Good morning, RVA! It's 47 °F, and temperatures today will head right up into the mid-to-upper 60s. I dunno, we might could even see 70 °F! Expect a pretty temperate first week of February.
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting that a driver hit and killed a person walking along the 5200 block of Hull Street over the weekend. Police are still looking for the driver and the vehicle—which may be silver or gray in color with heavy damage to the front end. If you have any information you can call the RPD’s Crash Team Investigator (804.646.1665) or contact Crime Stoppers at 804.780.1000 or at 7801000.com.
Remember when Republican freshman delegate Wendell Walker submitted a bad-faith bill to remove the Harry F. Byrd statue from the Capitol grounds? Byrd, a Democrat, was Virginia’s head segregationist, and I guess Walker thought that present-day Democrats would recoil at the thought of taking down a monument to an actual racist who happened to be one of their own. Well, that plan to own the libz has severely backfired as Democrats are pretty stoked to vote for Walker’s bill, which he has now requested be removed from consideration. Turns out, that’s not how things work, and the House Rules Committee has asked Walker to come to the front of the class and explain, why, exactly, he submitted the bill in the first place and why he now wants it killed. These sort of time-wasting bills that exist solely to prove a point (bread and butter for folks like Sen. Tommy Norment) work a lot better when you’ve got control of the legislative body—otherwise own the libz quickly turns into a very public self own.
Speaking of bills that won’t die, Nicholas Smith’s latest edition of VAGAries gets into the particulars of how bills do or do not die. Tap through to read the thrilling tale of what exactly happened with Del. Bourne’s bill to redirect some of the State’s sales tax to help pay for Richmond’s proposed new downtown arena—it’s an absolutely bananas chain of events. The tl;dr is that almost no one knows if Bourne’s bill is actually all dead or if it’s still slightly alive (big difference). We’ll learn more at a Finance subcommittee meeting today at 8:00 AM, but I’m leaning toward the whole thing being a series of unfortunate events—you know, assume incompetence before you assume malice.
Samuel Northrop at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says that Richmond Public Schools have sold the empty Moore Street School to VCU for $1. VCU has plans to turn the building into a child development center and will hold a third of the slots—at no cost!—for kids living in Carver and Gilpin Court. If this turns into anything like the VCU Health Family Care Center at Northside, it’ll be a pretty great addition to the neighborhood. I do, however, think, of all entities in the region, that VCU could afford to at least pay the assessed value of the property (I’d look that up, but the City’s parcel mapper appears to be down this morning). It’s awesome that VCU will hold space for kids in the community but, like, no need to just give property away when the school district has so many financial needs.
What does it mean when legislators or bills say things are “in the public interest?” Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury explains it all, in this edition of Virginia Explained. You’ll learn a bunch about legislative process but also how it applies to Virginia’s renewable energy economy.
Today is your final opportunity to weigh in on the Amelia Street School renaming, which you can do at 6:30 PM (1821 Amelia Street). I think this is the final public engagement session for school renaming that RPS plans to do, so we should soon see a report or a PDF or something with suggested new names for George Mason Elementary, E.S.H. Greene Elementary, the Amelia Street School, and the new middle school on Hull Street.
via /r/rva, I kind of love this beer (or soda!) bottle cap map of Virginia.
The 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses take place today, and you can follow along in a million different ways, even right on Wikipedia! This means we’ve got just a single month until Super Tuesday, when Virginia’s primary rolls around.
This morning's patron longread
Nightmares on wax: the environmental impact of the vinyl revival
Submitted by Patron Jeanna. Everything comes from somewhere, including vinyl records. Keep reading though, because streaming music comes from somewhere too, and the environmental impact of massive data centers is certainly nonzero.
While it is far exceeded by revenues from streaming, the vinyl market keeps growing – Americans now spend as much on vinyl as they do on CDs, while there were 4.3m vinyl sales in the UK last year, the 12th consecutive year of growth. So, if you’re one of the millions of people to re-embrace vinyl records, it’s worth knowing where they come from and how they’re made. There are containers called hoppers at each pressing station, brimming with the lentil-like polymer pellets that get funnelled down into the machinery, heated and fused to form larger biscuits that resemble hockey pucks, and squashed to make records.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.