people killed by Hurricane Ida—24 hours ago it stood at eight. As of this morning, though, 56 deaths have been attributed to Ida. According to Wikipedia: “23 in New Jersey, 16 in New York, 7 in Louisiana, 5 in Pennsylvania, 2 in Mississippi, 1 in Maryland, 1 in Virginia, and 1 in Connecticut.” The climate crisis does not just mean stronger hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico a thousand miles south of here that we don’t have to think or care about. Five times as many people died north of Richmond than did south of Richmond. We’re going to have to invest in better infrastructure, especially in neighborhoods we’ve neglected, to withstand these sorts of dangerous weather events (see above (and below)).

I know football at all levels is problematic, but this is fun: WTVR’s Lane Casadonte reports that George Wythe High School beat Caroline last night, 8–6, snapping a 42 game losing streak.

Logistical note! Monday is a federal holiday, and, instead of writing this email I will be sleeping in, drinking coffee in my living room before anyone else in my house wakes up, and scrolling through online auctions. I hope you’re able to find some time to do your own version of quiet-coffee-auction time. 'Till Tuesday!

This morning’s longread

New Orleans Was Already a ‘Heat Island.’ Then Ida Cut the Power

Climate change means hotter summers and fiercer weather which results in more damage to aging power infrastructure. That means after a storm rolls through, thousands and thousands of people might have to swelter through burning-hot temperatures with no air conditioning. It’s worse for cities, of course, and double worse for the redlined neighborhoods in those cities. This piece in Wired looks into this exact situation happening in New Orleans right now (and cites the work done by local climate scientist, Dr. Jeremy Hoffman).

Several factors turn cities into heat islands. Concrete, asphalt, and brick absorb heat really well. When the ambient air cools down at night, those dense materials can only release some of that heat, so they may still be warm when the sun comes up the next day and applies more energy. “So you get kind of this baking-in factor over the course of multiple days of heat,” says Portland State University climate adaptation scientist Vivek Shandas, who has studied the heat island effect in Portland, New Orleans, and dozens of other cities. Following Hurricane Ida, he says, it now looks like New Orleans is facing a “string of days of excess heat.”

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Picture of the Day

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F, and, as foretold, highs today should top out around 80 °F—but you gotta deal with all of this rain in return. Decent trade, I think! This weekend’s weather looks pretty great, with steadily increasing temperatures until we’re right back on the surface of the sun by the middle of next week.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports the seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as: 176, 25, and 5.9, respectively. VDH reports a seven-day average of 20.3 new cases in and around Richmond (Richmond: -5.9; Henrico: 21.4, and Chesterfield: 4.7). Since this pandemic began, 1,359 people have died in the Richmond region. 46.8%, 58.6%, and 55.1% of the population in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. That’s nearly half a million people in the region (496,085) with at least some protection from this disease! That’s great, but having even more folks vaccinated would be greater. Here’s this week’s stacked chart of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths across the Commonwealth, and you can see slight upticks across the board. And, if you’re not yet vaccinated and need something more convincing than a couple of charts, read this terrifying piece in The Atlantic about what the darkest of winters could look like due to the delta variant.

Yesterday, the Governor’s state of emergency expired and that brought with it some confusion about where and when masks are required, recommended, or not needed at all. VDH has a helpful press release laying the whole thing out. Here’s the gist: people older than five are required to wear a mask “while indoors at a public or private K-12 school” and on planes, buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation. People who are not yet full vaccinated—including children under the age of 12—should still wear masks while indoors, following the current CDC recommendations. At the moment, the CDC and VDH are not recommending that fully vaccinated people need to wear a mask, but you totally can if you would feel more comfortable doing so. The VDH press release also includes this slightly ominous line: “Masks may be especially important now that recent cases of the “Delta variant” (B.1.617.2) have been identified in Virginia.” Don’t throw out all your favorite masks yet, I think.

As we inch closer to ARP money hitting the City’s bank account, I still don’t have a great feel for the goals or processes for deciding how to use this huge influx of cash. Luckily, smarter people than I are on the case, and the folks at Richmond Together have updated their comprehensive proposal for how to deeply, equitably invest this money into our city. Compare and contrast the programs created and funded in this document—investments that would begin to address some seriously systemic issues—to the extremely narrow district-by-district priorities found in Council’s RES. 2021-R030 (which has not yet passed). Anyway, Richmond Together’s document is a pleasure to read, and I hope you’ll take the time to do so and then send your favorite highlights (or the entire thing) to your set of elected officials.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the City’s Office of Equitable Transit and Mobility has put together a kind of pre-survey as they kick off the process for a much-needed update to the City’s transportation plan. It’s a MetroQuest survey, which is not my favorite, and it asks you to mark transportation barriers on a map, which I think is a huge barrier for a lot of folks who aren’t great at reading maps. That said, I’m excited for this process, and will take some of my weekend to dutifully mark this map with several dozen places that are terrible for people trying to walk, roll, ride, or bus around.

In his still-great email, RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras highlights a special School Board meeting on July 13th at George Wythe High School to discuss the construction of a replacement for George Wythe High School. This sounds like a positive step in the right direction—at least I hope so! It’s certainly an improvement over the Board’s previous position of just not wanting to discuss any possible compromise with City Council and the Mayor about who’s in charge of building schools. Also positive and of note, public comment at this meeting will be limited to the first 30 minutes.

Scott Wise and Cameron Thompson at WTVR report that a “free marijuana seed giveaway at a CBD Store on Lauderdale Drive in western Henrico County was temporarily shut down early Thursday due to the large crowds.” Amazing.

Logistical note! I’m headed out on vacation and will take a break from Good Morning, RVA for the next two weeks. You’ll hear from me again on July 19th, but, if you miss me or have excellent PDFs to share, you can always email them to me at [email protected]. Have a great fortnight, and please take good care of Richmond for me while I’m gone!

This morning’s longread

42,000 lbs. of pistachios stolen in Tulare County, California

I feel like I’ve shared a longread about nut heists before, but maybe about almonds? People will steal anything, I tell you what.

While completing orders and going over inventory, employees at a San Joaquin Valley pistachio company realized something didn’t add up. They seemed to be missing some nuts — and more than just a few. An audit launched earlier this month revealed that roughly 42,000 pounds of pistachios had vanished. Touchstone Pistachio Co. reported the missing merchandise to law enforcement on June 17, officials with the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office said. It didn’t take authorities long to crack the case.

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Picture of the Day