Good morning, RVA! It's 68 °F, and cooler weather has returned! Gone are the baking, near-triple-digit highs, replaced with some temperate, mid-70s vibes. You can expect clouds to hang around most of the day, which will maybe switch over to some rain this evening. Looks like the sky opens up tomorrow, though!
Water cooler
Monkeypox! You've got questions, Katelyn Jetelina's got answers. The bad news: "American ground squirrels are also highly susceptible to the virus. If monkeypox were to become established in a wildlife reservoir outside Africa, the public health setback would be difficult to reverse." Terrifying! But, there's good news, too: "Smallpox vaccines work on monkeypox, especially if the vaccine was recent. In fact, the CDC reports that smallpox vaccination within 3 years is 85% effective at preventing monkeypox disease." Also, if you're extra worried about monkeypox, masks and improved ventilation are good mitigation measures for this disease, too. Jetelina closes with this hopeful/realistic context: "It’s too early to tell if we should be worried, but we are confident the current outbreak will be nothing close to the COVID-19 pandemic. We live in the harsh reality where the next epidemic is just around the corner. We need to learn from the lessons of the past and present and prepare for the future."
Over the weekend, Delegates Willett and VanValkenburg wrote a good column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the shortsightedness of the Governor's choice to revoke telework agreements from all state employees. There are a million and one reasons why forcing every state employee back into an office is a bad policy—including childcare, gas prices, climate change, employee retention, and job competitiveness ("While the commonwealth frequently cannot compete with private-sector salaries, we can and do offer great health benefits, a retirement plan and, until recently, workplace flexibility."). While I appreciate the public support from elected Democrats, I don't think it'll do anything to shift the Governor's thinking on this—not that I believe he's even still thinking about it.
City Council meets tonight for their regularly scheduled meeting and will, theoretically, take up some of the papers that I've been tracking for what feels like forever. On the docket: Path to Equity (RES. 2022-R027), the two collective bargaining papers (ORD. 2021-345 and ORD. 2021-346), and the laundry list of Richmond 300 amendments (RES. 2021-R026). At this point, I anticipate only Path to Equity passing, but you never know! With budget season in the rear view mirror, maybe Council has some extra bandwidth? Additionally, Council will hold the final public hearing on their redistricting plan and, unless something goes haywire, will adopt new Council and School Board districts that take effect on June 22nd. You can find the final maps here.
Chris Suarez at the RTD reports on a leadership shakeup at the Enrichmond Foundation, the nonprofit that owns two of the City's historic Black cemeteries. For decades, nature had slowly reclaimed East End and Evergreen cemeteries, covering graves—even Maggie Walker's!—with creeping ivies and weeds. Then, forever ago at this point, a group of volunteers started coordinating cleanups to restore some order and sanctity to the spaces. When Enrichmond bought both properties a couple years back, tensions between those volunteers and the nonprofit started to simmer and have continued to boil ever since.
Reminder! High School graduations begin today, stretch into the middle of June, and will most likely snarl up much of the area around the Siegel Center for odd moments throughout the day. GRTC has put together a handy schedule of all the upcoming graduation ceremonies, but it's basically once per morning, afternoon, and evening for the next little while. Busses won't be detoured, but may be delayed, and if you're driving around please be careful if you decide to shift off of Broad and zoom through an adjacent residential neighborhood. Congratulations, graduates! You did it!
Finally, these beautiful drone photos from Creative Dog Media of people sweating it out at Riverrock this past weekend. Richmond's riverfront is really something else.
This morning's longread
The Race to Rebuild the World’s Coral Reefs
Depressing? Fascinating? Hopeful? Maybe all three!
“Like any good scientist,” he says, “I grabbed a scalpel, and I did it again.” Vaughan called this technique “micro-fragmenting,” and he quickly sought to reproduce the results with as many species of coral as possible. It turned out that researchers at other labs had noticed a similar pattern—cutting coral into smaller pieces could boost its growth rate. Still, it took years for the significance of these early experiments to sink in. When Vaughan and colleagues at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology published a joint paper in 2015, they found that micro-fragmenting could make some corals grow as much as 40 times faster than they otherwise would.
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