🌊 Good morning, RVA: Learn about your legislators, lab schools, and a (surprise) landing

Good morning, RVA! It’s 34 °F, and that’s colder than its been in a while! Get used to it, because NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says we can expect that “cold weather returns for two weeks or longer.” 1) Dang, I was just getting used to not having to maximum bundle myself with coats and gloves and scarves just to ride my bike around town, and 2) Dang, I hope all of my outdoor plants make it through until April.
 

Water cooler

Reminder! You can listen to all of the budget-related public meetings up to this point—including the Mayor’s budget presentation this past Monday—over on the Boring Show. While the meeting format will change for this year’s budget season, I still think listening to our elected officials is one of the best ways to get to know how they think and what they care about. For example, here is 8th District Councilmember Trammell responding to the Mayor’s request that each councilmember limit their budget priorities to five for the operating budget and three for the capital budget. City Council will hold their next budget work session on Monday, March 13th.
 

Related, Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond has a fun, high-level, emoji-based look at the Mayor’s proposed FY24 budget. If, like me, you’re saving the massive budget PDFs for the weekend, this short list can tide you over until then.
 

Yesterday, the Governor announced the first round of Lab School planning grants, which included VCU and VUU as recipients. Remember, lab schools, which you can learn tons more about over on the Virginia Department of Education’s website, are one of the Governor Youngkin’s attempts at defund public schools by allowing public dollars to instead fund private schools—in this case 100 million of those public dollars. Thankfully, the Democratically-controlled Senate watered down the Governor’s plan, and we’re left with those public dollars funding only “lab schools” run by institutes of higher learn (including private ones, though). It’s a bad road to head down, but I’m open-minded about what sorts of things our local universities can and will do with this money. As for this year’s planning grants, VCU proposes to use their share to “combine their Teacher Residency program with CodeRVA High School to develop a workforce of teachers that are able to provide computer science-focused education,” and VUU proposes an “integrated STEAM lab school for at-risk 6th through 8th graders.”
 

Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has a cool story about the impact of Virginia’s same-day voter registration laws. In the 2022 midterm elections, a “total of 25,353 ballots were cast via same-day registration in its first year of implementation…of that amount, 24,297, or 96%, were counted as legitimate votes.” And which localities saw the most same-day voting action? College towns! “Locality-specific data shows Williamsburg, Charlottesville/Albemarle County, Harrisonburg and Lynchburg saw the highest usage when measured as a percentage of total votes cast.” I mean, makes sense right? College students are nothing if not passionate yet busy enough to miss the (many) voter registration opportunities.
 

I love a good small-town news story like this one, from Tannock Blair and Rolynn Wilson at WRIC, about a hot air balloon making an “unexpected landing at a middle school in Hopewell over the weekend.”
 

Today’s feel good scroll: Rep. McClellan (officially official!) has a bunch of great photos and videos from her swearing-in last night (Twitter).
 

This morning’s longread

Every Coastal Home Is Now a Stick of Dynamite

I liked how this piece, which features Norfolk, uses passing around a stick of dynamite as a metaphor for coastal real estate. It’s gonna blow up eventually but when? All things considered, pretty soon: When we talk about nontrivial sea level rise by the year 2050, it seems like forever away, but, in reality, it’s within the lifespan of every 30-year mortgage signed today.
 

This displacement is at once profound and not very visible in the coastal housing market, where buyers and lenders are just beginning to digest the immense consequences of future sea-level rise. The value of all of the coastal real estate in the United States exceeds a trillion dollars, and a large portion of that value may vanish as buyers starts to shy away from homes most vulnerable to erosion and frequent flooding. As home values fall to reflect climate risk, wealthy homeowners and investors will dump their distressed assets and flee, while middle-class homeowners like the Langfords will be left to deal with climate catastrophes and costly mortgages. The resulting turmoil could reshape the Eastern Seaboard, threatening the growth of coastal cities such as Norfolk and potentially triggering a slow migration inland.
 

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Picture of the Day

Natural gradients on a shutter.