Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, but rain and colder temperatures move in this later this morning. At some point this afternoon expect the rain to switch over to snow while temperatures continue to drop and kids look expectantly for a school-cancellation email. NBC12's Andrew Freiden says we should expect 1–2 inches of snow to stick around this evening. Be careful if you've got to move around the region tonight!
Water cooler
We know that both Richmond and Henrico County Public Schools have decided to keep their mask mandates, despite whatever the Governor's Executive Order #2 says. But what about Chesterfield County Public Schools? Their school board will meet tonight to decide exactly that, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a good piece by Jessica Nocera pointing out some of the challenges the County's teachers are facing as Omicrons tears through the district. Also in the RTD, Holly Prestidge reports that the Hanover County School Board will hold a similar meeting on Monday, which is the day the EO takes effect but a previously scheduled flex, at-home day for students. These will both be epic meetings, I'm sure, but I'm most interested in where Chesterfield ends up, especially since the County split pretty evenly between Youngkin and McAuliffe in the gubernatorial election (51.8% to 47.4%). And a final reminder that I feel compelled to keep saying out loud: Despite the previous sentence, the science supporting masks-wearing is not political. Masks are cool and good and are an easy way to keep people safe in school buildings.
Bills come and go quickly during this early stage of the General Assembly, so it's important to have realistic expectations and not to fall in love with anything too fast. But, sometimes you can't help yourself. SB 472, introduced by Senator McClellan, would authorize Richmond to levy a 1% sales tax to pay for school construction. If Richmond is anything, it's a locality with big school construction needs that lacks the debt capacity to pay for those needs, and this bill would certainly help address that. Michael Martz at the RTD has some more details that you should casually note while not getting your hopes too high.
The Virginia Mercury's Sarah Vogelsong has a great context-setting piece as the General Assembly's Republicans look to undo the important, yet still-too-little climate legislation passed over the last couple of years. Tap through for some frustrating quotes and a total lack urgency.
City Council kicks off it's better-late-than-never redistricting public engagement process tonight at 6:00 PM. Given the detailed agenda, which you can find in full here, it looks like tonight's meeting will mostly walk through an overview of the redistricting process. Tomorrow, Council will host an identical meeting at 12:00 PM for the lunchtime crowd. If you'd like to learn more, you can read through some background redistricting information on the City's website, where you'll also find a couple tables listing out the shifts in population since the last redistricting. Somehow, through a number of small tweaks to district boundaries, the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th City Council Districts need to have a couple thousand people spread around between them. Will that result in drastically new Council districts? I doubt it, but I'm excited to see new proposed maps—even if they're very, very similar to the maps we have today.
Today at 4:00 PM you can join the Partnership on Housing Affordability for an update on the State of Housing in the Richmond Region. It's a free, but in-person, event, so evaluate your risk-reward accordingly. If you can't make it out that way but still want the latest on Richmond's affordable housing crisis, I'd wager that today's content might just show up as a PDF on their website at a later date.
Via /r/rva, what public services should you take advantage of but may not be common knowledge? I definitely did not know about the Library of Virginia and Science Museum of Virginia's Nature Backpack program (which includes a parking pass for any Virginia State Park!).
This morning's longread
Deer Wars and Death Threats
Too many deer in your neighborhood? What if we gave them all vasectomies?
Ed Burke, the borough’s deputy president, remembers first seeing deer in the news in the nineteen-nineties. Every once in a while, one would swim over from New Jersey, a feat that is impressive not necessarily for the swim—deer are strong swimmers and the Arthur Kill is fairly narrow—but for the fact that the deer first had to navigate a heavily trafficked industrial corridor of the Jersey shoreline sometimes known as the Chemical Coast. Once on the island, the animal’s exploits were often covered like those of a visiting dignitary, or a colorful drunk: someone who did not understand the local customs but who was nevertheless appreciated for his peculiarity and his novelty. “Did he pay the toll?” Burke joked.
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