🌊 Good morning, RVA: QR codes, our sewer is old, and in-person early voting

Good morning, RVA! It’s 71 °F, and today you can expect highs in the 80s, humidity, plus a good chance of rain—but, with any luck, nothing like yesterday. Remember when I casually said “bring an umbrella?” More like bring a canoe!
 

Water cooler

Two quick corona-updates this morning! First, a reminder that the FDA’s advisory committee (which is made up of independent experts) will meet today to consider booster shots for some subset of the general public. Given the strong feelings on either side of boostertown it might be an interesting meeting to watch, which you can do so here starting at 8:30 AM. Linking to an early morning virtual meeting of the “Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee” is definitely a next level of nerdy for me that I am excited to share with you. Second, the Virginia Department of Health rolled out QR codes for vaccination records based on the SMART Health format. You can grab a copy of yours over on vaccinate.virginia.gov. Saving a QR code to your phone somewhere is definitely better than carrying around a vaccine card or a picture of your vaccine card, for sure. Next thing I hope they’re working on: Getting your vaccination record into Apple Wallet.
 

It was really coming down out there yesterday, wasn’t it? That slow-moving storm dropped three inches of rain on the Fan over short period of time, totally overwhelming our aging sewer system. Check out this absolutely bananas video of trash cans floating down Harrison Street. VCU even ended up cancelling afternoon and night classes due to flooding! Absolutely wild, but, honestly, we should expect more of these real and local impacts from severe weather as we continue to burn our planet down and fail to make any sort of real progress towards mitigating the impacts of climate change. Now, a tangential aside: It was fascinating scrolling through Twitter this morning and watching, in reverse chronological order, consensus build over the idea that yesterday’s flooding was a result of the City not cleaning out storm drains. Folks are so incredibly quick to chalk up the impact of a global climate crisis and literal decades of disinvestment in local infrastructure to “incompetence” at City Hall. Cleaning out the storm drains certainly helps, of course, but, as the @RVAH2O account puts it, “storm drains, and the system at large (as it was designed), are simply not meant to handle 3” of water in a matter of hours.” I’ve written about it a ton, but our sewer system is OLD and requires almost a BILLION dollars to get it into a place to handle the kind of severe weather we’re now facing because of climate change. The scale of this problem is simply not solvable on the local level alone and will require vast amounts of support from the State (and probably federal) government. There are lots of reasons to be critical of the City, but yesterday’s flooding was not one of them. Moving so quickly to “clean out the storm drains!” distracts us and our local elected leaders from the actual, hard, boring problems of addressing aging infrastructure and the impacts of the climate crisis.
 

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports on two proposed apartment buildings—one at Hull Street and Commerce Road and one on 44th Street—that “would consist entirely of income-based units, with the Manchester units reserved for renters earning at or below 60 percent of the area median income – $37,800 for an individual, or $54,000 for a family of four.” 60% of AMI is not “deeply” affordable, but it is way more affordable than 80% AMI which was the standard in town for awhile. More of this!
 

Today is the first day of in-person early voting for this year’s gubernatorial election. You still have until October 12th to register to vote and until October 22nd to request a mail-in ballot be mailed to you. If you need to register to vote, you can do so over on the Department of Elections website.
 

This morning’s longread

Mark Lee Dickson paved the way for the Texas abortion ban, one small town at a time

Want to see how much impact one guy from Texas in a backwards baseball cap can have on the U.S. legal system?
 

His measure was passed by Waskom’s all-male council in 2019. Since then, similar laws have been passed by 38 other cities and towns. They were all a warm-up for what is now the legal mechanism enshrined in the Texas abortion ban. Abortion supporters call Dickson’s approach “diabolical,” and say it could have serious implications for abortion rights. Since the Texas ban took effect, at least 10 states have expressed interest in passing laws with similar ”Orwellian enforcement technique,” according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.
 

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Picture of the Day