📸 Good morning, RVA: A vote on ARPA funding?, new apartments, and a talented photographer

Good morning, RVA! It’s 61 °F, and today looks pretty OK with highs in the mid 70s. Just make sure you keep an eye out for rain later this afternoon and then again over night—we may even have some severe storms roll through.
 

Water cooler

It’s been a while since I checked in on VDH’s COVID-19 Outbreaks by Selected Exposure Settings dashboard. This dashboard lets you look through outbreaks at K–12 schools, which, remember, are not the same as cases brought into schools by kids who picked up COVID-19 at home or elsewhere out in the world. Outbreaks mean disease transmission inside of a school (or other setting). At the moment Chesterfield County Public Schools reports 13 outbreaks, Henrico County Public Schools reports seven, and Richmond Public Schools reports two. If I had a minute, I’d be interested in figuring out some sort of “outbreak per capita” number or comparing the number of outbreaks in each school district to the amount of COVID-19 in each of these localities. Maybe another day!
 

Today at 6:00 PM, City Council will hold a special meeting to, fingers crossed, vote on how to spend the first $77 million of the City’s share of ARPA money. The Staff Report is pretty readable and very short, so take a quick scroll through if you’d like to learn more. As far as I can tell, the plan as presented represents the Mayor’s priorities, and, I guess, tonight Council will have their chance to present additional amendments? Honestly, I’m a little confused to how this process will play out. But! If you’d like to weigh in on the spending plan, you have until 10:00 AM this morning to send an email to the Clerk (CityClerksOfffice@rva.gov) or you can, of course, show up in-person and give a public comment this evening.
 

Richmond BizSense’s Michael Schwartz reports on potential new apartments that could pop up at Willow Lawn across the street from the Kroger. Adding multi-family residential to Willow Lawn seems like such a no-brainer success given all the retail and transit nearby. The current plans do include a ton of parking—about 1.3 spots per unit—but the new apartment buildings would literally replace surface parking lots. So that’s certainly an improvement.
 

Frank Green at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “residents of a 10-story apartment building at 205 N. 4th St., in downtown Richmond, were evacuated Friday after city inspectors ruled it unsafe.” That’s wild! I don’t think I can remember hearing about an entire building being evacuated before. Green reports that the property owner must repair the fire suppression system, the elevators, an alarm panel, and must have a structural engineer come by and verify the building is structurally sound. Yikes.
 

A reader sent me this link to local photographer Brian Wotring’s June 6th, 2020 photo of the Robert E. Lee monument lit up with a projection of George Floyd’s face. With that photo, Wotring won the International Photography Awards’ Event Photographer of the Year prize. I think it’s so very special that because of the work of our talented community of artists and activists, Richmond will always be visually associated with that summer’s protests for racial justice.
 

This morning’s longread

Bonus: FDA Releases Pfizer Data on Kids Vaccines

Emily Oster, who you may remember from way back, deep in the pandemic times, has a good newsletter from last week looking through Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trial data for 5–11 year olds. The chain of meetings needed to authorize a vaccine for younger kids kicks off this week and should wrap up early next week. It’s been a long wait for these families, for sure. Just one more week!
 

Four things of note. This trial was run during the period in which the Delta variant dominated, which is good in terms of conclusions for the current setting. Overall the rates here are fairly low in both groups. There were no documented infections in either group among children who had previous evidence of SARS-COV-2 infection. There were no severe COVID-19 cases in either group, consistent with the overall low risk for children. Bottom line on efficacy is that it looks good. Yes, the samples are small, but the protection against any illness seems really significant.
 

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Picture of the Day

Every year I make a Brunswick stew in a huge cauldron. It’s one of the best things I do.