Good morning, RVA! It's 63 °F, and today’s weather is...atypical. You can expect highs in the 80s, winds in the 20mph range (with gusts up to 45mph (?!)), and then a chance for severe storms this evening. Enjoy? I guess?
Water cooler
This past Friday, Mayor Stoney introduced his FY 2023 budget and Capital Improvement Plan.pdf), and you can now (finally) scroll through both hefty PDFs all you want! You can also listen to the mayor’s introduction speech over on the Boring Show, which I recommend as a short, high-level introduction to his priorities (or read p. 35–44 of the budget PDF). The item of most intrigue is clearly Mayor Stoney’s decision to follow through on his promise to flat fund RPS since they turned in their budget late. That doesn’t mean schools will just have to do without any of the extra cash they asked for; the mayor put $15 million ($1 million less than the RPS request) into a reserve fund that “can be made available through the course of the fiscal year based upon needs demonstrated by the Richmond Public Schools leadership.” This new fund will require City Council to pass an entire ordinance to distribute any of the money—that means School Board and a majority of Council needs to all be on the same page, which, at this point, seems like a heckuva bar to clear. We’ll see if Council approves of this arrangement and includes it in the final budget they pass, the process of which will probably give us some insight into how easy or hard access to that money will be over the coming year. Outside of schools, there’s tons of stuff to dig into like city employee raises (5% raises for all employees, additional raises on top of that for cops), more funding for the Richmond Public Library, an increase in hourly parking fees, and modest increases in utility rates. And that’s not even touching the CIP which funds all the cool stuff like bridges, trails, and buildings. I’ll get into that later this week. As for next steps, City Council will have their first hands-on with the budget this coming Monday, so, until then, get out your favorite PDF reader and spend some time processing how our City will spend $836 million. One final note: This is the best looking budget document I’ve seen out of Richmond since I’ve been paying attention. Great work to all the staff who helped put it together!
Super related, Richmond’s School Board will meet tonight with a pretty packed agenda, including a handful of budget-related items. I haven’t seen any public reactions from School Board members about the Mayor’s plan to stick $15 million of their operating budget in a Council-controlled lockbox, and, despite the pre-existing agenda, I can’t imagine that won’t be the primary topic of conversation tonight. The Board will also discuss options for relocating Fox Elementary. At this point, the Administration recommends a short-term move to First Baptist Church on Monument Avenue for a couple weeks and then a permanent(ish) move into Clark Springs at some point in April.
The Richmond Police Department sent out a press release last night announcing an “officer involved shooting” in which police officers shot and killed a suspect on the 1200 block of Garber Street. Here’s the language from the press release: “At approximately 10:43 p.m. Sunday night, Richmond Police officers responded to the call of an unknown armed individual at a residence in the 1200 block of Garber Street. Police officers arrived on scene and located a white adult male with a firearm. Officers commanded the adult male to drop the firearm. Due to aggressive actions towards the officers by the suspect, officers fired their weapons in response and struck the suspect. The suspect was taken to a local hospital for treatment and later succumbed to his injuries.” I haven’t seen any further reporting on this but will keep an eye out for it.
Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams had a good piece over the weekend about all the different ways Virginia’s Republicans are making our schools a more inequitable environment for students. In his words: “In what has become a pattern in Virginia education, systemic racism’s reality and remedies are being attacked more aggressively than the disease itself.” But, as Williams half-jokingly says, it could be worse. The brick wall in the State Senate has done a great job at killing almost every terrible bill—education and otherwise—it could get its hands on. I mean, look at this list of dead bills from VAPLAN.
Finally, let’s end with this great tweet from State Senator Louise Lucas: “The Governor’s only win this session was changing a school mask rule that was going to change anyway when cases got this low? Rough session for my man in fleece.”
This morning's longread
Bones, Bones — How to Articulate a Whale
I love when writers do weird things and then reflect on them. Writers: Go find the dead whale in your own life!
And now the work begins. For the next six hours, some 30 volunteers — colleagues from the biology department, two theology professors, and a whole lot of science majors — will flense the whale, cutting away blubber, muscle, fat, tissue, ligaments, tendons, and cartilage until we reach bone. This is the second whale I’ve worked on. The first was three-quarters buried in a beach. The sand hid the carnage. This whale, however, displays her full body, inside and out. The dirt reddens. A particular scent fills the air. Scent is too weak a word. Odor? That, too, seems too weak. The whale is here, and so is her smell. It’s as much of a being here as the body itself, that familiar mixture of brine, fish, digestion, rancid oil, and Death only heightened in the week of decay since the necropsy.
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