Good morning, RVA! It's 16 °F, but highs today will head up out of the frozone and into the mid 40s. Expect plenty of sunshine as temperatures continue to warm throughout the week.
Water cooler
I know it’s only January, but last night marked the official kickoff for the 2020 Budget Season! Over at the School Board meeting, Superintendent Kamras introduced his FY2021 budget-compressed.pdf) (PDF), and, I swear y’all, it is the most readable and approachable budget document I think I’ve ever seen. They’ve got proposed expenditures broken down by categories from the strategic plan (Dreams4RPS (PDF)), which is so smart. For example, RPS wants to spend $489,000 more on adding six social workers, which falls under Priority 3, Safe and Loving School Cultures. Honestly, right away I feel a weird sense of protective ownership in this budget (??) since we all collectively spent so much time working on the strategic plan a couple summers ago. However, it all comes down to money and the extremely tiny amounts of it we have available, so what’s the total cost? $39 million more dollars. That’s a lot, but it should surprise exactly zero humans as RPS has been exceedingly clear and upfront with their budget needs moving forward over the next couple of years. The School District plans to pick up $18 million more from the State, should the Governor’s budget pass as is, so that leaves $21 million on the City’s tab. It’s been awhile, but do you remember how I kept talking about restoring the real estate tax to pre-Recession era levels because schools—not to mention transit or public housing—needed tens of millions of dollars of immediate investment? Well, City Council decided not to do that, so here we are with a big, not-unexpected request from Richmond Public Schools. I’m very interested to see how the Mayor and City Council deals with it. BUCKLE UP IT IS BUDGET SEASON.
Schools don’t have a monopoly on budgets, and GRTC’s CEO introduced a FY20-22 Capital Blueprint (PDF). This budget document is...not as heartwarming as RPS’s—but that’s a high, high bar. C. Suarez Rojas at the Richmond Times-Dispatch breaks down some of the details, which include articulated buses and a Park and Ride for the Pulse.
Over the long weekend, Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras decided to close schools this coming Monday, January 27th because “it appears that nearly 700 (about a third) of our teachers will be taking personal leave to participate in the VEA rally” for increasing state-level education funding. First, that’s kind of rad—good for those teachers. Second, my family is in the very privileged position of easily being able to absorb a day off from school with only a week’s notice. Many folks are not and will have to scramble to figure out childcare, meals, and a bunch of other logistics. I’m sure that was a tough call to make, but it feels like the right one. Also, where are you going to find 700 substitute teachers?
Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has the update on the fate of Republican gun bills down at the General Assembly. Did you know Republicans had gun bills? They do, or, well, more accurately, they did. Unable to read the room, Republicans submitted some pro-gun violence bills, including one that would have allowed concealed carry without a permit. These bills did not make it out of subcommittee.
Speaking of the General Assembly, I really recommend you check out my pal Nicholas Smith’s VAGAries email. Yesterday, he had a great bit about the proposed shopping cart bill (a real bill that definitely exists) and a couple days ago he had some nuanced thoughts on whether or not we should make Election Day a holiday. Sure, it’s nice to know about big-picture items like the ridiculous Republicans gun bills dying in subcommittee, but what I’m really after is slower, more thoughtful writing about what the heck stuff down at the GA means. This newsletter fills a hole in my politics-nerd life for sure!
The impeachment trial of Donald Trump got underway in earnest yesterday. Lots of stuff happened! Or, at least, it took Republicans in the Senate a long, long time to vote NO on many, many things and to establish the rules for the next steps of the process. Now the arguments portion of the trial begins, which means it is definitely the time to subscribe to impeachment.fyi if you haven’t already. I mean, who wants to spend their own time watching hours and hours of public meetings drag on into the middle of the night? Just kidding! That sounds awesome, and, if I had the time, it is exactly how I’d spend my evenings over the next week or two. But, since I definitely do not have that kind of time, I will read the impeachment.fyi each morning and feel plenty informed.
This morning's longread
"Flood the zone with shit": How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy
I loved this Vox article—even though it deeply bums me out—about our media and our very brain’s inability to deal with this present moment.
We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism. The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable. I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
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