Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and today looks great. Expect highs in the mid 80s with more of the same tomorrow. Starting Wednesday, though, we could see some rain move in and bring cooler temperatures with it. I definitely (and finally) got the pollen washed out of my screen porch over the weekend, so you’ll find me out there most afternoons—rain or shine!
Water cooler
RPS’s School Board meets tonight at 6:00 PM and you can stream the meeting live on their YouTube. They’ll discuss the rezoning plan for River City Middle School, and you can find the full agenda here (which also includes some neat renderings of a new, 1,800-seat George Wythe replacement!). If you’ve been following along, you’ll want to check out this PDF which outlines a few tweaks to last week’s rezoning plan and adds a bucketful of supporting information—like budgets needed to support shifting students around, transportation impacts, and a look forward at potential staffing needs. To address the five-member voting bloc’s bad-faith complaints about not being presented with more than one option, check out pages 11 through 15 which highlight the other options considered by the rezoning committee—each of which the committee felt too disruptive to students. If you’ve got thoughts and feeling about this whole rezoning process, you can show up tonight at Huguenot High School at 6:00 PM to give your public comment in-person or you can email your School Board rep.
WTVR’s Tyler Layne reports that RPS’s Chief Operating Officer has resigned, with Superintendent Kamras saying “Despite my best efforts to retain her, she felt she could not effectively perform her duties given the current political climate, in which she has felt harassed, undermined, and demeaned.” As you’d expect, Kamras says everyone should expect delays in operational projects given the reduced staff capacity. The Board’s behavior does have consequences, turns out, and, unfortunately, I don’t think the COO will be the last staff member to quit out of frustration—and who the heck would want to come in and take any of these jobs given everything that’s going on? Like I wrote last week, causing confusion and chaos while reducing the effectiveness of the School District seems to be the end goal of the five-member voting bloc, and I’m not really sure what anyone can do about it.
Also from Tyler Layne at WTVR, here’s what feels like an inevitable update on the Reimagining Monument Avenue Commission: The VMFA is no longer involved and the future of that work looks like a big ol’ question mark. Seems like a mess, and now we’ve either wasted a bunch of time to get moving on planning something great for Monument Avenue _or_ we’ve had a chance to gain necessary perspective from two summers ago. Choose your framing!
City Council’s Organizational Development committee meets today at 5:00 PM and will take up the two collective bargaining ordinances: ORD. 2021-345, which gives a wide range of City employees (including cops) the ability to unionize, and ORD. 2021-346 which gives just DPU and DPW staff the ability to unionize. Mayor Stoney introduced the latter as a pilot with plans to expand collective bargaining later down the road, while Councilmember Trammell submitted the former, if I had to guess, mostly so police and fire could have their own official unions from the get-go. Trammell’s ordinance already has two co-sponsors, and, despite any stressful feelings folks might have about giving police even more power within City government, I’d bet on OrgDev forwarding the the wider-ranging ordinance to full Council with a recommendation to approve.
Via /r/rva, here’s a picture of horses tied up? locked up? parked? outside of PBR in the Fan. Do we need...more and better horse infrastructure?
Each year Bike Walk RVA sends folks out into our region to count the number of people walking and riding bikes on specific streets. The data collected help us know how many folks use our bike infrastructure (or use dangerous streets despite an unsafe lack of infrastructure), and then we can then use that data to lobby for even more and better bike lanes, sidewalks, separated paths, protected intersections, and whatever else your urbanist heart can dream of. They’re looking for folks to sign up for a two hour slots from 5:00–7:00 PM on May 10th, 11th, or 12th. As of this moment, there are a ton of open slots, so tap through and claim one this morning!
This morning's longread
NASA’s Webb In Full Focus, Ready for Instrument Commissioning
The James Webb Space Telescope is pretty much ready to go after a monthlong, nerve-wracking, and amazing process. The science and engineering required to get a huge telescope out into the middle of space continues to boggles my mind! Since this is probably your last JWST update until we get the first official, media-friendly images from the observatory later this summer, I recommend that in the meantime you add NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day to your daily reads.
Webb’s mirrors are now directing fully focused light collected from space down into each instrument, and each instrument is successfully capturing images with the light being delivered to them. The image quality delivered to all instruments is “diffraction-limited,” meaning that the fineness of detail that can be seen is as good as physically possible given the size of the telescope...“With the completion of telescope alignment and half a lifetime’s worth of effort, my role on the James Webb Space Telescope mission has come to an end,” said Scott Acton, Webb wavefront sensing and controls scientist, Ball Aerospace. “These images have profoundly changed the way I see the universe. We are surrounded by a symphony of creation; there are galaxies everywhere! It is my hope that everyone in the world can see them.”
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