🧶 Good morning, RVA: Medicaid unwinding, Enrichmond update, and a mayoral platform

Good morning, RVA! It’s 68 °F, and today we’ve got a mixed bag: hot temperatures in the upper 80s, a pretty good chance for rain this evening, and a cold front moving through after the sun goes down. Cooler weather will stick around for a while, too, so keep an eye on your plants if you already started moving them outside!
 

Water cooler

Apologies for the delay, but I finally got around to posting City Council’s fourth Budget Work Session over on the Boring Show. I haven’t listened yet, but the agenda covered real estate revenue projections, responses to some of the questions councilmembers have so far, and a discussion of Council’s own amendments to the Mayor’s proposed budget. All interesting and worth your time—at least if you’re listening along at 2x speed. Also, and I missed this when looking at the agenda earlier this week, but City Council held a closed session afterward for “discussion, consideration, and interviewing of a prospective candidate for employment as a City Attorney.” Sounds like we could maybe hear news on that hire soon.
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Michael Martz reports on Medicaid unwinding, the process of Medicaid reevaluating the eligibility of alllllll its current members—something it hasn’t done since the start of the pandemic. Martz says about 14% of the program’s current participants in Virginia are no longer eligible (about 308,000 people) and will now have to find health insurance elsewhere. Stressful stuff! Even more stressful, the State estimates 80,000 additional people will lose coverage just because they don’t have updated contact information on file and won’t get their renewal notices. What a horrible way to lose health insurance! You can learn more over on the CommonHelp website, and please remind anyone you know that is a Medicaid member to get their information updated ASAP!
 

Ooooo interesting: Jakob Cordes at WRIC reports that “Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has opened an investigation into the stunning collapse of the Enrichmond Foundation last year.“ This is good, and I’m glad we’ve not just given up on learning more about whatever happened with Enrichmond. Also of note, Cordes points out that the Mayor has included $250,000 in his proposed budget for a “Richmond Outdoor and Prosperity Fund” which would go toward “assisting the 86 organizations impacted by Enrichmond’s abrupt closure.”
 

This week, the City of Chicago elected a new mayor, Brandon Johnson. Johnson campaigned on police reform, and you can read his Plan For a Safer Chicago which talks about investing in youth, supporting victims, and strengthening police accountability. They’re progressive plans to deal with both gun violence and police reform—certainly not a “tough on crime” platform. Compare and contrast the language Johnson uses to that of his opponent, Paul Vallas. So how did Chicagoans vote? Well, check out these fascinating maps of Chicago’s violent crime overlaid on election results (Twitter). The neighborhoods most impacted by violent crime were most likely to vote for Johnson, the police reform candidate. This was surprising to me (in a good way!) and counter to the narrative I often read in national media. Definitely something for Richmond’s mayoral hopefuls to keep in mind as they start spinning up their campaigns in the next year.
 

Question: Has anyone seen M.F. Broom out sweeping the bike lanes of Richmond lately??
 

This morning’s longread

Not Your Grandfather’s Moon Mission

I am compelled to link to almost every article about NASA’s Artemis missions, which will eventually send humans to the moon for the first time in my life. This piece in The Atlantic covers Artemis II, which, in November of 2024, will take astronauts around the moon and back, much like Apollo 8 did in 1968.
 

Apollo 8 laid the foundation for countless historic moments in American space exploration. The harrowing yet triumphant moon landing, during Apollo 11 in 1969, couldn’t have happened without it. Neither could the first steps on the lunar surface, or the time that astronauts drove a moon buggy across the gray landscape, or the delightful incident in which a geologist threw his hammer as hard as he could off into the distance, just to see how far it would go. Artemis 2 will likely pave the way for similarly grand photo ops and goofy stunts. And it has already set a precedent that never materialized during the previous era of exploration. All 24 people who have flown to the moon so far were white and male. Koch will be the first woman, and Glover the first person of color, to make the trip.
 

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Picture of the Day

Alley robot.