Good morning, RVA! It's 38 °F, and today’s highs will hit 50 °F for the last time in the foreseeable future. What a difference a day makes, because this morning Nick Russo and Megan Wise at NBC12 are tracking another chance for snow on Friday night. I hope this one pans out—I’m tired of these unfulfilling dustings!
Water cooler
It’s still early, but I’m optimistic about the graphs of hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19 in Virginia. Both have at least plateaued or even started to decline. This matches what we’re seeing across the country, especially in northeastern states that got Omicron’d before we did. Still though, the absolute number of people hospitalized is very high, and if, for some reason, you needed additional convincing to get vaccinated, check out these graphs from the CDC comparing hospitalization rates of unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people. To quote from the words bit, “in December...monthly rates of COVID-19 associated hospitalizations were 16x higher in unvaccinated adults.” That’s a lot of Xs. Finally, I’ve seen a couple Concerned Tweets about a new sub variant of Omicron, termed BA. 2. Yesterday, Katelyn Jetelina, my favorite yet not-exceedingly-optimistic epidemiologist newsletter person, had this to say on the topic: “We know this virus will mutate. And BA.2 is an example that it’s doing what we expect. We should keep an eye on this, but I’m not too concerned right now. I’m more concerned about another variant popping out of nowhere like Omicron did.” She’s got some data and studies to back that position up, and I encourage you to tap through and read.
Look at this dumb thing I wrote yesterday: “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.” Not only was I incredibly wrong, but Council passed the Casino Re-Referendum papers 8–1 with Councilmember Jordan the only vote against. However, to my credit, when I made yesterday’s very incorrect prediction, I was missing this key piece of information reported by Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney and several members of the City Council are proposing a 2-cent reduction to the city’s real estate tax rate to get voters behind a second casino referendum.”
First, you should be angry that our elected leadership is wasting precious time and energy re-rolling the dice on a casino referendum and willfully ignoring and discarding the results of a referendum. Let me quote Allan-Charles Chipman, one of my favorite voices on the casino, “The passage of this legislation would defy the expressed will of the people in Richmond. It is a frequent tactic of casinos once they lose any democratic referendum to try and break the will of the people with consecutive referendums...While double or nothing is an acceptable tool for someone who lost a bet in the casino, it is not an acceptable option for the members of this body who lost a bet on a casino.”
Second, you should be angry that our leaders—who spent last night talking about how a casino will bring much-needed revenue to the City—are selling this re-referendum by pairing it with a reduction in the real estate tax. Our leaders are, right now, contemplating trading extremely stable, predictable, and long-term revenue, for a big check up front and an uncertain future. It’s shocking. I’ve written about it one trillion times before, but the real estate tax is one of our only tools to generate the money we need, on the scale we need it, to tackle decades and decades of disinvestment. And once you lower the real estate tax, it is nearly impossible to raise it back up. In fact, Republicans (and maybe some Democrats) in the General Assembly would like to make it nearly impossible to ever raise the real estate tax again by requiring localities to hold a referendum to do so (HB 1010 / SB 620). Here’s the worst case scenario: Council lowers the real estate tax and fails to spend the big, upfront casino cash addressing systemic problems on the Southside; the General Assembly prevents localities from ever again raising the real estate tax; and the casino revenues flames out in a half-dozen years leaving us with a hole in our budget that we must fill by cutting people and programs (and we can probably guess which part of town will feel those cuts most).
Looking forward, I see a couple of things to keep in mind as the City plods endlessly toward another casino vote. One is that Sen. Joe Morrissey would love to put a casino in Petersburg and has legislation floating around in the GA (SB 203) that would authorize Petersburg to hold their own referendum and ban Richmond from holding a second referendum for five years. Another is the possibility of a Land Value Tax in Richmond, which would be the only way I could ever get behind a reduction in the real estate tax. We have the authority to do so, it’d result in a better and more equitable source of revenue for the City, and it wouldn’t be such a short-sighted gamble. It’d require a lot of messaging and courage from our elected leadership, though.
I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts and feelings on this as we move closer to November, but, right now, I’m just feeling incredibly deflated and disappointed.
Dang, is there a lot of big stuff going on at the moment! The Washington Post reports that Richmond Public Schools joined a lawsuit against the Governor’s anti-mask Executive Order along with Fairfax, Alexandria, Hampton, Falls Church, Arlington, and Prince William County schools. Kenya Hunter at the RTD has some quotes from locals and local legislators. I haven’t seen a timeline for how this lawsuit will play out, so stay tuned for possible injunctions or whatever the lawyer word is! Related, Holly Prestidge, also at the RTD, reports that Hanover County Public Schools have decided to go along with Governor Youngkin’s EO and make masks optional, and Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury points out that the EO applies to private schools as well.
This morning's longread
Tide and Time
You really gotta read this piece about the impact hasty, thoughtless development and climate change (although the former really is part of the latter, isn’t it?) has on the Outer Banks. I quote an optimistic section below, but living with the effects of climate change means we probably need to let some places go—and the Outer Banks might just be one of those places.
The good news is that humans can reverse these problems because humans created them. However, Dare County’s proactive, yet undercoordinated patchwork of resilience solutions can only address the symptoms but not the causes of climate change, or the islands’ erosion. Slowing or reversing climate change over the coming centuries will require humans to immediately stop burning fossil fuels and confront the exploitative economies that created this climate crisis. We must switch to clean energies and agricultural methods and develop technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Reversing the erosion on the Outer Banks will require North Carolinians to reimagine the tourism and development that wither the islands.
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