Good morning, RVA! It's 25 °F, and we’ve survived the cold, cold weekend and have emerged to a decent Monday. Expect highs in the mid 40s and even warmer temperatures tomorrow. As of this moment, the extended forecast is clear of any snow!
Water cooler
I’ve got lots of updates on mask-wearing in schools, starting with: Today, the Governor’s Executive Order #2, the one banning mask mandates in PreK–12 schools, takes effect. For now, though, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield schools have all decided to carry their mask mandates forward. Depending on how you frame it, this is either the local school districts adhering to the state law that requires them to follow CDC guidance to the maximum extent practicable or it is them defying the Governor to protect the safety of students and staff. Either way, I’m here for it. Additionally, RPS has (maybe) gone a step further and, according to Kenya Hunter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “voted Sunday to take legal action to preserve its authority to oversee city schools and enforce COVID-19 protocols in an apparent effort to block the governor’s executive order on masks.” Due to lawyery stuff, we don’t know for sure what the Board voted on yesterday afternoon, so stay tuned on that front. Also over the weekend, the Virginia Department of Health and the Virginia Department of Education put out this Interim Guidance for COVID-19 Prevention in Virginia PreK–12 Schools. If you want to get into the details of how the State’s public health agency is dealing with an anti-public health executive, scroll down to page 10 and read the section on masking. Finally, if you’re a family hopelessly confused about when to send your kid to school if they’ve been exposed to or caught COVID, VDH put out this flowchart illustrating the (very complicated) isolation/quarantine guidance for kids trying to go to school. This particular document, although overwhelming to look at, is much less wishy-washy on mask-wearing, and, as far as I can tell, matches the current CDC guidance.
The Governor also dropped this 14-page PDF of his legislative and budget amendment priorities for this General Assembly session. Two important things: First, I don’t know how many of these bills sound innocuous in the descriptions but do some secret, terrible thing to roll back decades of progress; and second, I don’t have any sense at all which of these bills are dead on arrival and which have a chance at convincing one or two Democratic senators. You’ll see a ton of big-ticket items, like charter school bills, which feel like the Governor’s biggest priority this session. You’ll also see some smaller-but-terrible bills like HB 1010 / SB 620, which would require localities to hold a referendum to increase the real estate tax rate. Not that we have the political gumption to raise the real estate tax in Richmond right now, but if the City was required to hold a referendum to do so it would literally never, ever happen. Unfortunately, because of a lot of racism, raising the real estate tax is one of the very, very few ways Richmond can afford to undo the decades and decades of disinvestment in our housing, schools, and infrastructure.
City council meets today at 6:00 PM for their regularly scheduled meeting, and you can find the full agenda here. You can also see allllll the bills I’m tracking over on the GMRVA Legislation Tracker Trello board. Of particular note for today: Council looks like they’ll vote on ORD. 2021-308, the ordinance which would give the School Board the money necessary to pay for designing a replacement for George Wythe High School. I haven’t seen any public discussion on if City Council and School Board came to an agreement on the size of that replacement, so I don’t have a great sense for how the votes will go tonight (or if it’ll get continued again at some point today). Also on the agenda tonight is Councilmember Trammell’s ORD. 2022-015, and a few accompanying papers, that would reinitiate the casino referendum process. I really don’t see five members of Council voting to overturn a referendum on a controversial project and attempting to redo the whole thing—especially during an non-presidential election year. Finally, at their informal meeting, City Council will review the FY2023 budget schedule, which I am very excited about.
Extreme PDF alert! The Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development released the HB854 Statewide Housing Study—all 426 pages of it! That’s way too many pages, even for me, but the first dozen or so give a really good high-level picture of the state of housing across the Commonwealth. If anyone ends up summarizing this beast, will you let me know?
As foretold, Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury reports on the now-Republican-led House of Delegates and their attempts to hurry up retail marijuana sales into 2023 instead of 2024. Oliver also reports on a ton of other details that are sure to shift—mostly changes removing any sort of equity or reparative aspects of the new laws.
This morning's longread
World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing Is Now Under Way in L.A.
It’s like reconnecting neighborhoods split apart by highways, but for animals.
Transportation planning largely does not take the habitats of species other than humans into consideration, but L.A.’s proposal could help change that. Wildlife bridges received $340 million in the federal infrastructure bill, and as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted yesterday, preventing such collisions makes roads safer for humans too. According to the Federal Highway Administration, about 300,000 wildlife collisions happen on U.S. roadways each year — “Those are just estimates,” says Pratt, “and that’s just the big stuff” — but many are not reported. Pratt says the solution doesn’t necessarily mean building dedicated infrastructure for every animal; rather, it’s about creating more corridors similar to this one, where humans can move around safely without murdering other living things (or each other).
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