🚋 Good morning, RVA: RPS resignation, election dominos, and the Ashland Trolley Line

Good morning, RVA! It’s 65 °F right now (before the sun comes up) and today’s high will top out somewhere in the mid 80s. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says (Twitter), “We’re going to SMASH Today’s record of 75°. It won’t even be close. And probably will get to the all-time February record of 83°, which happened twice in the early 1930s.” Things do cool off in a big way tomorrow, but today looks like an absolute stunner. Enjoy!
 

Water cooler

Anna Bryson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that RPS Chief of Staff, Michelle Hudascko has resigned. To quote a bit from Hudascko’s resignation letter: “…the hostile and toxic work environment that some members of the RPS School Board have created and actively perpetuate on a daily basis is a deep disservice to RPS students and families…The frequent actions that some Board Members take to dismantle progress and intentionally set the Administration up to fail, along with the mean-spirited personal attacks, threats, and unfounded accusations have made doing this work nearly impossible. Our students are the ones paying the price.” I couldn’t agree more, and it’s not like Hudascko is an outlier, either. Tyler Lane at WTVR put together the list of recent high-level resignations which include: Chief Operating Officer, Chief Academic Officer, and the Director of Safety and Security. In a pretty clear sign of their brokenness and dysfunction, the RPS Board couldn’t come to consensus on a statement for media.
 

Alright, it’s election dominos time! Now that Representative-elect McClellan is off to Washington, we need to go through another whole round of primaries and special elections to fill her State Senate seat. Sen. Louise Lucas has set March 28th as the special election date, and the Democratic Party of Virginia has set February 26—this Sunday!—as the primary election date. Candidates have until 7:00 PM tomorrow to declare—stressful! At this point, I know we’ll see Alexsis Rodgers, Lamont Bagby, and Dawn Adams on the ballot, but, even with the incredibly short timelines, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more names pop up over the next 36 hours. Voting locations to come, stay tuned, and make a plan to vote!
 

Yesterday, Patrick Wilson at the RTD got ahold of some internal affairs documents from the Richmond Police Department about their responses during the protests of the summer of 2020. I think nothing in here will surprise you, and you’ll see a lot of the former Police Chief’s defensive tone come through in statements from on-the-ground officers. My biggest takeaway is that the acting/interim/new Chief has a ton of work to do on the basics—stuff like equipment training.
 

WRIC’s Jakob Cordes reports on a bit of progress in bringing Chesterfield’s bikeways plan to life. I know it’ll take one zillion years, and might just never happen, but a safe, protected way to ride bikes from the City to the trails at Pocahontas State Park would be really, really rad.
 

Jahd Khalil at VPM has an update on the City’s plan to acquire those two historically Black cemeteries in East End. That resolution (RES. 2023-R011) has been continued until April.
 

Another good thread via /r/rva: “Best calorie bombs in the city.” Sometimes you just want a pile of fried things topped with cheese and sauce and more fried things, you know?
 

Tonight, from 6:00–7:00 PM, VUU will host a neat discussion about the old Ashland Trolley Line, its historical impact, and how the in-planning Fall Line Trail will follow a similarish route. I love transportation history (obviously), and, if we hadn’t set fire to our electric street cars in the 40s and 50s, a couple lines would run just blocks from my house! PlanRVA has put together a really nice StoryMap if you’d like to learn more about the trolley’s history (and if it ran past your house) or you can just come out to the event tonight, which is free to attend.
 

This morning’s longread

The Work is Not Enough

I read this surrounded by laundry thinking through next week’s meal plan, and it hit me hard! Anne Helen Petersen!
 

Losing a day, an hour, an afternoon — if that was time used to put things in place to keep them rolling through the week, and that time is lost, then you find yourself in a 17-task pile-up. The laundry didn’t get done or put away, which means everyone’s down in the laundry room sorting through piles on the floor, which means there’s more laundry and/or no place to put the next loads of laundry — and pretty soon you’re in laundry apocalypse, and the only thing that’s going to save you is…the next weekend. When your life is this precariously balanced, weekends aren’t for rest or reflection, not really. They’re for cramming in the things you had no time for during the week (whatever semblance of leisure + 17 kids’ birthday parties or sporting events if you’re a parent) then catching up or setting up or meal planning or doing enough laundry in preparation for the week to come.
 

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Picture of the Day

Visual tree static.