Good morning, RVA! It's 33 °F, and that’s cold! Overnight lows for the next couple of days will sink below freezing, putting an end to whatever’s still living in your garden (and sending a wave of abominable spider crickets indoors to take disgusting refuge). Today, though, you can expect middle-of-November highs in the upper 40s with plenty of sunshine.
Water cooler
Yesterday, blistering reactions to the Virginia Department of Education’s changes to the history and social science learning standards started to pour in. The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus penned this open letter, saying they “have deep concerns with the politically-drafted revised standards that literally revise, whitewash, and omit important history in Virginia’s school curriculum.” An example: The draft standards VDOE released this past Friday did not mention Martin Luther King Jr. until 6th grade, something the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Anna Bryson says VDOE has since quietly updated calling the omission “unintentional.” Another example, and huge red flag: “The original Northam administration draft references multiple times that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, while the Youngkin administration draft does not.” Bryson also reports on some of the other topics scrubbed out of the new standards and the role Hillsdale College—whose president led the extremely eye-rolly “1776 Commission”—may have had in the recent update. The State Board of Education will look over the new draft at their meeting today (agenda here, livestream here), but you’ll definitely have an opportunity to get involved at a few public engagement sessions over the next couple of months.
Tonight at 6:00 PM, the newly-formed Richmond Coalition for Health Care Equity will host a community meeting at Mount Olivet Church (1223 N. 25th Street) to “discuss recent reporting calling into question Bon Secours's use of the 340B federal program intended to help hospital systems reinvest in services benefitting low-income patients and communities.” The tone for the evening sounds serious, informational, and action-oriented; I really like the language they chose for the event flyer: “What has Bon Secours Mercy done to Richmond Community Hospital, and what can we do about it?” Richmond Together, a local progressive group with smart thoughts on policy change, has helped put together this new coalition to tackle an important and timely issue. I think that’s an interesting, grass-rootsy model, and it avoids the hours and expense required to stand up an actual single-issue nonprofit. I’m looking forward to seeing what next steps towards accountability and restitution come out of tonight’s meeting.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond looked through the City’s records and pulled a list of who will get the biggest check in the mail should City Council pass the proposed one-time real estate tax rebate. Philip Morris, Dominion, huge developers like Louis Salomonsky and Thalhimer top the list. By the way, this is exactly the same list of folks who would have seen the most benefit from permanently cutting the real estate tax rate—at the expense of funding for core City programs and services, too. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather build a bike lane or two than give a couple hundred thousand dollars back to Philip Morris and Dominion.
Richmond’s Department of Parks and Rec. will spend the next couple of weeks dredging the bottom of Fountain Lake using, what I can only describe as, a combination backhoe and 19th century paddle steamer. Apparently they are “hydro-raking...to remove organic matter from the bottom.” Whatever it is they’re doing, it looks awesome and fun.
Tomorrow morning, at 8:30 AM, CreativeMornings/Richmond will host Dr. Sesha Joi Moon, Director of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion with the U.S. House of Representatives, at the ICA for a conversation moderated by Kelli Lemon. If you’ve got the morning free and want to hear smart things from smart people, check it out!
This morning's longread
The Environmentalists Undermining Environmentalism
I agree with a lot form every side of this article about community engagement in The Atlantic. Somehow we’ve got to figure out a way to protect and involve the communities impacted by large public projects (think about Richmond’s counter examples in Jackson Ward and Fulton) while also not giving a half dozen well-resourced NIMBYs the tools to grind every beneficial project to dust. It’s really complicated, and I’m not sure about the right path forward.
Key to understanding the undemocratic nature of “community participation” is defining who is actually meant by “community.” First, the types of people who have the time and money to sue developers under federal environmental statutes are not representative of the broader community. Second, the costs of construction (noise, a disrupted view) are localized, whereas the benefits of renewable energy are large and diffuse. That means if the process for green-lighting a project prioritizes local voices, it will miss a much larger piece of the picture: all of the millions of people who will benefit from a greener future. The environmental-justice movement’s response to this problem has been to propose expanding opportunities for litigation for marginalized communities. But research has shown that even when community leaders reduce the barriers to entry, input meetings remain just as unrepresentative as before.
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Picture of the Day
Found in a local high school.
