Good morning, RVA! It's 31 °F, but highs today, and over the next couple days, should settle in the 60s. Don't look now, but this weekend we could see temperatures in the 80s! Incredible!
Water cooler
It's Tuesday, and so I bring you this week's graphs of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in Virginia. Check out the hospitalizations graph in particular; the Commonwealth now has fewer hospitalizations now than when the Omicron wave began. Pending an unknowable and unpredictable change at some point in future, we're just a couple of weeks away from numbers not seen since the magical, care-free time of last summer. However, we're not quite there yet, and our shiny new "community level" indicator remains at yellow (or medium). One last coronaupdate: The Governor's anti-mask legislation banning mask mandates in public schools goes into effect today, just days after the CDC went ahead and adjusted their masking recommendations. Masks in schools were never going to be a forever thing, and now, due to this shortsighted legislation passed by the General Assembly and signed by the Governor, we've lost an important public health tool should we need it again.
Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Richmond's School Board unanimously passed a budget last night that, while smaller than what the Superintendent proposed, still funds the District's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Wellness Officer. I spent most of yesterday nervously tied up in knots, hoping the Board would not strip these position and create an untenable situation for Superintendent Kamras. I will now exhale, take a minute for my heart rate to return to normal, and celebrate that—as the sun rises this morning—RPS still has a superintendent. Compromise, which the Board managed to find yesterday, is good and I am glad for it! This political brinkmanship, though, is poisonous. That the School Board ultimately chose to do the right thing does not distract me from the fact that, without the direct involvement of hundreds of Richmonders, they planned on passing a budget that would have, in Kamras's words, "tied my hands behind my back and expected me to perform miracles." There's a lot of work to be done moving forward.
Meanwhile, across the river, City Council met to work through their packed agenda—which included passing RES. 2022-R011, the resolution in support of adding Henrico to GRTC's Board. One thing I did I miss on the agenda for yesterday's informal City Council meeting was a presentaiton on the Civilian Review Board—not by the City's Civilian Review Board Task Force, but by a professor hired by the Mayor's administration. Ali Rockett at the RTD has the details, and puts it this way: "At odds on many points, both plans agree on one primary premise: Richmond should have a civilian review board." Hmm. Dr. Eli Coston, who served as co-chair for the CRB Task Force, has a letter in response to last night's presentation that you should read. Council still has some decisions to make, but I will be very, very bummed if they decide to disregard all of the citizen time and effort that the CRB Task Force put into creating the existing CRB recommendations.
Richmond BizSense's Jack Jacobs reports that House Republicans killed the attempt to legalize retail sales of marijuana this coming September. While I still don't think we'll need to wait all the way until January 2024 for fully legal retail sales, it does sounds like any hopes for a 2022 legalization have gone up in smoke.
President Biden will deliver the State of the Union tonight at 9:00 PM, and you can tune in pretty much anywhere and everywhere. I feel a lot of sympathy for the President's speech writers, who've surely had a ton of work to do revising the speech over the last five of days.
This morning's longread
Sea Level Rise Will Be Catastrophic—and Unequal
I had never once thought about the vertical movement of land as a contributing factor to sea level rise!
In Galveston in particular, the land has been collapsing at an astonishing rate. “The numbers I'm going to give you are going to be hard to believe, but there's an area in Baytown, where there's a big Exxon Mobil industrial plant, that sank about 11 feet in a period of 50 or 60 years, because they were just unsustainably pulling water out of there,” says Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, a conservation nonprofit that wasn’t involved in the new report. “There was a nice upper-middle-class subdivision where all the Exxon executives lived that ultimately had to be condemned, because water was lapping up the foundations of these houses.” (Whether or not the irony was lost on them isn’t clear.)
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