Good morning, RVA! It's 36 °F, and today you should expect highs in the upper 40s with plenty of sunshine. That, plus or minus a few degrees, pretty much looks like the forecast for the rest of the week.
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting two murders. First, on November 30th, Police responded to the 3100 block of Midlothian and found Ashraf H. Mahasees, 23, shot to death. This was the murder victim I mentioned yesterday. Second, on Monday evening, officers arrived to the 2000 block of Accommodation Street and found J-Mari R. Saunders, 17, suffering from a fatal gun shot wound.
OK! Richmond Public Schools Rezoning! School Board met last night and did in fact vote on a rezoning proposal (kind of) and it was not Status Quo Proposal W (kind of). Shows what I know. Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details from last night’s meeting. According to Mattingly, School Board, on a 5-4 vote adopted Proposal Y—but not any of the Northside changes (YES: Doerr, Barlow, Burke, Page, Owen; NO: Gibson, Young, Sapini, Cosby). Page 33 of this PDF will show you what the Proposal Y map looks like for elementary schools, page 38 for middle schools, and page 43 for high schools.
Most of the controversy centered around elementary school changes. Along with significant changes to the Miles Jones / Southampton and Greene / Broad Rock zones on the Southside, the Fox / Cary zones contain the biggest changes north of the river. In broad terms, previously the highway, running east-west, separated the Fox zone from the Cary zone. Now a jagged north-south line divides the two, running down Arthur Ashe Boulevard and zagging over to somewhere around Allen. The end result is that lots of kids living in the Museum District are now zoned for Cary and lots of kids living in Randolph are now zoned for Fox. Personal opinion: This is a good rezoning and basically undoes the 2013ish rezoning (PDF) that only further segregated Richmond’s elementary schools (and that’s not just my opinion). Someone could probably write some political commentary about how one of the biggest zoning changes undertaken by this School Board is to undo the changes made by the previous School Board—of which two members now sit on City Council.
Anyway, back to the present! About the Northside, it sounds like the School Board decided to punt on making any decisions at all and have “scheduled a December 16th special meeting at Ginter Park Elementary to make a final decision.” Another personal opinion: This is bad process. We just went through an entire year of meetings and conversations and public engagement. Scheduling another meeting to, potentially, totally rework zoning proposals for the Northside—just two weeks from now, deep in the holiday season—is not what folks signed up for. Just like City Council, School Board has adopted a Culture of Continuation—pushing hard decisions further down the calendar, making it nearly impossible for the public to understand what is happening and when. Stay tuned, I guess—and, if you have strong opinions about Northside elementary school zones, you now have two weeks to tell your School Board rep all about them (again).
Y’all, I TOTALLY forgot that yesterday was Councilmember Lynch’s first day on the job! Congratulations and good luck! I hope diving headfirst into an hourslong NoBro meeting was exactly everything you expected it would be!
I came across a couple of interesting Richmond 300 (the City’s master planning process, remember?) documents that are worth sharing. First, the Community Consultation #2 Report (PDF) details each and every bit of community engagement focused on the draft of the new master plan. Keep this PDF in mind when folks say “But, but...we didn’t know! There was no opportunity to know!” Second, and way more interesting, is this Scott’s Addition circulation study (PDF). There are some really great maps that you’ll want to look through, especially the missing sidewalk map on page 17. Scroll down to page 52 to read the short-term recommendations for turning a known garbage neighborhood (at least in terms of the amenities and infrastructure) into a safe, more humane place to exist. I’m especially stoked to see “install temporary curb extensions with pavement markings and flex bollards for pedestrians” make the list. We need to start doing things like this in Richmond. Honestly, none of the short-term recommendations require tons of capital or concrete and seem like things the City could...just do. They...should just do them? Like ASAP?
So what even is the deal with “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” and how close to living in actual Gilead are we? Delegate Jay Jones (Virginia’s 89th District) has the same questions and wrote a letter to Attorney General Herring to get a formal opinion on the matter. He’s concerned that “as Boards of Supervisors and City Councils continue to receive requests to join the ‘gun sanctuary’ movement....the absence of such an opinion could hamper the legislature’s ability to duly consider and pass gun safety legislation next year.”
My good pal Nicholas has started a much needed newsletter, VAGAries, covering what the heck is going on at the General Assembly. For years, Nicholas has been the person I turn to when I am confused by whatever state government thing—which, if I’m being honest, is most state government things. You can read his first edition here and you can subscribe to VAGAries here.
Today is Giving Tuesday. It’s our annual time to spend money in a way that helps us offset the sticky feeling of materialism we accumulated over the course of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Some Sort of Sunday, and Cyber Monday. Today your inboxes are most likely stuffed full with emails from nonprofits asking for money. Honestly, it’s a very similar inbox landscape to Black Friday, just swap high-priced electronics for good causes. The nonprofit at which I work, RVA Rapid Transit, is no exception to this, either, and you can expect our email later this afternoon. The truth is, there are many, many small, local organizations worthy of your materialism-offset dollars, but today I’d like you to consider sending those dollars over to RVA Rapid Transit. Obviously, I’m biased—they do write my paycheck—but I think a lot of the work we do appeals to the type of folks who, for whatever reason, open and read the region’s premier zoning and rezoning email each and every day. You can donate online here. We’re raising $10,000 towards hiring a new human to focus on community engagement, and, at this point, we’re just over halfway there.
This morning's longread
Why Public Transit Is an Equity Battleground
I love the feeling of community you get on a bus! It’s the best.
The experience of using transit—where we all feel like we’re in it together—is quite different from the experience of driving in a car independently. There’s an egalitarian aspect to being on a subway car, or on a bus; you are in community automatically with the people around you in a way that is unlike any other way. It’s a public space, but it’s a special kind of public space that everyone has opted into. In the sense that a community is a team, it’s an immediate team that has been built up. This community aspect is often overlooked when we think about transit, so it doesn’t surprise me that we see uprisings around transit issues in places where there are deeper problems around equity and poverty. Transit is the place where we can actually come together. To threaten transit with a higher fare or service cuts will immediately spark a kind of community-driven anger.
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