Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today you can expect a brisk day with highs in the low 50s. Yesterday evening, I rode my bike around wearing an actual winter coat!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 2,228↘️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 31↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 220↘️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 120, Henrico: 58, and Richmond: 42). Since this pandemic began, 464 people have died in the Richmond region. Check out this new (to me?) section of VDH's data dashboard called Weekly Health District Case Data. At first glance, a table of weekly new reported cases by health districts seems pretty standard, boring stuff right? This is why we've all made our own spreadsheets! But, the cool part of this page, I think, is that you can disaggregate those weekly case counts by age or race/ethnicity, and you can choose to graph them as an area chart. So, for example, see how in Richmond Latino folks made up a much large chunk of reported cases earlier in the pandemic than they do now. As always, remember that these are reported cases, and VDH just can't magically know about folks who catch the coronavirus but don't get tested (which folks may not do for employment, cultural, or other complicated reasons). I imagine there is at least some overlap between those unreported cases and some of our region's Black and Brown populations. Anyway, that's your regularish reminder that none of these chartsandgraphs paint an exactly perfect picture of what's happening on the ground.
Remember Navy Hill? Remember how we spent months and months talking about building a place where thousands of people would (intentionally!) gather in person? Seems wild! After failing to convince much of the public and, more importantly, five members of City Council, the development team behind Navy Hill has now turned and pitched their arena-anchored development idea to Henrico County. Tom Lappas at the Henrico Citizen has all the details on the proposed GreenCity project, which sounds a lot like Navy Hill: arena, hotels, retail, residential. It's just located in the 'burbs out by Parham Road and I-95. I haven't learned more about municipal financing during the course of the pandemic, so I can't speak super intelligently to all the details of how the County will pay for this project, but Lappas says, "Though Henrico would not directly contribute any money to the project, the [community development authority] it creates likely would sell bonds to pay for infrastructure improvements to the site, then recoup that money during a period of no more than 30 years through certain taxes on the property." Honestly, this sounds a lot like a TIF (the mechanism the Mayor proposed using to paying for Navy Hill) and was how Short Pump Town Center got funded (which was held up as a regional example of TIF-like funding during the whole Navy Hill process). The key difference between then and now to me, is that the Navy Hill TIF would have encompassed almost the entirety of downtown and included areas that have and will continue to thrive regardless of what happens around the site of the current Coliseum. According to Lappas, "Henrico officials intend to restrict the assessment or tax to the GreenCity project itself." The aforelinked article frames this development as "a major coup for Henrico," but I dunno. A bigger coup—and a coup I could get behind—would be for the City to raze the Coliseum and build a dense, urban, wonderful neighborhood on its most valuable land instead of an enormous room that sits empty most of the time. We can do both: a suburban arena and a downtown neighborhood! As every single pro-arena person said during the Navy Hill Saga, an arena is a regional amenity. It'd be great to stop thinking about our region in zero-sum terms.
Moving on from one major economic development project to another, the City has set up this page with information about bringing a potential resort casino to Richmond. During this past spring's session, the General Assembly passed legislation that allows casinos in Richmond pending a ballot referendum. The City anticipates that referendum hitting ballots next November, and, "prior to requesting the court to order a casino referendum, the city [needs to] select a preferred resort casino operator and location." My personal preference is to just not select an operator and location and avoid bringing a resort casino to Richmond entirely. However, I don't think that my opinion is reflected widely or generally, but we'll see. In the meantime, the City has a survey for folks to fill out to "make sure the Request for Qualifications/Proposals reflects your goals for a new economic development initiative." Casino haters like myself will be annoyed that the survey assumes you definitely want a resort casino in the city limits and doesn't really give you a way to say otherwise. Remember how one of my continual issues with Navy Hill was the City charging forward on the project—a project with a lot of benefits!—without bringing folks in and asking if they even wanted the project in the first place? Yeah, that. While this is a bit different since the casino must ultimately be approved by voters, it still feels like yet another economic development project presented as a done deal with the community brought in at the tail end. Here's Sheri Shannon saying it better than me on Twitter: "A suggestion: Educate the public on this process and the referendum vote for 2021. There’s a lot of info on the survey landing page that folks will gloss over. The first step cannot just be a survey, but helping folks understand everything that’s on the table."
A lot was riding on this past November's election, so I totally understand if you haven't once thought about the redistricting amendment that passed. Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has details on the state legislators that will make up the new bi-partisan redistricting commission, and, super importantly, a link to this application for regular citizens who want to serve on the committee! That could be you! The application is due by December 28th, so all of you potential committee members have some time.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Gregory Gillian has the Important Grocery Store News You Crave: The Carytown Publix will open on December 9th. I haven't been by the Carytown Exchange location in a minute, but I guess a lot of progress has been made over the last pandemic or so.
There's something deeply wrong about Virginia Tech—a college for, like, mostly young people—partnering with Hardywood to make Fightin' Hokies Lager, right? That said, I will fully admit that they can just take my money and that this will be my gameday beer of choice for the foreseeable future.
This morning's longread
The Flynn Pardon Is a Despicable Use of an Awesome Power
I liked this thoughtful take on the president's pardon power and how, like everything else that he touches, Trump has corrupted it.
As a Christian, I would love to say that the embrace of the pardon flowed from Christian belief, but that probably is true only for some of the Framers. Just as influential might have been the Bard. Educated Americans at the end of the 18th century lived in a cult of Shakespeare; busts of him were common in upper-class homes, and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams even made a joint pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1786. Shakespeare, in his plays, came back again and again to the idea of mercy. Measure for Measure is expressly about governmental pardoning, and the power of mercy is a central theme in many of Shakespeare’s other works, including The Tempest—a performance of which George Washington attended during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
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