🦅 Good morning, RVA: Get involved, overtime pay, and counting birds

Good morning, RVA! It’s 37 °F, and that’s about the temperature for today. Expect a bit of clouds until tomorrow when we’ll, with any luck, fully see the sun again. Temperatures will stay in the 40s and 50s until Monday when thing start to warm up a bit (again).

Water cooler

This week’s email from Richmond Public Schools’ Superintendent is short, sweet, and right up my alley. He gives folks two ways to concretely get involved in the civic process as it relates to schools funding: 1) Call the legislators who will put the final touches on Virginia’s budget proposal(s) to ask them for more money for RPS, and 2) Show up at the General Assembly building on Sunday at 12:00 PM to immediately respond to the proposed House and Senate budgets (Facebook). For the latter, fingers crossed, the response will be “Hey, thanks for fully funding your share of public education, Commonwealth.” But, should that not be the case, you can be on hand to cast scornful looks upon the legislators.

Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a summary of a recent report released by the City Auditor that focuses on overtime pay at the Sheriff’s Office. You can read the full, 14-page audit here (PDF). The short of it: Overtime pay went, way, way up—from $643,985 in FY2018 to $2,786,220 in FY2019—and it does sound like some of the operational procedures at the jail could benefit from some tweaking. That said, pay at Richmond’s Sheriff’s Office still lags behind neighboring facilities, and, something I’m always interested in knowing, the Office has about a 15% vacancy rate. Until the Mayor and City Council find a way to fully fund vacant position at City departments (by, oh, I dunno, raising the real estate tax to pre-Recession era levels), we’ll always need folks to work overtime and we’ll always see huge overtime line items. At some point, surely, you save some money by filling a couple of those vacancies, right?

The Virginia Mercury’s Ned Oliver has an update on the General Assembly’s attempt to give control of Confederate Monuments to localities. Sen. Surovell, a Democrat from Fairfax, has this unfortunate quote that shows a lack of knowledge about when (the Jim Crow era, decades after the Civil War) and why (Lost Cause racism) the majority of Confederate monuments were built: “Before we make decisions about them, everybody’s entitled to have complete information…Otherwise, I think a lot of people just jump to conclusions, make assumptions that everybody just put these statues up because they were racist or something.” Turns out, that’s exactly why these statues were put up! Anyway, I’d still like to see the two-thirds majority vote requirement removed from the final version of the bill, but, if it must, I guess the other stuff can stay—although, requiring studies into the history of these monuments is just a huge waste of everyone’s time and money.

This coming Saturday, February 15th, from 10:00–11:00 AM, Maymont will host its annual Great Backyard Bird Count. It’s free and designed for all ages and skill levels. One assumes they mean all bird-counting skill levels, which, is good because my current skill level at that hovers near zero. In fact, until this very moment, I had no idea that the Great Backyard Bird Count is a national program put on by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audobon Society. Sounds like if you can’t make it out to Maymont on Saturday morning but still want to spend some time hangin’ with the birds, you can tap on the previous link and participate from literally wherever you happen to be. So cool!

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense says a mystery buyer has bought the building at 504 W. Broad Street, one of Richmond’s definitely cursed properties. Currently questionably occupied by Tiny Victory (Platania says the shop’s been closed and couldn’t get ahold of the owners), previous tenants include Yaki, Boka Tavern, Antler & Fin, the Belvidere at Broad, and, probably, a eldritch butcher who sold suspiciously delicious meat pies. Super excited for whatever moves into that space next, though.

Logistical note: Monday, Presidents’ Day or Washington’s Birthday if you aren’t feeling colloquial, is a federal holiday, which means you won’t hear from me until Tuesday. If your work/life situation allows it, enjoy the long weekend!

This morning’s patron longread

The Last Time Democracy Almost Died

Submitted by Patron Giles. I guess it’s comforting that we’ve been here before and manage to scrape through. Read to the end of this piece, though, because I kind of love the idea of public (both in terms of who can come and who funds it) debate salons.

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: “If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.

This morning’s Instagram