👃 Good morning, RVA: Building neighborhoods, Test to Stay, and Spanish

Good morning, RVA! It’s 28 °F, and colder temperatures have returned. Expect highs(ish) in the mid 30s for the next little while. Make sure to keep an eye on Friday night or Saturday morning as that’s our next best chance for snow to move into the region.
 

Water cooler

I’ve still got a lot of thoughts about Council and the Mayor’s plan to pair a second casino referendum with a two-cent reduction in the City’s real estate tax—most of them, at the moment, aren’t very constructive. But, basically, I’ve got two main issues with this plan: 1) I’d rather the City build thriving neighborhoods than big, shiny projects, 2) Given the decades of racist disinvestment, the City needs MORE revenue, not less. Following the whole Navy Hill situation, Richmond has done pretty well with that first point. We’ve got a new City Center plan, which was just adopted this past Monday by Council, and the Diamond District development process is humming along. Both should—fingers crossed—build new neighborhoods that create stable and long term tax revenue for the City. However, neither of those two neighborhoods are on the Southside and the casino is. That said, a casino is not the only way to bring investment, and nothing prevents us from building thriving neighborhoods on the Southside, too. In fact, take a look at this draft Southside Economic Plan introduced at last week’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee meeting. While a lot of this document is plans within plans, it lays out the path towards serious, solid, urbanist investment across the Southside! I mean, check out some of the highlights: BRT plans along Hull and Midlothian, rezonings, plans to update infrastructure like sidewalks and bike lanes, adding a bunch of properties to the land bank, and redeveloping big sites like Southside Plaza and Oak Grove Elementary School. The City could turn its focus from a bright-and-shiny, high-risk, morally-questionable casino and go all-in on something like this plan to build thriving, sustainable Southside neighborhoods. It’s harder work, for sure, and will take a long time, but it’d certainly be worth it. A short postscript: I think the casino is pretty much a done deal (although I thought that last time!), and, should it pass, the City should take the huge up-front check and pour it straight into kicking off pieces of something like the Southside Economic Plan.
 

Earlier this week, Richmond Public Schools launched a Test to Stay program as part of their COVID-19 protocols, and you can read through the four-page FAQ here. Test to Stay, or TTS, uses the magic of rapid tests to allow folks identified as close contacts to return to school—as long as they repeatedly test negative. From the FAQ: “TTS provides testing on the school nights of the first five days of an individual’s assigned quarantine period and allows participants to attend school and/or work throughout the full 10-day quarantine period, assuming negative test results.” This is incredibly helpful for minimizing quarantine disruptions—both for staff and students. Participants in the TTS program must wear a mask when back at school, which makes some students who cannot wear a mask ineligible, and adds an interesting wrinkle to the ongoing conversations about the Governor’s anti-mask Executive Order #2. Can you even safely implement a TTS program if a school district has given up on masks?
 

Speaking of! Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Chesterfield County Public Schools voted to ditch their mask mandate this coming Thursday.
 

City Council has a couple quick things floating around today. First, they’ll hold a special meeting to get one-time COVID-19 bonuses sorted for certain City employees. Second, the Governmental Operations committee will meet and consider RES. 2022-R006, which expresses Council’s interest in translating all of their meetings and materials into Spanish—including providing live Spanish-language translation during their meetings. This is a super early (and non-binding) resolution that basically asks Council’s staff to figure how much all of that would cost, but I’m still excited about it. Richmond Public Schools manages to do this well, so we know its possible!
 

This morning’s longread

Virginia schools mask mandate — Glenn Youngkin has created chaos.

I enjoyed reading this piece in Slate about the rollout of Governor Youngkin’s executive order removing the PreK–12 mask mandate. While y’all already know the gist, it’s still interesting to see a national magazine’s take on what’s happening locally. Plus, the piece includes about 600 links, and, if you wanted, you could easily find yourself deep into an anti-mask rabbit hole.
 

The best way to ensure public contempt for every level of government is by pitting various parts of it against one another, dumping it all on the courts to resolve, and then telling a million parents to do whatever they want in the interim (just do it with “love”). It hardly matters what a court says at this juncture—parents have been told to defy any authority but their own. Teaching just became significantly harder in Virginia.
 

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Picture of the Day

Tour of Houseplants, Day 7!