🌏 Good morning, RVA: Outbreaks, ARPA, and a climate emergency

Good morning, RVA! It’s 68 °F, and False Fall is over—welcome back to summer. Today you can expect highs in mid 90s, plenty of sunshine, and NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says you should keep an eye out for brilliantly red wildfire smoke-induced sunrises and sunsets.
 

Water cooler

This past Friday, RPS Superintendent Kamras announced that an RPS employee died from COVID-19: “This marks our second known fatality from the pandemic. Please keep this individual’s family in your thoughts and prayers. Please also take every possible measure to protect yourself, your loved ones, and our entire community. RPS students and staff spend most of their day outside of school, where the transmission rate is high among unvaccinated individuals. To be direct, our unvaccinated family members and friends are putting RPS students and staff at risk outside of school, and, in doing so, jeopardizing our ability to keep our doors open.”
 

I think it’s still too soon to expect VDH’s weekly-updating COVID-19 Outbreaks By Selected Exposure Settings dashboard to reflect anything useful about the first week back to in-person school. But, so we have context for the coming weeks: At the moment Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield report one, one, and two outbreaks in K–12 settings respectively. Both the Richmond and Henrico outbreaks date from before school started, while VDH was notified of both the Chesterfield outbreaks the County’s first week of school (remember Chesterfield schools kicked off a week earlier on August 23rd).
 

City Council is BACK from it’s summer hiatus, and they’ve got some fun things on this evening’s informal and formal agendas. At the informal, the mayor will present his version of how the City should spend that $77 million of ARPA money. How closely will his vision align with City Council’s? Will City Council even care? And, this is not a rhetorical question, how much authority do the mayor and City Council each have to allocate these funds? Is it like the regular budget process where the mayor submits a plan (in this case an amendment to this year’s budget), and then, should they want to change anything, Council has to get on the same page about amendments? However it works, this should be fascinating and thrilling for the four of us who are fascinated and thrilled by this sort of thing.
 

Also at the informal, the Civilian Review Board Task Force will present their recomendations to City Council. To summarize, the Task Force wants a CRB that can investigate all complaints (with subpoena power), make binding disciplinary decisions, review RPD policies and make recommendations, audit police data and issue public reports, and review the RPD budget and make recommendations on that, too. Check out slide nine in the aforelinked presentation for a orgchart that’ll show you some of the envisioned roles and responsibilities. This seems like a lot of authority to give the CRB—which is good! I’m interested in two things: 1) how many councilmembers support these recommendations now that we’re outside of last summer’s particular moment, and 2) does the CRB have enough budget to support the proposed organizational structure?
 

One final bit of City Council news, tonight they’ll consider RES. 2021-R049, which declares “the existence of a climate and ecological emergency that threatens the city of Richmond, the surrounding region, the Commonwealth of Virginia, civilization, humanity, and the natural world.” Considering it’s a non-binding resolution and all members of Council have signed on as co-patrons, I think it should pass without comment. The thing to keep an eye on moving forward, though, is if any of the recommendations made start to move out of the resolution and into reality.
 

This morning’s longread

The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias

What is it about living a self-sustaining life in a forest somewhere that is SO compelling to me?
 

It was a grand social experiment, but the promise was often rosier than the reality. Most found the grind too hard going and the poverty too bleak, and within a few years returned to the city and more conventional lives. But a small number stuck it out for decades, long after the Summer of Love had dissipated, and a handful of them still live in communities scattered across Northern California. These flinty souls remain a study in principled self-reliance and human ingenuity, having supported themselves and their families for years through subsistence farming and sundry side hustles: ceramics, teaching, salmon fishing, instrument making, firewood hawking, and weed growing.
 

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Picture of the Day

Weird but also totally not weird at all.