Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and, no joke, my weather app displays a snow icon at this very minute. That won’t last long, because highs today will reach the mid 50s as we head into an even warmer back half of the week.
Water cooler
I continue to read and enjoy—as much as one can enjoy reading about viruses and vaccines two years into all of this—Katelyn Jetelina’s near-daily Omicron newsletters. Here’s yesterday’s update, which I’d summarize as “we still don’t know very much.” One change to definitely note, though: the CDC altered their booster recommendations (again). Now all adults should (instead of may) get boosted. If you still lack a boost, you can find the full list of walk-up vaccination events hosted by the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts here, and you can always pull up your local pharmacy’s website and make a booster appointment there. No excuses, just go get it done! Additionally, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has/had high hopes for 2021’s end-of-year holidays that now feel on the verge of collapse. But! About parties and travel plans, Jetelina has this good advice: “Let’s get through this next week. Once we have the data, we will know how to approach holidays smartly.” Stay tuned, and get boosted.
Yesterday, the City’s Education Compact—the regularly-scheduled meeting of City Council and School Board—got together, and Emma North at WRIC has the recap. It didn’t occur to me yesterday, but, duh, City Council and School Board have a ton of awkward conversations queued up given the evolving disaster of building a replacement for George Wythe High School. As I’ve said many times, the Mayor and City Council ultimately hold all the money and, thus, the leverage in this situation. Councilmember Jones couldn’t put it more clearly: “As chair of the finance committee, I guarantee you, I am willing to hold funding until we get a plan, until we know where we’re going.”
I don’t know enough about real estate or contracts or economic development to understand why the City transferred 41-acres of parking lots surrounding Stoney Point Fashion Park to the mall’s owner at no cost. Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has the details. I imagine it’s got to have something to do with making the property more attractive for sale and redevelopment? I have no idea, but I do know that City-owned land is a precious resource, and if we’re getting rid of it we should have some sort of say in how it’ll be used in the future (like an affordable housing requirement!).
VDOT is putting together a small area plan that will “evaluate automobile, transit, bicycle, and pedestrian conditions along Staples Mill Road and other key streets near the Staples Mill Road Amtrak Station in Henrico County.” As per the Honored and Ancient Ways, there is a MetroQuest survey for you to fill out. It should only take you a couple of minutes and feels a little bit like an urbanism quiz: Do you want to slow vehicles with A) Roadway design or B) Law enforcement? Choose wisely! I live less than three miles from the Staples Mill Station and almost five miles from the Main Street Station. I will always take the train from Main Street because you just can’t bike to Staples Mill safely and the transit options are so infrequent they might as well not even exist. So, take a couple minutes, fill the survey out, and lobby for better bike and pedestrian access to the train station.
This morning's longread
The Great Organic-Food Fraud
Chances are really, really good that if you’ve purchased organic food it wasn’t as organic as you thought it was because of this guy.
The math didn’t work: Bushman had been buying far more corn from Constant than could possibly have been grown on Organic Land Management’s Missouri farms. It began to dawn on Borgerding that “we were not talking about a load or two—we’re talking millions of dollars of grain.” He recalls concluding that Constant might have just been acting as a broker on the side—buying grain from other organic farmers and then selling it on. Borgerding laughed, weakly, then said, “Or he was doing something else.” Constant was, in fact, passing off non-organic grain as organic grain. The scheme, in which at least half a dozen associates were involved, is the largest-known fraud in the history of American organic agriculture: prosecutors accused him of causing customers to spend at least a quarter of a billion dollars on products falsely labelled with organic seals.
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