🎷 Good morning, RVA: 2023 budget season begins, electoral dominos, and jazzed legislators

Good morning, RVA! It’s 42 °F, and you’ll probably see some rain this morning. Temperatures will eek up into the 50s this afternoon but things should get significant warmer over the next couple of days. Richmond in the winter: Weirdly warm, wet, and cloudy!
 

Water cooler

Tonight, at the RPS School Board meeting, the 2023 budget season officially kicks off with the Superintendent’s presentation of his proposed budget. This is definitely a PDF you’ll want to flip through—especially the first section which includes a really nice primer on how budgets work in Richmond. This year, Superintendent Kamras has proposed a $35.3 million increase over last year’s budget with the vast majority of that (about 66%) going towards teacher and staff pay increases. Slides eight and nine of the presentation detail the specifics and point out that if this year’s raises get funded, teachers will have seen their pay increase 30% since 2018—jumping the average salary from $52,000 to $68,000. Seems like a worthy expense, especially in the middle of a nationwide teacher shortage. As for how to find the money to pay for those raises, slide 16 gets down to business and breaks out where the School District hopes to find the $35.3 million in new spending: Mostly from an anticipated $6 million increase from the state and a new $28.3 million ask from the City. That’s a nontrivial number, so we’ll have to see what ultimately ends up in the City’s budget. Next steps are for the School Board to hold some public meetings, make some tweaks, vote on this budget, and send it to the Mayor (something they failed to do last year). Then the mayor will introduce his budget at some point in March, which gets tweaked by Council for final approval in June. Welcome to budget season! The most wonderful time of the year!
 

School Board sure has a busy night ahead of them, because alongside all of that fun budget stuff, there’s also interesting presentations on proposed tweaks to the District’s cell phone policy and their 2023 list of legislative advocacy priorities. About the latter, I don’t know that any of these, especially the funding-related ones, will find favor with the current Governor—he wants to defund public schools, not give them more money. But, maybe some of the investments in mental health will sneak through. If you’d like to advocate for fully funding public schools and the other RPS priorities, keep an eye on their Advocacy Hub to find resources for getting involved.
 

The electoral dominos set off by the death of Rep. McEachin continue to fall, and Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the first list I’ve seen of folks lining up to fill McClellan’s Virginia Senate seat should she win her February 21st Congressional election. It’s a fascinating list which, depending on who wins, may set off even more special elections. I guess I kind of just assumed that Del. Bagby would be next in line, especially after he stepped aside during last month’s primary with McClellan—but I dunno! Some of the big names on this list really would make it an interesting, and potentially competitive, race.
 

Also in the RTD, this bizarre story, reported by Charlotte Rene Woods and Patrick Wilson, about the Governor’s decision to block a Ford battery plant outside of Danville. From the piece: “Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to halt plans for a $3.5 billion Ford Motor Co. battery plant over his concerns about Chinese influence cost one of the poorest areas of Virginia a reported 2,500 jobs with potential for more.” In response, the governor’s spokesperson gave this bizarre statement, “While Ford is an iconic American company, it became clear that this proposal would serve as a front for the Chinese Communist party, which could compromise our economic security and Virginians’ personal privacy.” Republicans who represent the area in the General Assembly, however, “did not respond to a chance to comment on Monday.” I don’t blame them, and I agree with Sen. Surovell: That this decision—which cost actual Virginians actual access to opportunity—is mostly a game Youngkin’s playing with the other republican presidential primary candidates.
 

I loved this piece by Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond, originally titled “What Richmond lawmakers are jazzed on.” Tap through for a one-sentence description of what bill is most important to 14 different area legislators. What a great idea for an article!
 

Richmond Connects is what the City calls its ongoing process to create an equity-centered, multimodal transportation plan, and this winter folks have a cool opportunity to join a Richmond Connects focus group to help the City plan for improvements to walking, biking, and riding the bus. Specifically, the City’s looking for seniors and residents with lower-incomes from the Northside, East End, Manchester, Midlothian, and Walmsley neighborhoods. Participants will receive a $50 gift card for their participation. I know that readers of this particular email are probably not the target audience, BUT I do feel like readers of this particular email definitely have the right connections to make sure this opportunity ends up in the right hands. So please think about who you can share the aforelinked survey with this morning!
 

Love this photo of the day of a James River Park surprise from Richard Hayes at RVAHub.
 

This morning’s longread

Why Not Mars

No one loves space more than me, and I went into this essay about why we shouldn’t send people to mars with big-time skeptical-face. But! I think he probably has a point, and I would 100% trade human exploration of mars for dozens of high-quality robotic missions like Galileo and Cassini.
 

The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun. The buildup to Mars would not look like Apollo, but a long series of ISS-like flights to nowhere. If your main complaint about the International Space Station is that it’s too exciting and has a distracting view of Earth out the window, then you’ll love watching ISS Jr. drift around doing bone studies in deep space. But if you think rockets, adventure, exploration, and discovery are more fun than counting tumors in mice, then the slow and timorous Mars program will only break your heart.
 

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Picture of the Day

I love well-chosen bathroom accessories.