Good morning, RVA! It’s 45 °F, and, while you can expect highs in the 60s today, you can also expect a whole lot of wind. Later this week we could see lows below freezing, so think hard if you’ve got plans to plant your garden!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,392 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 20 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 145 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 72, Henrico: 31, and Richmond: 42). Since this pandemic began, 1,203 people have died in the Richmond region. While it’s good news on the vaccine side of things, which you’ll see in a moment, the number of new COVID-19 cases in Virginia continues to climb up off of this bumpy plateau. One thing I’m interested in is how having a huge percentage of the state’s seniors vaccinated impacts the number of hospitalizations and deaths. I mean, I’m not interested enough to want case counts to increase, but it looks like that’s happening anyway.
As for vaccines, the Richmond region continues to vaccinate more than enough people to meet the governor’s stated goals (which works out to 37,000 vaccines administer per week). For folks still waiting on a vaccination appointment—or waiting to become eligible—“vaccinating more than enough people to meet the goal” does not feel like nearly enough. We’ll get there, though. Here’s this week’s graph of total doses administered locally along with the graph of state allocation of vaccine. And, over the weekend, I put together a new, simple graph of total people in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield with at least one dose. The purple part of this graph represents 75% of the region’s population (679,950) and is what we’re shooting for if we want to reach herd immunity. I don’t really know if you can “reach herd immunity” in a locality or even in a group of localities, but I think it’s something to shoot for (or at least make a graph about).
City Council will host its second budget work session today! You can tune in live at 1:00 PM or check out the recording on The Boring Show later this week. The presentation attached to the agenda looks like a general budget overview and has the Mayor and CAO’s names on it, which could be a fun presentation to listen in on. One additional budget update I wanted to mention. Last week I wrote about how the new “Complete Streets” CIP project folded together a bunch of projects from last year’s CIP—including the City’s project for paving. For FY22, all of those projects combined totaled $23,900,000 while the new Complete Streets project only had $8,150,000 budgeted towards it in FY22. The budget for paving in last year’s CIP alone was $20 million, so I was concerned about the missing $15 million and nervous that money previously allocated to sidewalks and bike lanes and traffic calming would get spent on paving. I’ve since learned some things! The key piece of information I lacked was that money from the CVTA (about $17 million) will get moved into a CVTA Special Fund in the City’s operating budget. That solves the mystery of the missing $15 million. I assume (always stupid) that most of this will be spent on road (and sidewalk!) maintenance and paving for the foreseeable future due to years of disinvestment, and that the $8 million allocated for Complete Streets will be used for just that. That might be an overly naive take—given that the new Complete Streets money is more discretionary than listing out specific projects for specific needs like, say, setting aside $X million for sidewalks. It’s something to keep an eye on. Also, nothing says that the money coming from the CVTA forever and always must be used on road maintenance. That’s something to keep an eye on, too.
Kenya Hunter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School accepted more Black and Latino students for the upcoming 2021–22 school year than it has in five years. This year, around 8% of Black students who applied were accepted; 11.7% of Latino applicants got in. That’s up from 3% for Black students and down from 20% for Latino students, who applied in significantly greater numbers this year.” What changed? Hunter says the school got rid of in-person admission tests. While school administrators aren’t willing to say that’s what increased applications from Black and Latino students, you can easily see how standardized tests are a barrier to some students.
The Partnership for Smarter Growth, Virginia Poverty Law Center, and Richmond For All have put together a proposed affordable housing framework for the Richmond Region. There’s a lot in here, and a lot of it is above and beyond my housing chops. While I really don’t know the path forward on public housing—for example, does the federal support exist to commit to “one-for-one brick-and-mortar replacement of like kind of any public housing units lost in the process of redevelopment”—I do appreciate some of the suggested process improvements for RRHA. I’d like to learn more about Local Rent Supplement Programs, too. Anyway, you can learn more today at a virtual presentation at 12:00 PM. It’s free, but you’ll want to register over on the Eventbrite.
I think I’ve linked to each previous phase of VDOT’s commuter survey, so now I am honor-bound to link to the Phase 3 Virginia Commuter Survey. If you commute, or if you no longer commute, take a couple minutes and fill this out—especially if you get to and from work in something other than a personal vehicle! These days, I make most of my commutes in my slippers.
This morning’s longread
Why a ship stuck in Egypt threatens the economy in the United States
Last night they got the boat slightly less stuck in the Suez Canal. Here’s a piece in the WaPo about why having it stuck there in the first place was a big deal.
If you’ve been paying attention to the story, you’ve probably heard this aspect mentioned. This ship, this one gigantic, Empire State Building-sized ship, might potentially cause economic damage to the United States. This may seem inscrutable to a layperson. The ship will do this … how, exactly? To answer this question, I contacted several experts on global logistics. The goal wasn’t to understand the intricacies of the international trade system, but simply to answer that direct question. What’s the butterfly-flapping-its-wings process by which that stuck vessel ripples onto our shores? The short and obvious answer is that, unlike that apocryphal butterfly, there’s a direct and obvious connection between that ship and American consumers.
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Picture of the Day
A flying squirrel.
