🐁 Good morning, RVA: The RPS School Board, Casino 2.0 update, and new neon

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F, and today looks the tiniest bit cooler than the last few days. You can expect highs right around 90 °F and Feels Likes in the same neighborhood. I don’t know about you, but that kind of heat still makes me sweat through my shirt after even just a quick walk or ride around the block—so, preemptive apologies if you happen to run across me this week and I’m soaked though and bedraggled!
 

Water cooler

I never know what to make of RPS School Board meetings. Megan Pauly at VPM reports that the Board voted to consider hiring a 3rd-party to conduct an investigation into the shooting that took place during Huguenot High School’s graduation ceremony back in June. But, I also know, because of RVADirt’s citizen reporting on Twitter, that the Richmond Police Department has not yet finished their investigation, which seems like something you’d want to wrap up before launching your own. Also also, at that same meeting this past Monday, apparently 2nd District Boardmember Mariah White introduced a motion to suspend the Superintendent? One week before school starts? Seems…bad. I’ve said this before, but if most Richmonders forced themselves to watch one or two School Board meetings they would be shocked at the level of dysfunction and distraction. A lot of it goes unreported—I guess exactly because it’s so dysfunctional and distracting?—but, at some point, it’d be nice to start holding these elected officials accountable for both their actions and their behavior. Totally unrelated (just kidding, super related): School Board elections are right around the corner in 2024. I know there are multiple people reading this exact sentence right now that are half-heartedly thinking “hmm could I run for School Board?” Yes you can, and yes you should!
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Michael Martz has a small update on Casino 2.0, reporting that Richmond Lodge No. 1 of the Good Lions Inc. (not affiliated with the Lions Club International), has asked a judge to pump the brakes on putting the Casino redo on this November’s ballot. Good Lions argues that “the city improperly awarded a contract to the casino operator without undergoing a public bidding process first.” The judge will consider their argument and has (temporarily) suspended his earlier decision to allow adding a casino referendum to the ballot. Fascinatingly, Good Lions is represented by State Senator Chap Petersen, a Democrat out of Fairfax City, which I imagine does not make our Democrat and Governor-hopeful Mayor very happy. Anyway, I wouldn’t get too excited about this development if, like me, you plan on voting NO on Casino 2.0 in a couple months, because I’d wager that this all goes away. We’ll learn for sure later this month.
 

Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reports on a charming story that could come straight out of the Busy Town Newspaper: Chloe Kottwitz, 24, recently bought a neon sign shop after the previous owner of 35 years passed away. Kottwitz learned the craft from that same previous owner, and will continue on making fresh, new neon (according to Oliver, she made all the large neon signs hanging in The Park). You can stop by her shop, Uptown Neon, at 2629 W. Cary Street and apparently find “a special bin of affordable bits and pieces aimed at walk-in customers,” which sounds rad.
 

Via /r/rva, a chance to participate in a scientific study that looks at how urbanization affects wildlife by comparing Richmond’s house mice to those living in Henrico, Hanover, Goochland, Powhatan, Chesterfield, Louisa, and King William. This seems like 1) a neat way to participate in science, and 2) a humane and useful way to get rid of any mice you may have scurrying around your house.
 

While scrolling through Threads this morning, I stumbled across this new series from VPM called Curious Commonwealth, in which Whittney Evans takes your questions about Virginia and leaves no stone unturned, no rabbit hole unfallen-into, and no library archive unvisited in hopes of finding the answers. I’m hoping it’s a little like a local version of Starlee Kine’s Mystery Show. Of course I already have a ton of questions that I’d love answered, like: What’s the oldest tree in Richmond (see below)?, have we ever had a huge bamboo die-off in the region before?, is the right-wing country singer from yesterday’s email a Republican astroturf project?, are we losing public-housing units in the Creighton Court redevelopment project? And these are just from the last week or so! I think if I had one super power it’d be to stop time so I could turn stones, fall into rabbit holes, and visit library archives myself to dig up the answers to some of these questions.
 

I enjoyed this reminder of how easy it is to lie with data: “The average US president has been charged with two felonies.”
 

This morning’s longread

I think I found Oakland’s oldest tree. It’s spectacular

I wish Richmond had a history of turning its trees into celebrities. Do we have any with fun names? Someone send me some charming stories about our old and massive trees!
 

But Oakland has a history of turning its oak trees into celebrities. There’s the Jack London Oak, where Oakland’s city logo came from, which was dug up from Mosswood Park in 1917 and transplanted to Oakland City Hall, a feat accomplished with the labor of eight people over four days. In 1931, an entire page of the Post Enquirer was dedicated to the collapse of an oak tree outside the home of former Mayor Enoch Pardee. He famously threatened to shoot anyone who killed either of the two oak trees outside his house, one of which still stands. Another tree in Dimond Park was once lauded in newspapers dating back to 1940 as “the oldest oak tree in Oakland.” It was finally cut down in 2017. Its stump remains, and its width looks comparable to my mystery oak, which raises a question: Is the city’s current oldest oak tree hidden in East Oakland?
 

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Picture of the Day

There was a lot going on in the sky last night.