Good morning, RVA! It's 61 °F, and this afternoon you can expect highs in the 70s?? This evening, if it stops raining long enough to get out before the sun sets, you can find me me zooming through some damp Northside alleys on two wheels.
Water cooler
The RPS School Board failed to pass a budget last night, with the same oppositional five-member voting bloc each voting against the Superintendent’s proposal. @KidsFirstRPS has a long, live Twitter thread if you want get a feel for the meeting. As with the George Wythe debacle, these five members of the School Board can think they have the leverage all they want, but the Mayor introduces the City’s budget (which funds the school system) and City Council approves that budget. RPS gets what they get. The Mayor is required to submit his budget by March 4th, just nine days from now, and has requested the RPS budget by Friday or has said he’ll move forward using last year’s funding level for schools. Working with the Superintendent to craft a budget to give to the Mayor is the Board’s best opportunity to lay out their priorities and influence the process. Taking this week to grandstand and point fingers will mean they’ve given away their ability to get involved in the process to the Mayor and City Council, who, believe me, will have no problems setting an RPS budget all on their own. While flat-funding RPS would put the District in a world of hurt (see below for more bad budget news), five members of the School Board do not get to hold the entire City budget hostage.
In his email last night, before the disappointing budget meeting, RPS Superintendent Kamras sent out a call-to-action around the State’s budget. Here’s his words: “I'll cut to the chase with some simple math: the Senate's budget proposal would ADD $2 million to RPS while the House version would SUBTRACT $12.5 million. The House has proposed cutting what's called the At-Risk Add-On, which is special funding for school divisions like RPS that serve a high percentage of low-income students. It's time to act.” If you’d like to act, and you should, RPS has put together a very helpful page with exactly the language you should use and which legislators you should email. Imagine the kind of world our students will be living in with the existing $7 million cut in state funding, an additional $12.5 million cut proposed by Republican legislators, and then a potential flat-funding from the City because the School Board’s five-member voting bloc can’t seem to pass a budget. I think, total, that would be something like a $40 million shortfall? An 11% cut from the proposed budget? I’m sure something, somewhere will shake out of all these in-progress budgets, but it won’t be a full funding of RPS—that’s for sure. It’s exhausting to have to battle for public school dollars from the three separate levels of elected government.
In more positive RPS news, Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that insurance money will cover the replacement of Fox Elementary. This, given all the budget discussion above, is great news. It also sounds like moving Fox students to Clark Springs Elementary is the most best option—although that’ll require some money and elbow grease. At the meeting last night, Superintendent Kamras said students could start at (return to?) Clark Springs as soon as the week after spring break.
Yesterday, I mentioned RES. 2022-011, which would express the City’s support for adding Henrico to GRTC’s board of directors. I expressed some concerns about having two suburban localities with a potential majority on the board of a transit company that serves mostly urban riders. Not so fast, though! An astute reader pointed me to the section of the proposed bylaws on voting, which reads: “An affirmative vote of at least two of the directors nominated or appointed by the governing body of each locality identified in Article V, Section 2 constitutes a majority vote of the Board of Directors present, and each such majority vote is the act of the Board of Directors.” I think this means that each locality effectively has veto power on any board action, which, in theory, protects the region from runaway suburbanization of the transit system. High five to whoever at the City brokered that agreement! I do, however, feel the need to again underscore that while I love this bylaws backstop, over the last handful of years the GRTC board has stayed focused on expanding local service in places that make sense. In fact, before the pandemic, the speed of progress felt blistering—as far as public transit progress in a mid-sized Southern city goes—and now it kind of feels like things are starting to ramp up again. Honestly, I think I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of regional transit decision making? The Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee forwarded RES. 2022-011 along to full City Council with a recommendation to approve at this coming Monday’s meeting. I’m sure Henrico, Chesterfield, and the GRTC Board itself need to do similar things to make this governance change a done deal.
Related, the VCU Wilder School will host a free Lunch and Learn with GRTC’s Director of Equitable Innovation and Legislative Policy Joe Dillard, Jr. today at 1:00 PM. Hop on zoom for “a lively exploration” of how “major employers like VCU can use public transit to connect their strategic efforts to improve economic, educational, social, and health outcomes for surrounding communities.” The Wilder School will post a recording of the session on their YouTube channel following.
If you missed the previous redistricting meetings, you’re in luck, because today at 3:00 PM the City will host a final public information meeting to review draft maps and determine what gets officially introduced to Council this coming Monday. An official 30-day public comment period will follow, so this is not your last time ever to get involved, but now’s the time if you wanted to express your thoughts, feelings, or emotions while the maps are still in draft form.
This morning's patron longread
Black and brown cyclists face heightened policing and poor infrastructure
Submitted by Patron Tim. Lots to chew on in this piece about biking while Black. Luckily, I think we see Richmond starting to address some of these challenges head on. Creating the Path to Equity document before even starting on the update to our city’s transportation plan is a great example of just that.
Additionally, Jesus Barajas, an assistant professor in the department of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, conducted research that found that a lack of infrastructure and police presence in underserved neighborhoods go hand in hand—the physical design of neighborhoods and disparate implementation of bike lanes allow racist enforcement of traffic laws to flourish. Together with the overrepresentation of white residential needs in city development and planning, BIPOC cyclists become trapped in an ongoing cycle in which infrastructure ignores or is outright hostile to their use, which discourages BIPOC from participating in further city plans, which leads to their needs being underrepresented in infrastructure development, and so on.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
