🗳️ Good morning, RVA: VOTE! (for McClellan!), FOIA legislation, and “microtransit”

Good morning, RVA! It’s 25 °F, and it’s cold outside! Today you can expect highs around 40 °F as things start to warm up a bit before the weekend. Disappointingly, despite the sub-zero temperatures forecast for this weekend, I think our chance for a white Christmas has left the building.
 

Water cooler

Today’s the day! Residents of Virginia’s 4th Congressional District have the exciting opportunity to cast a ballot in a rare December primary. First, if you’re not sure which district you live in, you can check your voter information on the Department of Elections website. Second, you can see the full list of the candidates that will appear on the ballot here. Third, you should make a plan to get to one of the eight polling locations scattered across the District (four of which are in and around Richmond) between 6:00 AM and 7:00 PM. Fourth, I’ll be voting for Sen. Jennifer McClellan, and I can’t think of anyone better equipped to represent me in Congress than her. I so rarely get to vote for someone with absolutely zero reservations, but this is definitely one of those times!
 

It’s sort of news-business inside baseball, but the Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial board has a good and even-handed editorial about Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act and how government agencies can abuse the current regulations. I think most folks’ eyes glaze over when you mention “FOIA legislation”, but, let’s be honest, other than zoning and rezoning, this email newsletter lives for news about the news. FOIA is complicated! Having both submitted and received FOIA requests, I know how important they can be to keeping the public informed but also how they can sometimes be used in bad faith to gum up the gears of government. Del. Roem’s proposals—which requires state government to fulfill FOIA requests that take no more than two hours free of charge—is a good compromise between transparency and the practical constraints of reality. So far all of Roem’s bills have failed to make it out of committee and will probably continue to do so given the current administration, but I still think it’s good and important work.
 

Yesterday, GRTC announced they’d received a $4 million grant from the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation to “close gaps in rural and suburban areas of Richmond through microstransit, an on-demand system that allows people to book rides in real time and get picked up and dropped off in designated areas.” You can take a look at a map of the proposed “microtransit zones”, which are mostly scattered across the region’s more suburban and rural areas (but does include one just northeast of the city in Henrico County). I’m skeptical of microtransit in general, but this three-year pilot seems like an interesting experiment. Also of note: GRTC expects “systemwide ridership to recover to 2019 levels by 2023.” That’s pretty exciting and impressive!
 

I think there are mostly no updates in this piece by the Virginia Mercury’s Nathaniel Cline about the Governor’s proposed anti-trans policies for public schools. While the Joint Commission on Administrative Rules objected to the proposed policies (and sent a Very Offical Letter!), they admit they don’t have a ton of authority over this type of thing. I think we just have to wait until the state Superintendent of Public Instruction finalizes the policies and then see how our local school districts react. Remember: Some school districts didn’t feel the need to comply with the previous administration’s policies protecting trans kids, and it’ll be interesting to watch what happens now that the roles have flip-flopped.
 

This morning’s longread

No One Knows What’s Inside the Smallpox Vaccine

Since we’re all vaccine hobbyists at this point, I thought I’d share this fascinating piece in the Atlantic about the now-mysterious origins of the smallpox vaccine.
 

José Esparza first began wondering about vaccinia in the 1980s, when he was assigned an office at the World Health Organization next to the smallpox archives. By then, the disease had already been eradicated, and people had, he says, “little interest in understanding the origins of the vaccine.”…For years now, he has been scouring museums and eBay for old vials of smallpox vaccine, scoring a couple every year. (“EBay—you can find anything you can imagine!” he says.) These vials no longer contain live virus, but the technology now exists to sequence the fragments of viral DNA that remain. This DNA has revealed tantalizing if perplexing clues. Vaccinia turns out to be most genetically similar to another poxvirus called horsepox. But scientists have only ever sequenced one horsepox sample in the world, and they may never find another; the disease largely disappeared in the early 20th century. If horsepox really is the progenitor of vaccinia, how did that happen? And how did it then become lost to time?
 

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Picture of the Day

Have y’all been by the Dominion building downtown?