💩 Good morning, RVA: Mask reactions, COVID tests, and cash for sewers

Good morning, RVA! It’s 29 °F, and those not-so-cold temperatures continue today and into tonight. Expect some rain this evening followed by three days of potential winter weather. Will it be rain, sleet, snow, or just a big huge bust? We’ll find out soon, so get your milk and bread while. you. still. can.
 

Water cooler

Folks, including the Governor’s own team, continue to react to the masked-related Executive Order #2 he signed on Saturday. First, and I don’t know how I missed it, but Lt. Governor Earle-Sears showed up on FOXNews over the weekend threatening to pull funding from schools that do not follow the EO. I think this was mostly a troll, and Youngkin’s spokesperson has chosen to continue the troll by neither confirming nor denying the possibility that the Governor who ran on “excellence in education” was already considering stripping funding from schools on day one of his term. Locally, the mayor had Superintendent Kamras join him on his regularly scheduled press conference yesterday, and both of them had some strong things to say about the EO, which you can read in this piece by Jessica Nocera, Mel Leonor, and Patrick Wilson over in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Then, last night, Richmond’s School Board passed a resolution affirming their mask mandate (8–1, with 4th District’s Jonathan Young the lone vote against). Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury says the Governor’s administration “won’t say how his school masking opt-out order will be enforced” and a group of parents from Chesapeake are suing the Governor in an effort to scrap the Executive Order. And it’s only Wednesday! Now that the lawyers have gotten involved, though, I do think we’ll have some sort of progress in one direction or another before the Order takes effect on Monday. Which direction? I have absolutely no idea. Finally, I think it’s important to say out loud that masks in schools are great, prevent transmission of disease, and are supported by science. The Governor’s EO is anti-science and should be rescinded. These are not two equal sides of the same coin that we should sit down and have a rational debate about. Don’t let the media coverage (mine included) of the process to sort all this out obfuscate the fact that this particular Executive Order is not supported by facts and science!
 

Also in the RTD, Eric Kolenich reports that VCU, JMU, Virginia Tech, and William and Mary have all removed their employee vaccine mandate as a result of the Governor’s Executive Directive #2. Again, while not great, this is mostly a nothingburger as these universities have required employees to be vaccinated for months and, presumably, have very high vaccination rates (in an email to staff, VCU said “97 percent of faculty and staff were vaccinated” at the end of last semester).
 

COVIDtests.gov launched yesterday, and that means, theoretically, every household in America can get four free at-home COVID-19 tests shipped directly to them. A single batch of four tests is not a ton of tests, especially for families with more than four members, but! it’s a start. I hope the president expands this program into some sort of regular, ongoing shipment of COVID-19 tests—like we’ve seen in other countries—but I also recognize there are, theoretically, many other ways to get tested for COVID-19. Also, for what it’s worth, I’ve heard about order issues for people who live in apartment buildings or other multi-family residential settings like duplexes, so if things go sideways during your order process, maybe check back in a couple of days. Finally, if you feel sick but can’t find a test or can’t make it out to a testing event, please stay home!
 

I really enjoyed this piece of reporting by Michael Martz in the RTD on the General Assembly’s attempts to fix Richmond’s combined sewer overflow problem. It’s a big problem! Like billions of dollars big, and if state-level politicians want the problem fixed then the state-level politicians will need to put up a significant portion of those billions of dollars. Governor Youngkin has said ending sewer overflow events is a priority for his administration—I think mostly to offset his climate denialism—so we’ll see if he can jam some more resources for Richmond into this year’s budget. Finding the cash to accelerate this project’s timeline would be huge!
 

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has a close-to-final update on the new apartments nearing completion at Lombardy and Broad. The development, which “is the first along that stretch of Broad to take full advantage of the 12-story heights allowed under the city’s TOD-1 Transit-Oriented Nodal zoning,” should finish up in August. I’m so excited for these apartments and for what kind of similarly-tall buildings they’ll hopefully spawn over in the Lowe’s parking lot.
 

This morning’s longread

The Great Siberian Thaw

I think I’ve shared a longread about attempts to reintroduce woolly mammoths to Siberia—as a way to encourage the growth of light-reflecting, planet-cooling, permafrost-preserving grasses. The New Yorker zooms out a few levels and has a good, general piece about the state of the Russian permafrost and what it means now that it has started to thaw (FYI, it means bad stuff).
 

Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.
 

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Picture of the Day

Tour of Houseplants, Day 2.