❄️ Good morning, RVA: School Board progress, a bicycle bill, and silly maps

Good morning, RVA! It’s 32 °F, and, from where you sit, can you see any snow? I can!! However, NBC12’s Andrew Freiden, a much more trustworthy source of weather information than whatever’s outside my window, says we should expect a “barely there batch of winter weather this morning” (Twitter). Sigh. Expect clouds and cold weather, with lows around 40 °F for most of the day.
 

Water cooler

4th District School Board member Jonathan Young’s proposal to close five schools—none in the 4th District and with absolutely zero community engagement—fell entirely flat at last night’s RPS budget meeting. In fact, Maggi Marshall at WTVR reports that “a majority of Richmond School Board members…denounced” the proposal. I tuned in to a bit of the meeting (skip to around 20 minutes in for this particular discussion) and was thankful to hear board member Gibson say she was “disappointed” in Young’s process and the stress it caused families and to hear Board Chair Rizzi apologize for the chaos and confusion Young’s half-baked proposal brought to the RPS community. Honestly, as frustrating as it was to hear about Young’s plan, it was really nice to see the School Board smoothly and empathetically handle it, pass it by, and move on with Board business. Give how this group has operated over the last couple years, last night seemed like progress!
 

We all know how foolish it is to get your hopes up this early in the General Assembly process—especially in years with control of the Senate and House divided. So I’m hesitant to even point out that SB 1293, a bill permitting safety stops (more commonly know as Idaho stops) has made it out of the full Senate on a bipartisan (!) 24–16 vote. Ian M. Stewart at VPM reported on the bill a couple of days ago, back when it was still in committee, and if you tap through you’ll definitely catch the, let’s say, realistic expectations Senate Democrats have about this bill making it through the House after crossover.
 

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has a thorough report on a planned redevelopment out by the CookOut, Staples Mill Pulse Station, and the Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods bakery. A lot of that area is owned by the Ukrop family, and infilling the current wasteland of parking lots with residential, retail, office, and all sorts of other things lines up with Henrico’s plans to turn that part of town into a sort of “Scott’s Addition 2.0.” Exciting, but I’ll be even more excited when they start reworking the street grid—it’s currently a mess to find your way through back there.
 

This morning, the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Bill Lohman reports on the new amphitheater coming to the riverfront. Not a ton of new news in here, but you can read some early oppositional-ish comments from the Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association and find a link to the venue’s new website (if signing up for developer newsletters is your thing).
 

For Groundhog Day, Axios has a few silly maps of Punxsutawney Phil’s accuracy at predicting an early spring and an end to winter. Honestly, I don’t know what to make of these maps, but I think they might be showing the impact of climate change? I dunno…Phil! Phil Connors!
 

This morning’s longread

Gas stoves: Is there a public health component worth discussing?

Everyone’s talking about gas stoves! A regulatory person said a thing, a media source exaggerated the quote a bit, and now we’ve got Republican elected officials invoking Charlton Heston’s cold, dead hands about their kitchen appliances. Dumb! Anyway, Katelyn Jetelina, who I’m always linking to on Fridays in the COVID-19 section of this email, wrote up a nice public-health take on the impacts of gas stoves. Just like COVID-19 (and everything else in life), how you choose to mitigate those impacts is kind of up to you and your family’s risk budget.
 

This is not a new issue. Decades of research have found the same thing: gas stoves can contribute to respiratory issues, especially for children with asthma. When we burn fuel at high temperatures (i.e., cooking) many different chemicals are released into the air. This includes nitrogen dioxide, which is a reddish-brown gas (see “NO2” in the figure below). When this happens in an indoor space, concentrations can get high, especially if you live in a smaller home with limited physical space and ventilation. Studies for many decades have measured nitrogen dioxide levels in homes and found that levels were higher for homes with gas stoves. For example, a study across 15 countries in the 90s found gas stoves were a major contributor to nitrogen dioxide exposure. This is both because gas stoves contribute significantly to indoor nitrogen dioxide and because people spend a lot of time indoors at home.
 

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Picture of the Day

Proof!