Good morning, RVA: Traffic violence, public comment, and renaming schools

Good morning, RVA! It’s 33 °F, and this entire week looks pretty nice—at least according to the weekly forecast at the moment. Today, expect highs in the mid-to-upper 50s and lots of sunshine. Temperatures should increase into the 60s by Wednesday. Nice!

Water cooler

A driver hit and killed a person on the 900 block of Chamberlayne Parkway on Saturday evening, WTVR reports. Chamberlayne Parkway is one of two main connections for folks living in Gilpin Court to get from the neighborhood into Downtown. It’s an incredibly dangerous intersection that includes both local traffic and a highway off ramp—it’s awful to walk through. My question for the Mayor, City Council, and City staff continues to be: After a driver kills a person walking on our streets, what will the City do in response? How long is “absolutely nothing” an acceptable answer?

Tonight, at Bellevue Elementary School (2301 E. Grace Street) from 6:30–7:30 PM, the RPS School Board will host their penultimate public hearing on rezoning schools. If you’ve got opinions on the proposed rezoning now is the time to let your School Board rep know. You can find rezoning maps W–Z at the bottom of this PDF along with how each option will impact the demographics of each school, and here are emails and phone numbers for all of the school board members. Please do this! While the School District definitely needs to make sure the three new schools they’re building are full at the start of next school year, it’s also an important opportunity for us to take a couple of steps towards desegregating our schools. Are any of the rezoning options perfect? No! Was the community outreach done by RPS perfect? No!—but it was one of the most extensive outreach efforts I’ve seen for a City-related effort. We shouldn’t let the specter of perfection and better process stand as support for the unacceptable status quo. We can do better, and that’s why contacting your School Board rep is so important! This will be a stressful vote—probably one with electoral consequences. School Board reps need to have the space and cover (aka your support) to cast change-making, progressive votes. On the flip side, of course, they also need to know that there a ton of folks who are fed up with the status quo of segregated schools, who are watching, and who will remember those folks who vote to support that, too.

Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says that last week the Hanover County School Board did not decide to rename any of their schools currently named after dead Confederates. This bit is particularly illustrative: “‘The board is not taking any action on this item tonight,’ [School Board Chair] Bourassa said before the meeting was quickly adjourned and board members left out a back door.“ We’ll see, I guess. The School Board still faces a lawsuit from the NAACP about the school names, and, at some point, they’ll have to weigh whether continuing to do the wrong thing is worth the legal expense. Related, Mattingly spoke to some of the folks involved in the work to change the names and some of the folks who want to keep the schools named after racists 💸. Yikes.

The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong has a piece about Dominion including a coal plant in its green energy package. This quote from Dominion’s lawyer is just incredibly eyerolly: “[The Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center] is in fact one of the cleanest-burning coal plants in the country…But we hear the concerns, the company hears the concerns of interveners that having a co-fired fossil fuel plant in the portfolio could conceivably diminish customer interest.” Interveners! Get outta here with that kind of language!

Glarg, there’s another NoBro meeting today. This afternoon, City Council will hold their nth Navy Hill Development Proposal Work Session from 3:00–5:00 PM in Council Chambers. On the agenda (PDF): Department of Social Services, Arena, and Arena Operator. Actually, I’m pretty interested in this DSS discussion. A while back, the City wanted to move DSS from directly behind City Hall 💸—which is smack in the middle of the NoBro footprint—to the deep hinterlands and off of any meaningful bus service. As far as I know, that bad idea is dead, but I haven’t heard (or have forgotten) about the new plan for DSS.

This morning’s longread

The Cancellation of Colin Kaepernick

You gotta read Ta-Nehisi Coates editorials—it’s just the rules, I don’t make ‘em.

The new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color. Nothing is sacred anymore, and, more important, nothing is legitimate — least of all those institutions charged with dispensing justice. And so, justice is seized by the crowd. This is suboptimal. The choice now would seem to be between building egalitarian institutions capable of withstanding public scrutiny, or further retreat into a dissembling fog.

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