Good morning, RVA! It's 37 °F, and today is full of weather! You can expect dropping temperatures and lots of rain, sleet, and snow in that order. How much of each? Who knows, but it’ll be enough to make moving around the region gross and dangerous. The grab bag of winter weather should taper off sometime after lunch, but if you’re looking to do things this morning, check for cancellations first!
Water cooler
School children across the region rejoice! Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield public schools are all closed today due to the inclement weather (which has just switched over to sleet as I write this parenthetical). However, assuming the rain/sleet/snow passes and schools wrap up their weather-related closing by tomorrow, they still will need to navigate preventing COVID-related closings as we move into 2022. Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras put out his five-point plan to keep schools open and in-person this past Thursday, and it’s worth reading through (even if you don’t have school-aged kids running around). Here’s the five points: 1) The district gave out over 8,000 at-home tests to staff and students yesterday, 2) RPS will pilot a test-to-stay program starting as soon as next week, 3) all unvaccinated staff will be tested weekly, 4) “we have purchased a quarter million KN95 masks for staff, high school, and middle school students,” and 5) they’ll continue to host vaccination events—with 15 planned over the next couple of months. These are all good, concrete, and proactive moves to keep our kids in school! I’m most interested in the second thing and am looking forward to if/how the test-to-stay pilot and the CDC’s new, shortened isolation and quarantine guidance work together. Part of my brain, the part that had to be really convinced that it was OK to walk to the grocery story to pick up some cornbread mix last night, is terrified at any return to anything. But the the other, less reptilian part, knows that test-to-stay and shortened quarantines are both signs of us moving past pandemic and into endemic. Transition times like this are stressful, and for the next several months I fully expect to feel plenty of stress while making skeptical/constipated faces about many of these moves!
Last week, the City posted the Diamond District Request for Interest PDF, which you can download and store away in your own PDF library. The RFI itself is a breezy 24 pages, followed by 139 pages of appendixes that include a market analysis of both the neighborhood and of building a new ball park. While this is, ostensibly, a document for developers, I think reading through it is a nice and easy way (if you skip the appendix) to see what the City envisions for the mostly-wasteland currently surrounding the Diamond. I recommend it! Developers have until February 15th to submit their proposals. They’re required to keep the proposals under 30 pages, which means they should be pretty readable for normal people like us.
Maybe old news at this point, but Desiree Montilla at NBC12 has some of the details on the (outgoing) Governor and Mayor’s plan to transfer Monument Avenue’s Confederate statues to the Black History Museum and The Valentine. Critically related, and assuming the winter weather doesn’t cancel it, City Council will meet tonight to introduce legislation to “accept a donation of personal property including the Robert E. Lee statue, pedestal blocks, and associated artifacts, valued at approximately $12,000,000.00, from the Commonwealth of Virginia.” First, I’d love to know how they valued a circle of land in the Fan and a massive racist statue at $12 million. Second, I assume Council wants to get this done as quick as they can before the new Governor shows up and decides on a different future for the circle and its monument.
Take a minute and flip through this list of 2022’s big development projects and questions that Michael Schwartz at Richmond BizSense put together. The most interesting one to me: “Some claim well-known Washington, D.C.-based Douglas Development has held much of the Arts District hostage by not doing anything with its myriad holdings in the neighborhood. Might this be the year the company makes a move? Is Douglas waiting to see what happens with the Coliseum and City Center area?“ I doubt a move will happen, but it sure would be nice to, you know, have actual things in some of those buildings downtown.
Jack Jacobs, also at Richmond BizSense, reports that Kulture will open up a preemptive weed store in Chesterfield. Seems like a big risk to me but does further point out how the current in-between situation the General Assembly has set up for marijuana legalization is untenable.
This morning's longread
The space station race
The recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (the progress of which you can follow in excruciating detail here) has got me way back into space—so expect more galactic longreads. Let’s start with this nice overview of humanity’s plans for a more permanent presence off-world.
NASA is scaling back its presence in low-Earth orbit as the government focuses on sending humans back to the moon and, eventually, to Mars. As part of that transition, the space agency wants to rent out facilities for its astronauts on new space stations run by private companies. When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. That means countries won’t just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too.
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