Good morning, RVA! It's 20 °F, and I continue to be disappointed with our snow situation. What even was that! Bleh. Today, though, you can expect temperatures in the mid 40s, and, later this week, even warmer temperatures through at least Thursday.
Water cooler
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley had a must-read column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch over the weekend: “Lawmakers should hold the line on privatizing public education.” Siegel-Hawley is real smart and this is the column I’ve been looking for on Virginia’s return to segregation academies via Governor Youngkin’s push to expand charter schools. Here’s a quote from the piece: “Effectively recreating dual systems of schooling — a hallmark of the pre-Brown era — by increasing neovouchers and charter schools in Virginia is problematic for all of us. Siphoning substantial funding away from our woefully underresourced, overstretched regular public schools doubles down on separate and unequal schooling for the students left behind. And white, segregated charter and private schools will receive government support to ill-educate future citizens for a multiracial society.”
This is the second, must-read piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: Chris Suarez reports on the new attempt to bring a casino to Richmond’s Southside and the extremely stressful plan to pair it with a reduction in the real estate tax rate. Suarez does a great job of laying out how the mayor’s proposed tax reduction would mostly benefit affluent home owners, who mostly voted against the casino. Here it is, plainly put: “Homeowners in precincts that supported the casino on Election Day would save about $40, while those in precincts that opposed it would save about $90.” For context, the tax reduction would cost the city $5.7 million in annual revenue, and, once the rate goes down, it’s nearly impossible to raise again (especially if the Republicans in the General Assembly get their way). That’s a lot of money to hope the casino covers for literally forever. Suarez also talks to local political analyst, Richard Meagher, who points out that throughout his two terms, Mayor Stoney has advocated, multiple times, for tax increases. I can see how the mayor, searching for revenue but stymied by Council, would want to switch his tactics from directly raising it through taxes to enticing huge, taxable developments to the City—see Navy Hill, Casino One, and now Casino Two. I think this is, at least, a consistent and good-faith strategy. It’s not one I agree with, of course, and I’d prefer we replicate what the City’s doing with the Diamond District 100 times, everywhere we can. Where you really lose me, though, is proposing to strip the City from almost $6 million annually—that’s the entire budget of the Richmond Public Library! If folks want to take another swing at a casino, fine, but let’s do that without putting the future work of reinvesting in Richmond at risk. P.S. I think this is one of the best things I’ve read in the paper in a good, long while. Great work (and thank you) to everyone involved!
Michael Martz, also at the RTD, writes about Richmond’s sewers and so I am honor-bound to link you to the piece. I love seeing our federal legislators involved in the massively expensive work to upgrade Richmond’s aging combined sewer system—especially how they’re angling to remove a local-match requirement from some of that sweet, sweet infrastructure bill money. That’d certainly help move things along because, according to April Bingham, director of Richmond’s Department of Public Utilities, “the city’s ability to match additional federal or state contributions ‘has been exhausted.’” Bingham also notes that any Republican efforts to speed up the City’s timeline on replacing the sewer system is “just not feasible, even with federal funding.” Please keep this in mind! The Governor wants to make this sewer work a key piece of his environmental platform, but it sure sounds like he has set unrealistic timelines for the City. That’ll let him point fingers and shrug shoulders when the enormous amount of work hasn’t been completed at the end of his term.
The New York Times has a piece about restaurants ditching their phone lines that opens with local spooky/charming mini-golf bar Hotel Greene. I guess some people are annoyed by this, but for those of us with an irrational fear of the phone it seems just fine!
I’m a sucker for long exposures photos of water AND a sucker for drone photos of the James River. Via /r/rva, here’s a set of photos that are both!
Reminder! Today is the last day to submit feedback on the City’s transportation plan policy guide, aka Path to Equity. I know I’ve said this before, but, even if you don’t plan on submitting feedback or if you don’t particularly care about “policy guides” in general, you should still read this PDF. In fact, you should read this PDF and then you should send it to a couple of your friends to read, too. It does such a great job of laying the foundational context to a lot of Richmond’s biggest (and most expensive, see above) challenges. It’s such a great primer, and I’m gad it exists!
Because it might literally come up at the water cooler today, the Rams will play the Bengals on February 13th in Super Bowl LVI (56). Show off your sports knowledge by saying things like “the Bengals were a 125-1 shot to reach the Super Bowl!” and “did you see that ludicrous display last night??”
This morning's longread
We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was
Jamelle Bouie, who lives right down the road in Charlottesville, has a really interesting piece in the New York Times about quantizing the trans-Atlantic slave trade. I know its not the same thing, but I wonder how we take the lesson here—of being careful when abstracting data away from humanity—and apply it to our now-daily COVID-19 quantitative data habits?
Years ago, I worked with colleagues at Slate magazine on an infographic that showed the scale and duration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, using data from the SlaveVoyages website...What I did not appreciate at the time was how we, the creators, would lose control of our creation. People encountered the infographic in ways we could not anticipate and that lay outside of our imagination. It was repurposed for schools and museums, used for personal projects and in exhibitions. Inevitably, some of these people would contact us. They would want to know more: about the ships, about the journeys, about the people. And we couldn’t answer them. When I think back to the creation of that infographic, I wonder whether we had shown the care demanded of the data. Whether we had, in creating this abstraction, re-enacted — however inadvertently — some of the objectification of the slave trade.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
