Good morning, RVA: Education confusion, Medicaid work requirement, and dense zoning

Good morning, RVA! It’s 50 °F, and today you should expect plenty of sunshine to go along with temperatures near 60 °F. I believe they call this sort of weather “crisp.”

Water cooler

Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has an article about Richmond’s compliance with the Every Student Succeeds Act (the thing that replaces No Child Left Behind). If I’m being honest, I really don’t understand what it all means, and reading more on the Virginia Department of Education’s website certainly didn’t clear anything up. My confused and uninformed take: I will focus on accreditation, which I understand, and will try not to get too caught up in whatever state-level machinations are happening behind the scenes.

Michael Martz, also at the RTD, has an update on the state’s Medicaid expansion which focuses on the work requirement 💸. Republicans are cheesed at the number and type of exemptions to the requirement: “[Delegate Chris] Jones questioned why, for example, the proposal would grant a general exemption to the requirement for victims of domestic violence, whom he said generally want to get back into the workforce for stability.” Unless something has changed or I am mistaken, if for some reason you fail to clock in 80 hours per month of “work” (which is defined as a couple different types of things) you can lose your benefits entirely. If that’s not how this works, someone please let me know, because the last thing we should be doing to folks going through trauma in their lives is taking away their health care.

Michelle Hankerson at the Virginia Mercury says a new study rates Virginia as the second hardest state in which to cast your vote. Well, that’s not great.

J. Elias O’Neal says thoughtful zoning really can encourage denser and taller development. Now if we could just change state law so that we could force these developers, who are stoked to build near transit, to include some affordable units…

Style Weekly’s Top 40 Under 40 list is uo and available for you to Scroll through. Look at all of these cool folks in town doing a bunch of cool stuff!

Today’s Rail~volution takeaway: Richmond’s bus fare—$1.50 for a single ride, $1.75 for a single ride plus a transfer, or $3.50 for a day pass—is real cheap. Several cities around the country struggle to find funding to implement deep discounts for low-income riders, discounts that still don’t even bring their fare costs down to Richmond’s super low prices. Even worse, Pittsburgh, where single-ride fares are $2.75, uses transfers as a way to generate operating funds. The Port Authority makes somewhere around $4 million each year by charging $1 for a transfer or a full, additional $2.75 if you’re paying in cash. You can imagine who’s most impacted by this policy as people across America are displaced further and further from city centers.