Good morning, RVA! It's 55 °F, and NBC12's Andrew Freiden says to be on the lookout for storms this afternoon. More importantly, at least for any baby plants in your care, temperatures could drop below freezing tonight. Take appropriate plant precautions!
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,236 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 30 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 159 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 76, Henrico: 61, and Richmond: 22). Since this pandemic began, 1,263 people have died in the Richmond region. The seven-day average of new reported cases across the state sits at 1,348. Related to things I think about in the morning, the New York Times will redesign their coronadata reporting pages, as we move into, in their words, a different stage of the pandemic. I've been wondering if I should do the same and shift focus away from number of new cases each day to the number of folks vaccinated and people in the hospital. Honestly, I'd love to hear from readers about what kind of daily coronadata they find interesting and useful.
Speaking of, VDH reports over 25% of Virginians have now been fully vaccinated and over 40% have at least one dose of the vaccine. Those are big, real numbers!
From the LA Times, "Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted Tuesday of murdering George Floyd in a landmark trial that centered on police brutality and spoke to a nation shaken over the last year by protests against racial injustice and demands to reform law enforcement." Many, many people, both nationally and locally, released statements after the jury announced their verdict, and I'd like to quote from RPS Superintendent Kamras's at length. "Like many of you, I sat with my family this afternoon anxiously awaiting the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. When the news finally broke – guilty on all three counts – we felt both relieved and uneasy. Relieved because justice had prevailed; but uneasy because the victory, though historic, will serve as a sign to some that the 'system' is fundamentally sound. It is not. It is still infected with biases, institutional and human, that make the murder of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement all too common, and justice for their assailants all too rare...As we celebrate justice for George Floyd, let us remember the many, many others who have been killed under similar circumstances. Please see below for a (partial) list compiled by author Renée Ater of unarmed Black women and men who died at the hands of police since Michael Brown was shot and killed in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. If you can bear it, read their names tonight, one by one. We owe them the simple dignity of never forgetting them."
Quick reminder that City Council will meet today at 1:00 PM for their first budget amendment work session—the most exciting of budget work sessions. They've got a lot of proposed amendments to work through and a lot of compromises to make, so it should be a fascinating listen. Two things to keep an eye on apropos of the previous paragraph: Councilmembers submitted amendments to fund both the Civilian Review Board and to provide police officers higher pay. Those were already complex conversations and have only gotten more complex since last night. You can tune in live over on the City's legislative website, or listen via The Boring Show later this week.
Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has some more details on the "biennial real estate strategies" plan that City Council's Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee looked at yesterday. I think most of the properties that the City proposes to get rid of should be fairly non controversial, but approval of the plan would mean that we should see some RFPs floating around soon for the larger, more interesting sites—places like Oak Grove Elementary School, the Coliseum, and Fulton Gasworks.
This morning, you can live stream the assembly of a massive T. Rex skeleton in the Sauer's Center. The skeleton is, apparently, the only full-sized T. Rex replica in Virginia and measures 40 feet long and 14 feet tall. It has it's own twitter account! Sure!
Tonight, at 7:30 PM, you can join the Richmond Crusade for Voters for a virtual Commonwealth's Attorney forum featuring incumbent Colette McEachin and challenger Tom Barbour. I think this is the final time for you to see the candidates interact before in-person absentee voting in the Democratic primaries starts on Friday. Zoom info to follow—Meeting ID: 826 3423 6927; Call in: 301-715-8592; Passcode: 132889.
This morning's patron longread
What The Shortest Interstate In The U.S. Can Teach Us About Racism In Infrastructure
Submitted by Patron Brian. We, of course, have our fair share of racist-as-hell, garbage infrastructure in Richmond.
Our garbage infrastructure is racist as hell and often built and designed with racism foremost in mind. The more you learn about it, the more you see it everywhere you look. Racism is obvious in the very bones of our country. Many folks on Twitter pointed to Robert Moses, the subject of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. Moses was the master planner of a series of parkways on Long Island who made sure to build bridges too low for buses to pass under, thereby keeping Black and poor people from enjoying the public beaches. But this isn’t a problem of the past — it’s one that has shaped and continues to shape our cities. This subject really gets under my skin because I am passionate about two things: infrastructure and my hometown of Detroit, a city decimated by racist infrastructure policies that continue to this day.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
