🌊 Good morning, RVA: Under the cover of darkness, new plans, and failing dams

Good morning, RVA! It’s 53 °F, and I think the humidity from the last couple of days has passed. Today you can expect pretty consistent temperatures in the 60s and an end to the rain. Colder temperatures move in on Sunday—possibly below freezing—so good luck little spring plants!
 

Water cooler

How the heck did I miss this story from Wednesday? The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Chris Suarez reports that deep into Monday night, the RPS School Board ”effectively prevented the hire of the chief wellness officer after a discussion in closed session about personnel matters that ended around midnight Monday. The board deadlocked on a 4–4 vote to approve a bloc of unspecified personnel actions.“ First, decisions made by a public body at midnight are a clear sign of dysfunction, plain and simple. Second, this issue—allowing the Superintendent to hire his COO and CWO—came up weeks ago and the public turned out to give dozens and dozens of comments in support of the Superintendent. At that meeting, the School Board’s five-member bloc acquiesced to public pressure and voted to let those hirings go forward. Apparently that decision was not made in good faith, and those members have now, under the literal cover of darkness, broken those previous promises made in public. 1st District School Boardmember Liz Doerr sums it up: “This is clear act of retaliation and harassment against the superintendent…Since several of my colleagues were not able to cut the position, they’re now going to prevent him from filling it.” I agree, and it’s hard not to see those five members—White, Gibson, Young, Rizzi, and Harris-Muhammed—as working to sabotage the Superintendent and set him up for failure…the Superintendent that they hired and gave a four-year contract extension to just last year! It makes no sense! So: If you want to express your disappointment or ask some questions about why the Board is making secret late night decisions, you can find all of their email addresses here. I’d encourage you to copy the entire board along with your City Council representative and their liaison. Then, if you’re feeling especially spicy, post a screenshot of your email to the social network of your choice and encourage others to do the same. I think it’s extremely important that more folks start paying attention to Richmond’s School Board and talking about how the way they’ve done business over the last handful of years is not normal, efficient, or even functional.
 

Eric Kolenich, also at the RTD, says VCU’s Athletic Director claims that men’s basketball ticket sales declined this past season “in large part from fans who refused to wear masks during the omicron surge.” What a disappointing take from the AD of the only program in the whole country to not play in last year’s NCAA tournament due to COVID-19 protocols. You’d think he’d know the importance of mitigation measures. I’m a VCU season ticket holder, and I can tell you that rampant spread of disease was the reason I only attended just a single game, not VCU’s commonsense mask policy!
 

Hmmmm Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports on changes to the replacement for the bad and decrepit Public Safety building. Spiers says recent plans submitted show an all around smaller structure and some tweaks to the proposed uses—including elimination of street-level retail space. I don’t know what it all means, and it seems like Spiers still has a ton of questions, but any new development in that part of town should for sure conform to our lovely new City Center small area plan.
 

The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong has a really interesting piece about a failing dam in Fluvanna that’s really more about the scale and cost of aging infrastructure across Virginia. How about this nightmare fuel: “Currently there are more than 1,800 dams in the DCR inventory that are believed to be of regulatory size but do not have a regulatorily required hazard classification determination,…Of those 1,800, it is anticipated that at least 400 will be determined to be high-hazard dams.” Water is terrifying to me!
 

This morning’s longread

Our Fundamental Right To Shame And Shun The New York Times

Cancel Culture is a whole complicated thing, and I don’t know that I’ve fully processed all of my thoughts on the matter. This piece, though, has some thoughtful insights that I hadn’t considered (including the below “first speaker problem”) and at least hazards an attempt at actually defining Cancel Culture.
 

But a discussion of norms that value proportionality and make people more comfortable speaking isn’t serious if it doesn’t take into account the interests of the people who want to speak in return. This is what I’ve called the “First Speaker Problem” — a focus on the freedom and feelings of whoever started talking to the exclusion of the freedom and feelings of whoever is responding. The First Speaker Problem is a categorical error. It treats its focus — the First Speaker — as being in a different category than people responding, and ignores the fact that the First Speaker is almost certainly responding to someone else’s speech. It assumes, without evidence, that the First Speaker’s speech somehow promotes open discourse and isn’t itself “disproportionate” — in other words it utterly fails to aim the norms-based analysis at the First Speaker’s speech.
 

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Picture of the Day

A bike rack and some scooters downtown—turns out bike racks can bring order to more than just bikes!