💥 Good morning, RVA: Traffic violence, a budget session, and choice words

Good morning, RVA! It’s 27 °F, and I’m grumpy about it. Highs today, though, should hit somewhere in the 50s and that’s not so bad. Looking ahead, after one more slightly sub-freezing night tonight, it looks like we’ve got a week of warmer weather ahead of us—maybe even temperatures in the 80s as we approach the weekend!
 

Water cooler

The Richmond Police Department’s Crash Team reports that a driver hit and killed a person crossing N. Belvidere Street at W. Leigh Street. From the release: On Friday “at approximately 2:54 a.m., officers were called to the intersection of North Belvidere Street and West Leigh Street for the report of a collision. Officers arrived and found an adult male down and injured in the left travel lane of the northbound lanes of North Belvidere after being struck by a vehicle in the intersection.” RPD hasn’t shared any other information about this crash, but I have no doubt that speed was a factor. I cross this section of Belvidere every day on my ride home from work (a block south of here because the Leigh Street intersection is too wide and intense). I regularly see people driving well over the posted speed limit—especially in the left lane as they try to both beat the lights and avoid turning traffic in the right lane. The width of the street—across the bridge and onto the southernmost part of Chamberlayne Avenue—really makes it feel like you’re driving on a highway, not through a dense residential neighborhood. This is the second person killed by a driver on or near VCU’s campus this year. Both of these fatal crashes took place on the City’s High Injury Street Network, where we know for a fact—with data—the most serious and deadly crashes occur.
 

City Council will meet today for their third budget session and will focus on the City becoming an “employer of choice.” You can, of course, watch the meeting live online or wait a couple days and I’ll have it up on the Boring Show. Also of note, they’ll head into a closed session to talk through the City Attorney recruitment/hiring process.
 

Speaking of city meetings, the Planning Commission also meets today, and you can find their full agenda here. They’ve got a lot to work through, and most interesting to me are probably the 260 proposed apartments at the end of Grove Avenue right before the highway (ORD. 2023–068), a presentation on the changes to the TOD-1 zoning district, and a resolution to amend Richmond 300 with that chaotic laundry list of amendments tossed together by various members of City Council (CPCR.2023.009). About the latter, I’m hoping Planning Commission will reject Council’s clunky, haphazard shoving of stuff onto the end of our award-winning master plan with absolutely zero public engagement.
 

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams weighs in on the death of Irvo Otieno, who died in the custody of the Henrico County Sheriff’s Office. Here’s MPW: “The video evidence shared with Otieno’s attorneys and family members had not yet been made available to the public by Dinwiddie Commonwealth’s Attorney Ann Cabell Baskervill, who found it disturbing enough to charge seven Henrico deputies with second-degree murder in Otieno’s death…After the deputies were charged Tuesday, Gov. Glenn Youngkin urged calm, asking Virginians to ‘respect the process.’ I wish elected officials would spend less time worrying about civic unrest and more time addressing the broken systems that lead to that unrest.”
 

Samantha Willis, writing for the Virginia Mercury, digs in on the Hanover County School Board’s decision to rename John M. Gandy Elementary, which is “the one school in the district with a name representative of Black history and Black excellence.” I wrote about this messed up situation last week, but you definitely should tap through and read Willis’s piece this morning. She details the recent steps backward the county has made towards its legacy of systemic racism and has some A+ choice words for County leadership. If you happen to live in Hanover, use this article as a starting point for the public comment you’re planning on sending to the County’s Elementary School Naming Committee—you are planning on sending in a public comment, right? You’ve got until Friday to do so.
 

Greater Richmond Fit4Kids’ Safe Routes to Schools program has a cool giving opportunity that closely aligns with my heart and all the time I spend on a bicycle. They want to raise $7,500 (as part of a matching grant) for “a truck that will transport a fleet of bikes between schools to teach students how to ride.” What’s better than teaching kids how to ride bikes?? Safe Routes to Schools does great work in our communities encouraging students to walk and bike to school—which is, as we say in the bike biz, how you get them. Once a kid experiences the freedom of flying around Richmond on a bike—like Luke on a speeder zipping through the Forest Moon of Endor—you’ve got a life long bike person. If you’ve got a couple of bucks to spare, chip in today.
 

This morning’s longread

Segregated schools, not ‘divisive concepts,’ are what divide us

Dr. Genevieve Siegel-Hawley had a great column in Richmond Times-Dispatch this past weekend about modern-day school segregation—plus some history about Bettie Weaver that I never knew.
 

Today, white resistance to educational equity initiatives in Virginia and elsewhere centers on an ahistorical and perverted view of Title VI’s prohibition against discrimination. White resistance flourishes when we refuse to grasp how central anti-Black racism is to our history and contemporary society. It hardens when we keep our educational and social worlds racially separate. And it rears its head when white supremacy is threatened. Backlash to the racial reckoning engendered by George Floyd’s murder helps explain efforts to stoke white racial grievance, protect white students from guilt by circumscribing learning about our past and subvert serious education reform targeting segregation.
 

We could create a different story in Virginia.
 

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Picture of the Day

Basically my mental image of a beer.