🧪 Good morning, RVA: No casino for Petersburg, lab schools, and Dock Street

Good morning, RVA! It’s 30 °F, and, what the heck!, this afternoon will spend some serious time in the mid 60s. Please get out there and enjoy two wonderful days in a row until winter weather moves in on Sunday, when you can expect temperatures in the 20s, rain, and snow. Let’s just say I’m…skeptical…about just how many businesses and schools will open on Monday morning.
 

Water cooler

Bad news bears for pro-casino Petersburgers: Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “A powerful state Senate committee killed a proposal on Thursday evening that would have allowed Petersburg residents to hold a referendum on hosting a casino in the city.” Of course, nothing is truly dead in the General Assembly until…well, until one of several confusing things happens, but certainly this split committee vote (a very bipartisan 9–7) doesn’t mean Sen. Morrissey’s mission is all dead, just mostly dead. And mostly dead is slightly alive. Suarez reports that the senator plans to “discuss the vote with the Democratic caucus and will try to revive the bill.” Do I think it’ll work? It’ll take a miracle; there’s just too much oomph behind the plan to revive Richmond’s casino instead.
 

Mel Leonor, also at the RTD, has a really clear and interesting report on the progress of the Governor’s plan to defund public schools in favor of standing up hundreds of charter schools across the Commonwealth. Sounds like the Virginia Senate isn’t having it, but is willing to consider creating some “lab schools” run by colleges and universities. Two keys from Senate Democrats that are sure to run afoul with the Governor’s team: These lab schools could not be run by private or for-profit colleges and they would “not be funded using local, state or federal per-pupil dollars.” These changes would defeat the primary purpose of Youngkin’s education platform—to defund public schools—and, honestly sounds kind of interesting? Henrico’s Del. VanValkenburg, who’s typically my go-to for state-level education stuff (and is dealing with an entirely different version of the bill in the House of Delegates), seems generally in favor of funding the lab schools that are allowed under current Virginia law. I’d like to learn more!
 

Sydney Koch, writing for RVA Mag, has some premium tree content that you should read. Koch profiles TreeLab, whose whole mission is to “grow trees and plants to beautify and improve the City of Richmond.” As we all know, trees are magical and solve about 100 commingled urban problems—check out the Science Museum’s illustration in the aforelinked piece if you don’t believe me. Lucky for us, we have a couple tree-focused groups in town, like TreeLab, dedicated to tree-ing up our City streets.
 

Important photo update via /r/rva: “RVA just turned the canal back on.”
 

Also via /r/rva, this story about a distracted driver on, what looks like, Dock Street: “I was walking my dog at the Canal Walk and some girl almost drove her car straight into us and ended up knocking over a light pole. It nearly missed us when it fell so luckily no one was hurt but my poor sweet girl was traumatized by it.” Dock Street is too wide, too fast, and too close to a lovely people-centered destination. What is even the purpose of Dock Street, honestly? It seems like mostly a way for motorists to avoid traffic on Main Street. Let’s just pedestrianize the whole thing.
 

Reminder: Today at 12:00 PM you can join the last of three redistricting map drawing meetings. Cut it on during lunch and then get to work, calmed and focused by the soothing sounds of a bunch of people on Zoom trying to tell a GIS analyst how to update a map using only their words. After today’s meeting, the experts have a couple of weeks before Council plans to officially look over the new maps at their February 28th meeting. After that a 30-day public comment period follows, which is the most best time to weigh in or—and this was encouraged—draw your own map.
 

This morning’s longread

Inflation and Other Woes Are Eating Your Girl Scout Cookies

Listen, you don’t even need to read this whole piece, just behold: The most perfect lede ever written!
 

Girl Scouts are earning a new badge in global economic turmoil. A month into national cookie-selling season, scouts have felt the effects of supply-chain woes and inflation. Some troops are grappling with shortages of flavors from S’mores to Samoas, plus the occasional angry grown-up customer ticked off about price increases, sometimes from $4 to $5 or $6 per box.
 

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

Picture of the Day

The front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch from February 11th, 1922.
 

Two things: 1) It’s fun how our legislative body is so freaking old that a paper from 100 years ago reads pretty much like today’s newsletter, and 2) The RTD reported the death of some Confederate business man with this straightforward and charming header that folks can feel free to use for for me when I pass: “Long and Useful Life Is Ended in His Death.”