Good morning, RVA! It's 58 °F and foggy. With any luck, by the time you read this the fog will have burned off to reveal...more clouds! Today does look a little gloomy with highs in the 70s, but, if you’re solar-powered, don’t worry: Tomorrow looks bright and amazing.
Water cooler
Turns out Richmond’s Chief of Police did not make a presentation to City Council about gun violence yesterday, because he was busy resigning entirely from the job! WTVR has the Mayor’s statement, which says he’s appointed Major Richard Edwards as Acting Chief and will conduct a “nationwide search in order for the City to find the best-qualified candidate and fit for the department and the community.” I don’t know what particular straw broke this camel’s back, but certainly the RPD’s messy handling of their Alleged Fourth of July Plot had a lot to do with it. I’ll also point out that, in his statement, the Mayor said, “As we look around the nation, the challenges faced by police departments have changed since 2020 and we, like so many of our counterparts, are pivoting to ensure we have the infrastructure, including leadership, in place to meet the needs of the current landscape and for the future.“ This directly contrasts with something ex-Chief Smith said just last week to WTVR’s Tyler Lane while talking about officer morale: “Um, I think [morale is] pretty good. I do have a lot of support with officers and talk to them. I think it's just an occurrence in police departments, and especially since talking to other chiefs, that the morale is just an issue until we can get 2020 behind us 100%.” It sounds like Smith wanted to forget about 2020 and move past it, while the Mayor wants to use lessons learned from that summer to shift the direction of the Richmond Police Department. Who Mayor Stoney hires as the next chief will do a lot to show how serious he really is about that.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Lyndon German reports on the official expanding of GRTC’s Board of Directors. First, for the first time ever, Henrico now has three seats on the Board. Second, the makeup of the Board is no longer subject-matter-expert citizens but entirely elected and municipal officials. Richmond will be represented by Councilmembers Addision and Robertson and Chief Administrative Officer Lincoln Saunders. I’m not sure how to feel about this! Certainly it should make for a less antagonistic relationship between GRTC and the City, but maybe some of that antagonism was good? For all its investments and improvements over the last decade, the City has not always valued public transit or had its best interests at heart. I guess we’ll see how it goes; hiring a new, permanent CEO is probably the first big task facing this new group.
The City’s application for DOT’s Reconnecting Communities grant—which they’ll use to study capping a section of the highway north of Jackson Ward—was due back on October 10th, and they successfully got it submitted on time. You can read all 242 pages in full here. 242 pages is a bridge too far, even for me, but I do think it’s pretty neat that the City decided to post their application online and share it broadly through a couple different newsletters. The second chunk of the PDF is probably worth flipping through, though. It’s just a huge stack of supporting letters from a number of diverse institutions and elected leaders—it’ll give you a sense for the amount of support this project has in its early stages.
City Council’s Governmental Operations committee meets today and will hear a presentation about rising utility rates. There’s a lot of interesting information in the aforelinked PDF, but the proposed rate changes are on the last page. I don’t think increasing gas, water, and stormwater rates should surprise anyone: The planet’s burning down and each of those things is either making the problem worse or getting more expensive as a result. I still think it’s bananas that the City’s Department of Public Utilities is involved in any sort of natural gas expansion whatsoever. If it were me, this would be a presentation about how to strategically move customers away from natural gas and shutter service as quickly as possible. But, it’s not me, and DPU is extremely well-resourced and, obviously, not incentivized to get people to use less of its services. Anyway and less depressing, GovOps will also have a super-related discussion on “Next Steps Regarding Support of the City’s Urban Forestry Work,” which may be the first move in getting the necessarily legislation passed to create an urban forester position.
The James River Park System, the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, and Richmond Public Schools are working together to create an Environmental Literacy Plan to “influence policies and practices for guaranteeing equitable access to environmental education.” They’ve got a Metroquest survey for you to fill out to help them sort through community priorities when it comes to environmental education. If you can stomach the Metroquest, it should take you about 10 minutes to fill out!
Reminder: Today is Walk, Bike, and Roll to School Day! If you’re out and about this morning, make sure to cheer on any kids you see staying out of the car drop-off line and making their way to school under their own power. Also, of course, if you’re driving around, please take it extra slow and keep an eye out for a bunch of kids having a blast.
This morning's longread
What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root?
Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times explores whether our American fears of majority rule are misplaced. I liked thinking this through, but, unfortunately, I don’t see a feasible path towards changing the structure of our federal government any time soon.
We cannot know how American history would have unfolded in the absence of our counter-majoritarian institutions. But the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead. It is an insight we can apply to the present. It’s not the national majority that threatens the right to vote or the right to bodily autonomy or that wants to strip transgender Americans of their right to exist in civil society...If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans.
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Picture of the Day
This goat has places to be!
