📧 Good morning, RVA: New mask guidance, a very important budget meeting, and Russian vodka

Good morning, RVA! It’s 31 °F, and today you can expect sunny highs in the 50s. The week ahead of us looks clear, dry, and pretty dang warm for a first week of March—I’ve already made plans to work in my yard this weekend. Spring has almost sprung!
 

Water cooler

Late last Friday, the CDC announced new guidelines for helping you decide if and when you should wear a mask. Now, instead of “community transmission,” we’ve got “community level”, a three-tier framework that’s based on new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people, and the percentage of staffed inpatient hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. You can see the big shift here is to include not just cases but hospitalizations in a decision-making framework for folks. Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield are all currently at “medium” (yellow) level which means that the CDC does not recommend most people wear a mask indoors in public. This is a big change! I’m still processing what it all means, but I found this PDF from the CDC comparing community level with community transmission over past few COVID-19 waves pretty helpful. Also helpful, Katelyn Jetelina already wrote up her initial reactions to the new guidance, and gives it a general thumbs up.
 

Tonight, at River City Middle School from 6:00 PM until question mark, the RPS School Board will host a meeting to, theoretically, pass their budget. The big question is: Will the Board meddle in the operation of schools—during several concurrent and ongoing crises—and cut funding for the District’s Chief Operating Office and Chief Wellness Officer with almost no planning or community engagement? Tonight feels like a big inflection moment for Richmond Public Schools. In one possible future, the School Board continues down their current path of grandstanding, micromanaging the superintendent, and stripping his administration of the tools needed to successfully do the job. That’s the bad timeline and the one where, before too long, RPS is probably searching for a new superintendent to come work in its openly hostile environment. In another future, the five-member voting bloc puts Richmond’s kids first, passes a budget that includes the COO and CWO, and quickly asks the Mayor and Council very, very nicely to fully fund the RPS budget request. The first, bad timeline should terrify you—even if you don’t have children in Richmond Public Schools. Who would want to take this job should Kamras leave? What qualified leader would want to come into a clearly dysfunctional situation and work for a Board that, for some incomprehensible reason, made the job so hard for the previous guy that he up and quit? I love Richmond, deeply, but this is not a top-tier job at the moment and we would not see top-tier candidates. OK, on to the empowering, action part of this email! First, you should email the entire School Board, copying all of City Council and their liaisons, and ask them to pass a budget tonight that includes the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Wellness Officer. Then, you should screenshot that email and post it on the social media platform(s) of your choice, asking others to send similar emails. Here are some talking points if you need them. Finally, according to the agenda for tonight’s in-person School Board meeting, there will be public comment. The more people that show up to this meeting and give public comment in support of Superintendent Kamras the better. Things seem dark after that whole paragraph, but the future is still unwritten and the bad timeline is not a foregone conclusion. Hopefully, with enough public outcry, School Board’s five-member voting bloc will make the decisions necessary to support the superintendent, the District, and kids.
 

Honestly, City Council has too much going on today. In addition to all of its regularly-scheduled business—like adopting RES. 2022-R007, in support of reducing the real estate tax because of theoretical casino money, and RES. 2022-R011, adding Henrico to the GRTC board—Council will also attempt to look at the new redistricting maps and host the first official budget meeting. That’s not even including the George Wythe money ordinance (ORD. 2021–308) and whatever other stuff Council plans on doing to put pressure on School Board ahead of tonight’s meeting. It’s a lot, and I would be zero percent surprised if a large number of items just got pushed until a later date.
 

Jessica Nolte at the Virginian-Pilot reports that Virginia’s ABC stores will “remove seven Russian-sourced vodka brands from its shelves.” Seems a little on the nose, and I would not have guessed that this is how Virginia would first wade into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Interestingly, “the stores will not be removing products such as Stolichnaya and Smirnoff, which are Russian-themed but not produced in Russia.“
 

Via /r/rva, this seriously impressive greenhouse in Church Hill. I just want to live in there.
 

This morning’s longread

The Russian Invasion Is a ‘Five-Alarm National-Security Crisis’

The Hilary Clinton in The Atlantic writes about how Republicans’ anti-democracy shenanigans at home have a huge impact on our foreign policy abroad—especially with China and Russia.
 

These are the stakes of the argument between democracy and autocracy. And when Republicans undermine American democratic institutions and trash our democratic norms, they make it harder to win that argument. They make it harder for the United States to encourage other countries to respect the rule of law, political pluralism, and the peaceful transfer of power. Those values should be among America’s most potent assets, inspiring people all over the world and offering a stark contrast with authoritarians whose power depends on squashing dissent and denying human rights. Instead, America has shown the world the ugly sneers of the insurrectionist and the conspiracy theorist.
 

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Picture of the Day

The ICA at night from the verrrry skinny median on Broad Street.