Good morning, RVA! It's 64 °F, and we’ve got another hot, dry day ahead of us. You can expect consistent sunshine and highs around 90 °F straight on through the long weekend. I hope you find time to get outside—or, heck, take a long nap in the cool comfort of some air conditioning—to celebrate the ending of the summer and to start thinking about the fall! Richmond’s best season is just around the corner.
Water cooler
It seems like it’s been forever, but the COVID-19 Community Level for all of Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield is now medium—only just barely medium, but medium nonetheless. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality respectively is 199, 138, and 191 (remember, the medium/high cutoff is 200). The 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 15.9. I’m taking this drop in level as good news but will still wear my mask when I’m out in indoor public spaces. The CDC does not recommend this for everyone while at a medium level, but it can’t hurt and masks are a chill and breezy way to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. We’ll see if we can sustain a regional medium as kids return to school and college students return to whatever it is that they get up to these days.
In other fun COVID-19 news, last night the CDC recommended new bivalent boosters for everyone 12 and older. These bivalent boosters, in both Pfizer and Moderna flavors, have a new formulation that focuses on the original SARS-CoV-2 virus plus the more recent BA.4/5 variant. Katelyn Jetelina has a great explainer that you should read detailing the safety, efficacy, and benefits of these new vaccines. Making small updates to vaccines is normal and a lot like how we rejigger the flu vaccine each year, and I this hope signals that we’re starting to settle into Regular Life with COVID-19. It’s a weird thing to hope, I know, but much better than living in Infinite Pandemic Mode forever. Since this recommendation just came through last night, I’d give your local pharmacies and health departments a minute to figure things out before banging on the door, demanding a bivalent vaccine. That said, I’d think booster should be readily available in the coming weeks. Start making a plan to get yours today!
The beginning of September marks City Council’s exciting return from recess, with councilmembers bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to tackle all the important papers they pushed off over the summer. I wanted to highlight one of those pushed-off papers, the ranked-choice voting ordinance (ORD. 2022-119), which will show up on Council’s Organizational Development committee’s agenda this coming Tuesday. This ordinance would switch the 2024 City Council election to ranked-choice voting, and is, honestly, a pretty big deal. Ranked-choice voting gets rid of a lot of the chaos of multi-candidate elections (like we often have in Richmond’s Council races), and we just saw how it impacted Alaska’s congressional special election with voters (Alaskans!) electing Democrat Mary Peltola over Sarah Palin. Your homework for this long weekend is to drop your City Council person a short email telling them that you, a resident and voter of Richmond, support ranked-choice voting and would like them to vote in favor of ORD. 2022-119. Full Council could vote on this paper as early as September 12th.
I missed this earlier in the week, but Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority has hired Steven Nesmith as their Chief Executive Officer. This is a tough job, and, as Suarez puts it, “has had a revolving door of permanent and temporary chiefs over the past decade, including three interim leaders since 2020.” Good luck, Nesmith!
Artemis I—NASA’s mission to blast an uncrewed spaceship out of earth’s orbit, around the moon, and return it safely back home off the coast of San Diego—will attempt another launch tomorrow, September 3rd, between 2:17–4:17 PM. I’ve got my fingers crossed, because there’s no better way to spend your Saturday than watching the livestream of a rocket liftoff.
Logistical note! This coming Monday is Labor Day, a state holiday, and as such I will take the morning off from this newsletter. I hope you have the day off, too, but, if not, I hope you find some time to rest and relax and recharge. We’re staring down the end of 2022, and I’m excited about it but definitely need a minute to collect myself before charging headlong into the last four months of the year. Have a great weekend, and I’ll be back in your inboxes Tuesday morning!
This morning's longread
Why is there a water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi?
Vox has a good explainer on what the heck is happening with the water in Jackson, Mississippi. This should sound extremely familiar to you: A capital city, neglected by the state, relying on crumbling infrastructure that suffers from decades of disinvestment and now costs billions-with-a-b to fix.
On the surface, the apparent cause of this crisis is damaged infrastructure: Recent flooding strained the city’s largest water treatment plant, O.B. Curtis, which was already dogged with problems. Plus, there was another issue with water pumps at a secondary treatment facility known as J.H. Fewell. As a result, many of the city’s water towers remain nearly empty, leaving the system without enough water or water pressure to fill pipes in homes, schools, and businesses. But the roots of this crisis run much deeper, and are inextricably tied to white disinvestment from a majority-Black city. Jackson’s water system — which serves a population that is more than 80 percent Black — has been burdened with problems for many years, largely because white flight drained the city of resources. The state’s Republican legislature has also failed to provide the majority-Democrat city with adequate funding for repairs.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
