Good morning, RVA! It's 43 °F, and today we’ve got highs near 70 °F with a chance of rain late this evening. Honestly, this whole week says to me that we’ve solidly moved on into spring—even though Richmond typically has at least one last winter hurrah at some point in the month of March. Maybe not anymore, though! Anyway, if you can dodge the rain, the week ahead looks really nice.
Water cooler
Last Tuesday, WTVR’s Tyler Lane reported that the City has repeatedly failed to meet the legally required timelines for fulfilling Freedom of Information Act requests. Frustrated, I’m sure, by lack of timely responses to his own requests, Lane, in a sort of “Well now this is happening!” way, FOIA’d the City’s internal communications about FOIA. I think that’s pretty smart, and what he found is pretty concerning. Tap through and you’ll see a lot of back-and-forth between City leadership and the FOIA officer (the person in charge of responding to these sorts of requests) about what should or should not be released—all of which, of course, is FOIA-able. The tone’s not great, but the City did eventually release the records Lane requested...almost. Lane ends with this: “CBS 6 is also aware of an email that should have been responsive to our request for emails in which [the FOIA officer] warned Burks that the city could face a lawsuit for not complying with FOIA. Burks has acknowledged the existence of the email and has said she would provide the email to CBS 6. But as of February 27, Burks has still not provided the email.” Then, this past Friday, Lane somehow got a hold of the missing email, and posted the whole, spicy thing on Twitter.
Later that same day, Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that the City’s FOIA officer was fired back on January 19th and has since filed a whistleblower complaint against the City alleging wrongful termination. If you want to really dig in, the RTD has posted a PDF of the full complaint that you can read for yourself. It’s full of bad, but here’s one of the more concerning bits, summarized by Holter but found on page 11 of the complaint: “After [the FOIA officer] was instructed to deny personnel records related to the mayor’s office for two requests that came from Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign, [the officer] was told by two separate city officials to no longer answer mayor’s office FOIA requests” and that those requests would be handled directly by the Mayor’s office. I suspect we’ll hear more about this particularl aspect in the coming days.
There’s a lot of not great stuff in both the reporting and the complaint itself, but, and I know this is an unpopular opinion, I sometimes feel ambivalent about FOIA news. It’s often too insider-baseball for me, and, having been on the receiving end of poorly worded FOIA requests, I have some sympathy for the additional workload it adds to already strapped public employees. That said, prompt response to FOIA requests is required by law, our government institutions should do the best they can to fulfill those requests, and they should do so in a helpful, not adversarially way. I think I’m still processing this story and how it fits into some other thoughts I’ve got floating around about how the City interacts with its residents, so expect more from me once the pieces start fitting together in my brain!
Samantha Willis at the Virginia Mercury, writes about the long and winding road the City has taken to get to last month’s announcement of the Shockoe Project. Despite the decades of fits and starts, Willis does have some optimism about this most recent attempt to memorialize the stories of the people bought, sold, and enslaved in Richmond: “Many may doubt that the Shockoe Project can be manifested from renderings and grand pans into reality; given the history, it’s understandable if they do. But I want to believe that this project will come to fruition. I would love to take my family there, not to wallow in the suffering of our ancestors, but to show my sons part of our historic narrative as the descendants of free and enslaved Black Virginians. I want to reflect on our peoples’ strength in a space specifically designed to imbue those ancestors with the dignity they were denied in life.”
It’s Richmond Invasive Species Awareness Week, which has to be one of my favorite awareness weeks. Starting yesterday, the James River Park System’s Invasive Plant Task Force has put together a full week of events to help combat the scourge of invasive plants in one of our great park systems. There’s all sorts of ways you can get involved: You can get out into the thick of things and pull up a bunch of English ivy, you can check out an educational film, and, heck, you can even go on a group bike ride that I assume entails riding around shouting mean things at bad plants. Before you head out there, though, make sure you scroll through this list of the top-10 worst invasive in the JRPS. It helps to know the enemy.
This morning's longread
Inside the Dahlia Wars
Want to learn a ton about dahlias? I didn’t think I did, but I couldn’t stop reading this long piece by Anne Helen Petersen about the complexities of the dahlia market. One thing I love about AHP—and I’m sure my friends and family will roll their eyes in sympathy—is that when she gets interested in something she goes in hard and cannot stop talking about it. In her words: “When I get interested in something, I approach it the way I’ve been taught to approach any subject: I go deep and wide. I learn about the history and I learn about the present; I get obsessed with both the practical and the political.” Tap through to experience this single-minded focus...about dahlias!
Earlier this week, a dahlia farm opened with thousands of dahlias on offer — with pictures mostly stolen from other sites. The owners of those sites (who’d spend countless hours on photography) were rightfully outraged (this is far from the first time this has happened — Etsy dahlia sellers are particularly notorious) and a long thread of support emerged for the growers whose work had been lifted. A few days later, a popular hybridizer (Coseytown) sent an email banning the future sale of all Coseytown tubers, past or future, outside of Coseytown’s own site. In other words: if you bought a Coseytown tuber five years ago or last year or were planning to in this year (in their sale, which opened on March 2nd), then will not be able to sell any of the tubers from your Coseytown plants. You can plant them in your garden, sure — but sell or trade, nope. (Remember, to this point, once you bought a tuber, you were free to do with it what you wanted — including selling its tubers). As you can imagine, the announcement has caused a massive uproar and still-unfurling conversations.
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Picture of the Day
Deliveries to the Linden Row Inn (or some other nearby spot?) are the most frequent bike lane offenders that I encounter.
