Good morning, RVA! It's 51 °F, and, once again, today looks beautiful. Expect highs near 80 °F accompanied by maybe a few more clouds than yesterday. Sounds like a day worth enjoying.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,023 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 31 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 154 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 51, Henrico: 61, and Richmond: 42). Since this pandemic began, 1,232 people have died in the Richmond region. Case counts across the state are on a downward trend—at least over the last five or so days. Plateau or nah? You can question the local case count similarly, I think. Check out the graph of the combined 7-day average of new reported cases in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. Hmmm...definite notes of plateau.
Over on the vaccine side of the house, parts of Virginia are already in Phase 2: Everybody Else. As of yesterday, the Chesapeake, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach Health Districts have all moved in to Phase 2. Actually, looking at this map, there area bunch of Health Districts already in Phase 2. We'll get there soon, y'all—hold tight. And until then, remain vigilant, wear a mask, keep your distance, and work from home if you can!
Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has an update on something I wrote about yesterday and reports that University of Richmond's board of trustees has decided to pump the brakes on leaving racists' names on two campus buildings. This comes after the faculty senate voted to censure the rector of the board of trustees. This all feels so predictable and avoidable, doesn't it? I wonder if the board underestimated the amount of blowback they'd get or if they didn't even consider it.
Related, the RTD's Chris Suarez sat through yesterday's Council meeting and reports on how Council will move forward on disposing of the Confederate monuments. Well, kind of. In a very Council way, they couldn't decide if they wanted to go through the disposal process themselves or if they wanted the Mayor's administration to handle it instead. Or maybe the Mayor's administration could do most of the work but keep Council in the loop? TBD! To Council's credit, though, they have lost a ton of staff recently, and, with the budget season ramped fully up, I doubt Confederate monument disposal is high on anyone's list.
Jonathan Spiers in Richmond BizSense has the details on these perpendicular-to-the-street townhomes proposed for a site in Highland Park. Every one comes with a spiral staircase to access the shared lawn! I'm fascinated by this concept (the perpendicular townhomes, not the spiral staircases) and interested in if we start seeing more of these pop up. Converting a big lot in a single-family neighborhood into 12 homes is definitely one way to do some mild density.
Tonight you've got two ways to learn more about the candidates running to represent you in various ways. First, the University of Richmond School of Law will host a virtual policy platform discussion with the Commonwealth's Attorney candidates today at 12:00 PM, featuring both incumbent Colette McEachin and challenger Tom Barbour. Second, Virginia State University will host the first televised Democratic gubernatorial debate tonight at 7:00 PM, featuring Lee Carter, Jennifer Carroll Foy, Justin Fairfax, Terry McAuliffe, and Jennifer McClellan. I'm familiar with this entire cast of characters (some for better reasons than others), but I'm really interested to see them all on stage together—some very different vibes across the group.
The New York Times has a nerdy but important update from the Senate after the parliamentarian issued new guidance about the budget reconciliation process: "The guidance could substantially weaken the filibuster by allowing the majority party to use budget reconciliation—a powerful tool that allows measures related to taxes and spending to pass on a majority vote—multiple times in a single fiscal year." For this newsletter, that means there's a possibility for the Senate to pass Biden's big infrastructure bill with a simple majority! Bring on that federal public transit funding!
This morning's longread
One weird trick to fix our broken child care system
Anne Helen Petersen! Here she is writing for Vox about publicly funded child care.
Early childhood care is, as one policy expert put it to me, a total market failure, and has been, whether we realized it or not, for decades. How do you fix a fundamentally broken system? It’s not as simple as blowing it up and starting over. The failure is so textured, so tied up in ideas of gender and race, of women and work, of “choice” and “kids are best cared for at home,” solutions thus far have largely been piecemeal: Add an incentive here, cut a cost there, even take the big step of establishing universal pre-K. Some of these reforms have meaningfully changed kids’ (and parents’) lives, but the entire process feels, as Lea Austin, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, put it to me, “like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.”
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