Good morning, RVA! It's 47 °F, and today we’ve got some delightfully unexpectedly highs near 70 °F alongside some bright and sunny skies. I know I’ve said this a lot recently, but if ever there was a day to get outside and have a blast, today is that day. I hope you can find the time to make it happen!
Water cooler
RVAGreen 2050’s February newsletter is worth your time and very action oriented. Specifically: Next week, City Council will hear RES. 2023-R005, which would have them adopt RVAGreen’s Climate Equity Action Plan.pdf) as the official sustainability plan for the City of Richmond. That’s something definitely worth supporting, and you should take two minutes this morning to drop your councilmember an email about it. If you’d like a sort of ground-floor summary of all the above links, check out this really clever eight-page “Council summary” document, which I think is just the best idea. If City Council can understand a document, so can you!
Ian M. Stewart at VPM reports on Henrico’s $320,000 takeaway from a federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program (Richmond took home about $760,000 from the same grant). Tap through, scroll down, and see with your own eyes a picture of how a locality can quickly create temporary, cheap infrastructure to slow drivers down and make our streets safer. I’m not saying Henrico has it all figured out—just try taking the bus to Short Pump and then walking to your destination —but I appreciate their willingness to at least experiment with infrastructure pilot programs like the one pictured here.
Storefront for Community Design has put together a really cool project alongside a neat volunteer opportunity. They’re developing Design Richmond, an interactive guide and activity book that will “empower residents, specifically youth ages 13-18, to become active participants in the design of their communities.” This is so totally right up my alley, and I wish something like it would have existed for my teenage self. I mean, check out these objectives for participants: “Explore the city from their own perspective, foster pride for living in Richmond, learn how Richmond was planned and designed, discover challenges in their community and imagine solutions, build vocabulary & understanding of city planning and design,and identify career fields that shape our neighborhoods.” If helping to put together something like this sounds like a whole lot of fun (how could it not!), you can fill out Storefront’s volunteer form.
Let’s do a quick check in with the Virginia Mercury’s Nathaniel Cline to see how the Governor’s policies to defund public schools are faring in the General Assembly: “All four bills put forward by Republicans this year to let parents use state education funding to cover the costs of educational opportunities outside the public school system failed to make it through this year’s General Assembly.” Not so great for the Governor’s agenda, but good news for our important public institutions.
If you’re up for a public meeting tonight, the City’s Charter Review Commission will gather at City Hall from 6:00–8:00 PM. This group of smart folks is in the process of reviewing Richmond’s current charter and will, eventually, suggest changes big and small to our guiding legislative document—changes that will all have to be approved by the General Assembly. That sounds daunting given the current makeup of the GA, but that’s part of the reason we put this group of smart folks together: to figure out how to successfully convince a disparate bunch of statewide lawmakers that Richmond does actually know best for Richmond (at least some of the time). You can view the full agenda for tonight’s meeting here (which is the actual first time I’ve ever found a link to a board and/or commission’s agenda on the City Clerk’s website! Makes me wonder what other treasures this dark portal holds...).
Here’s today’s ridiculous news: Eric Kolenich at the RTD reports that...let me just quote it: “In the 1890s, the estate of T.C. Williams Sr. gave the University of Richmond’s law school $25,000. Eventually, UR named the school for Williams. But last year, UR removed the name, citing Williams’ ownership of enslaved workers. And now his descendants are asking for their money back — with interest. The family has asked for $51 million.” What a waste of everyone’s time and energy.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond points me to this News You Can Use (Twitter): “Super Bowl Sunday is the peak annual consumption day for avocados...If you want avocados that are perfectly ripe on Sunday, you need to get them mid-week.”
This morning's longread
The Police Cannot Be a Law Unto Themselves
It’s been almost three years since the summer of 2020; far too little has changed and we still live in a world where we hear about police violence all too regularly. This Jamelle Bouie column, while depressing, feels like a primer in the language we should now use when we talking about police reform—in place of “defunding” or “reimagining.”
The absence of legal and, especially, democratic accountability is, or should be, an existential problem for any police reform agenda. Without a strategy to curb or break the cartel power of police departments — meaning their ability to undermine, neuter and subvert all attempts to regulate and control their actions and personnel — there is no practical way to achieve meaningful and lasting reform, if that is your goal. Indeed, anything resembling a root-and-branch transformation of American policing will only ever occur after the public is able to exercise real control over the institution itself. Put a little differently, the only reforms that can take hold in the absence of direct democratic accountability — where the public itself can shape the rules that govern policing and police officers — are those that don’t actually alter the status quo of police culture and police institutions.
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
When people lose their minds over building heights and “neighborhood character” this is what I think about.
