Good morning, RVA: 3,880↗️ • 3↗️; loads of vaccines; tell City Council to support Richmond 300

Good morning, RVA! It’s 32 °F, and snow?! Is it snowing where you are? Is it sticking? NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says we could see up to two inches on some grassy surfaceswith roads mostly staying wet (but snow-free). After this morning’s brief flirtation with winter, expect continued cold temperatures and highs just under 40 °F.

Water cooler

Richmond Police are reporting that Cory Hines, a man in his 30s, was fatally shot on the 2000 block of W. Broad Street this past Saturday. This is the Whole Foods/Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken block, and RPD are asking anyone who may have seen anything suspicious near the intersection of N. Allison Street and Broad Street to contact them.

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 3,880↗️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 3↗️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 323↗️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 83, Henrico: 150, and Richmond: 90). Since this pandemic began, 477 people have died in the Richmond region. Whoa, shockingly high numbers of new reported cases both at the state and local levels. Saturday posted similarly high levels but was accompanied by the familiar data-backlog caveat message. Sunday’s update came with no such caveat, and I’ve again had to change the y-axis on my statewide cases chart. Additionally, the seven-day moving average of new hospitalizations has reached a level we haven’t seen since the peak back on May 13th. The COVID Tracking Project has this to say: “Averaged across the last 7 days, each of our core metrics is at record levels.” Not great. This virus is not yet done with us.

Well this is a huge shift from last we spoke about the COVID-19 vaccine: VDH announced that Virginia will receive 480,000 doses of vaccine by the end of the year. They estimate that this is enough to give all of the state’s health care personnel and long-term care facility residents their first round of shots. That’s a lot of dang vaccines—way more than the “70,000” we heard about in the Governor’s NPR interview last week. Sounds like that 70k allotment will be the first of many, will arrive “mid-December” (which is, like, next week), and go to health care system across the Commonwealth.

Alright, in one week (assuming agendas don’t change like shifting sands) City Council will consider ORD. 2020–236, the Richmond 300 ordinance. I think now’s the time for folks to start emailing City Council (and liaisons!) to let them all know you’d like them to vote for this critical update to our master plan. This—the emailing of councilfolk to tell them what you’d like them to do—is important civic work, and you should just take the two minutes and send those emails right now. If you have questions, feel unprepared or hesitant, you can hop on to this Bike Walk RVA call tomorrow at 5:30 PM and learn more about what you can do to help get the plan across the finish line. And, honestly, it may need your help. According to Jeremy Lazarus at the Richmond Free Press, Councilwoman Robertson thinks the plan has “too many flaws” and “wants the plan returned to the city Planning Commission for revision.” Robertson, however, sits on the dang Planning Commission, which has already given Richmond 300 its stamp of approval! Maddeningly, Lazarus says “she acknowledges that she did not delve into the plan deeply enough before it cleared the commission in early October.” This is ultra embarrassing, especially so since the Richmond 300 process has been ongoing for years and there were plenty of opportunities to delve before now. Additionally, the public engagement around this plan has been better than…almost anything I’ve experienced in Richmond? As Sheri Shannon said on Twitter the other day, “Just so we’re clear: the Richmond 300 master plan did not happen overnight. It was a three-year process that involved the time, labor and expertise of hundreds of Richmond residents. When project managers noticed not everyone was being engaged, they hired folks to do that work.”

Kind of related, the City’s Planning Commission will meet today and will discuss ORD. 2020–241, which grants a perpetual easement to the state “on, over, under, and across certain rights-of-way located along North 9th Street, East Franklin Street, East Grace Street, and East Broad Street.” This is part of the State’s work to build a new General Assembly building, and, I tell you what, it makes me NERVOUS. A nontrivial number of buses head up 9th today (including the 15-minute #5) and our best pieces of east-west bike infrastructure connect through Franklin and Bank Streets. We’ve already seen how the Commonwealth treats Bank Street, making it hostile to bike traffic, so I don’t have a ton of faith that our other non-car infrastructure won’t be impacted by these other plans (which I can’t fully grok because I’m bad at engineer diagrams). Anyway, I hope the Planning Commission will keep the City’s entire transportation network in mind today while working through this paper.

Speaking of buses, GRTC says customers should expect delays starting yesterday through the next several days due to a shortage of operators after folks needed to quarantine after a possible COVID-19 exposure. You can read through a very thorough list of GRTC’s coronacases at the bottom of this page. In the aforelinked release, GRTC CEO Julie Timm says "The health and safety of our staff is critical to preserving reliable transit service, and this is why I believe it is essential for our transportation frontline staff to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in the first round, not the second round as tentatively planned.” I mean, I get it. We need to first vaccinate the vaccinators, but then the vaccinators have to be able to get to work, right?

This morning’s patron longread

Democracy Is Still Not Safe in the United States

Submitted by Patron Sam. The headline here is a huge bummer, but I felt a tiny bit more hopeful after reading this.

Reforming these systems is a clear step towards greater democracy. Some people argue that more direct voting risks populism, that so-called low-information voters will vote against their own interests and therefore can’t be trusted with democracy. That was, after all, more or less the reasoning of the Founders when they developed the Electoral College. But consider that a simple popular vote would have given us a different result four years ago. Consider that the single-party control that abandoned all moderating role in the interests of appointing partisan judges and personal enrichment was enabled by gerrymandering and corporate funding. The Republican proportion of seats in the House is consistently greater than its share of the popular vote. The District of Columbia and its 700,000 residents have no voting power in Congress at all. The populism and venality in our elections are not the result of too much democracy, but of too little.

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