Good morning, RVA! It's 56 °F, and today you can expect dry skies with highs in the mid 70s. Looking at the three day forecast, and rain might miss us until at least Saturday. However, the oak tress on my block look like they're getting ready to drop tons of pollen onto my neighborhood, so expect that fine yellow dust to start accumulating on everything everywhere soon.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,550 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 14 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 146 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 54, Henrico: 57, and Richmond: 35). Since this pandemic began, 1,239 people have died in the Richmond region.
CNN reports that the UK variant of the coronavirus, B.1.1.7, is "now the most common lineage circulating in the United States." The CDC has this neat graph of the proportions of the different variants floating around the United States that's worth checking out. So, what does this mean and should we be terrified? Well, the CDC has a simple page on their website dedicate to trying to answer exactly that question. We know that this variant seems to spread more quickly, which may lead to more cases, which may lead to more hospitalizations and deaths. That's scary, but we do think the vaccines we've got today still protect us against these variants. We don't know enough about the disease caused by this variant, though. Is it worse? Is it more mild? Studies are ongoing to science out the answer to those questions. That, for me, is enough to keep me in my mask and distanced from other folks when possible.
They did it! Yesterday, the general assembly legalized marijuana beginning on July 1st—just 84 days from now. Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has a great breakdown of what will and won't be allowed when the current prohibitions go up in smoke this summer. The gist: Adults aged 21 and older can have possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, you can gift up to one ounce to someone but not sell it to them, you cannot consume the drug in public (here's a good quote from Sen. Scott Surovell, "This is not going to generate some ganja fest at Jiffy Lube pavilion out in the parking lot."), you probably shouldn't drive around with weed in your car as the open-container definitions are loosey-goosey, and you can grow up to four marijuana plants in your home. The only way to obtain marijuana legally is to have someone gift it to you or to grow it yourself through seeds or clippings also gifted to you. How those people got their plants? Don't think to hard about it, I guess. Finally, another great quote from Sen. Janet Howell, "One of the reasons I support making it come into effect soon is if we don’t, and we have to wait another three years, I’ll be in my 80s before I can do legally what I was doing illegally in my 20s."
I listened to City Council's third budget work session yesterday while riding my bike around the Northside, and, I have to say, the budget summary delivered by Council's budget analyst, Bill Echelberger, is the best one I've ever heard. This dude loves knowing stuff about the budget! The explanation of City employee compensation, raises, step increases, and salary decompression (which I now finally understand!) is so fascinating. For example, check out slide 15. Over the past five years teachers and cops have seen regular salary increase, while general City employees got pay bumps just two of those years. See? Fascinating. The City had a compensation study done a while back (The Gallagher Compensation & Classification Study) to make sure its employees had competitive salaries inline with the market to help with recruitment and retention of talented folks. This year's budget proposes to implement Phase 2 of that study and would drop about $5.8 million into pay raises across almost every department (p. 23). Deep nerd stuff, but it's important!
Ali Rockett at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the quickly-working task force putting together budget and policy recommendations for Richmond's Civilian Review Board. I love this sentence: "The proposed figure—which would amount to $1.2 million annually—would make it one of the most expensive civilian review boards in the country, but also one of the most effective." Yeah! You get what you pay for! The task force wants a commitment of half that amount in this year's budget, which is something they'll have to get a member of Council to propose and to fund since it's not in the Mayor's budget. I think back when we were talking about CRBs this past summer, funding equivalent to 1% of the police department's budget got floated around as a goal. The proposed RPD budget, at the moment, is $95.8 million, so this proposed CRB funding is about 1.25% of that. Seems good to me. Rockett says Councilmember Jones and Lynch are likely candidates to propose the budget amendment since they patroned the paper that created the task force. Amendment sessions start on April 21st—get excited.
A quick, cool-thing update: The rad-looking bee parklet proposed for Brookland Park Boulevard goes before the Urban Design Committee today. I think once UDC approves, the parklet folks can get started putting this thing together.
Tonight and tomorrow afternoon the City will host virtual meetings about the proposed resort casino. Tonight's meeting will kick off at 6:00 PM and you can join via Microsoft Teams. A press release sent out by the City says the meetings will "report on the public comments received since March 2021 on resort casinos and proposed resort casino projects and locations." That...should be interesting!
Via /r/rva, that Stop for Pedestrians sign on Brookland Park Boulevard has been replaced and is now a recurring character on that subreddit, which I think is wonderful.
The Richmond and Henrico Health Districts will host a free community COVID-19 testing event today at Regency Square (1420 N. Parham Road) from 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM. If you've been exposed or have COVID-like symptoms, please go get tested.
This morning's longread
Repetitive Stress
I continue to be fascinated by people who run on purpose.
But the pain is the result of a long time spent doing something with one part of your body — whether it has to do with your stride length, your shoes, or your footstrike — in such a way that another part of your body has to compensate for the action. Repeat this enough, and you have a tight glute, a weakened bone, a foot that aches in the morning. What is interesting about running is that you engage with pain so frequently that the early warning signs of a serious injury often seem like regular pain, the usual, the old ordinary aches of a morning spent logging miles around a park. Most of my serious running injuries have been the result of ignoring the ways in which my body was signaling stress until some fateful morning when I woke up and realized it was too late to ignore the pain, that I’d have to honor it, and sit out for a week, a month, or more.
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