Good morning, RVA! It's 75 °F, and today you can expect highs up near 90 °F. NBC12's Andrew Freiden says to expect "tropical humidity" and a chance for severe storms—neither of which sound very pleasant!
Water cooler
I dipped back into my old coronacounts spreadsheet this morning to compare the current coronanumbers to this past spring's. Right now, according to VDH's data dashboard, we're seeing a 7-day average of 2,128 new positive cases per day. That's a lot, and the last time we saw an average of new cases like that was back around February 20th. Similarly, right now we've got a 7-day average of 79 new hospitalizations per day, which we saw on March 3rd. However, VDH reports our current 7-day average of new deaths as seven, which is an astounding 31 times less than March 3rd's 7-day average of 217 new deaths. I can't remember if early March was particularly horrible or we were going through a data reporting issue, but, either way: Earlier this year we routinely saw new cases top 2,000 with new deaths peaking anywhere between 20 and 60. We're just not seeing the same thing now. All of that was to say that the vaccines exist, they're free, and they keep people from dying. You could probably stroll right in to your nearest pharmacy or grocery store and get vaccinated today—no appointment required!
I think there's all sorts of interesting in this piece by the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Kenya Hunter about police officers in schools. Lacking School Board votes to remove police from schools entirely, the Superintendent has presented a plan to soften their presence and responsibilities in the short term and then revisit their role entirely in 2023. Fascinatingly, this issue splits the Board's current 5-4 voting bloc. 3rd District member Kenya Gibson, who typically leads the majority opposition to the Superintendent, is on the same page with him about removing police from schools entirely. She, of course, doesn't agree with the particular plan he's presented, but it doesn't seem like she can whip the votes necessary to pass an alternative. The School Board decided to take this issue up next month, though, which is plenty of time for ten other things to happen and change folks' minds.
Also in the RTD, Chris Suarez has a stressful update on the state of GRTC's plan for free fares moving forward. While not part of the decision-making process currently, you can just see how badly Henrico County wants a heavy say in what happens with our region's public transit system. I'm not necessarily against Henrico having a seat at the table, either—they've expanded bus service a ton in the last couple of years; their development patterns are trending more transit-friendly; and I think as more folks are priced out of the city, public transit will be more important for those living in the County. That said, I do have deep fears of Richmond ceding control of our transit system to the two mostly suburban counties. Transit works best in cities, most trips are taken in cities, and that's where the focus should be. I don't want to live in the possible future where a majority of our region's transit money is spent on inefficient, low-ridership express routes bringing people to and from 9-to-5s.
As foretold, Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury reports that the General Assembly's Joint Commission on Cannabis Oversight is already discussing how to speed up the legalization of retail marijuana sales. The proposal on the table would allow the existing medical marijuana companies to sell recreationally "on the condition that they each serve as an incubator for five new licensees who qualify for a planned social equity program, which is aimed at directing a portion of new marijuana business licenses to Black Virginians." This kind of reminds me of how a lot of new breweries start when brewers train and learn elsewhere and then strike out on their own. Seems like a good idea, although I do share some of Del. Herring's skepticism that the proposed incubation program may not have its intended (or any!) effect. Whatever they decide, waiting until 2024 until legalizing sales still seems absolutely bananas and untenable.
Ben Paviour at VPM reports on Virginia's bipartisan redistricting committee, which has started to get to work after the recent Census data drops. This seems suboptimal: "The Virginia Redistricting Commission voted on Tuesday to use voting patterns and the addresses of current lawmakers as they draw new political maps. The bipartisan commission is also on track to hire two, partisan map-drawing teams after they failed to agree on one neutral group." The latter thing seems real dumb and sad, but this sentence makes me feel less bad about the former thing, "The commission opted to continue considering incumbents' addresses as they draw new maps, swayed in part by arguments that lawmakers on the commission already knew much of this information while citizen members did not." Fair enough. Last year, there were lots of smart folks who argued against creating this commission on the grounds that what we'd put together was certainly not the best-case scenario—which I think we're seeing play out now. But, as the Virginia Mercury's Graham Moomaw said on Twitter, "For all the drama the Va. Redistricting Commission is going through, it’s worth remembering if it didn’t exist there’d be no messy public meetings to cover and the majority party could be doing lots of this work in private." I totally agree with that, and still think this is a step forward from secret back-room mapping. If we want to make the process better in the future we can and should.
This morning's patron longread
A university-led remedy to place-based discrimination in Richmond, Va.
Submitted by Patron Aaron. You'll most likely be familiar with a lot of this, but the Brookings Institute took a look at some of the current impact generations of systemic racism has had on Richmond.
This spatial analysis illustrates that Richmond’s Black residents are sorted by income and education into neighborhoods whose interconnecting and reinforcing spatial and socioeconomic features are marred by the ongoing effects of racism. This racism was encoded into the land itself, as well as in law, banking, and other key institutions. And it is staggeringly difficult for residents of these neglected neighborhoods to escape the crushing cycle of Black intergenerational poverty. For those Black residents in Richmond who do experience upward mobility, postsecondary education is often the key.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
