A look back at top 2021 articles from Citizen Publisher Tom Lappas

I’ve written 218 articles this year – including far more about COVID-19 than I’d have liked, to be sure – so picking a handful that stand out was no easy task, but these fit the bill for a variety of reasons.

Though much of my year as a reporter (in the time I get to spend as one, mixed in around trying to run the business) has been spent dissecting and digging through virus-related datasets, evaluating daily, weekly and monthly trends, identifying puzzling information, tracking down answers to questions about it, then trying to put things into proper perspective for readers, there’s also been a fair amount of other news to cover. Here are 10 of my most interesting or important stories of 2021, presented chronologically.

Cashwell defends her messaging about latest in-person learning delay

There were many moving pieces in January, as Henrico Schools officials considered various options for allowing students who had chosen to return to school in person to do just that. As COVID-19 case counts fluctuated and the first wave of vaccines arrived, Superintendent Amy Cashwell delayed the planned first day back two separate times within a week – the second time (according to a press release from the school system) because school nurses were needed to help vaccinate people at Richmond Raceway. Several Henrico supervisors, however, weren't buying that explanation – even as they heaped praise on Cashwell.

Ogburn ‘absolutely embarrassed and mortified’ about shared Facebook post

Then-Henrico School Board Chairwoman Micky Ogburn briefly shared an offensive Dr. Seuss-themed post on her personal Facebook page in March, then quickly deleted it after realizing what it said (and after hearing from several upset constituents). A few days later, I spoke with her at length about the episode. The fallout from the post ended up costing Ogburn her role as chair on the board this year (a mostly ceremonial role that typically rotates evenly among members anyway); she resigned that position a few weeks later but remains on the board.

Young girl murdered in Far West End; Henrico Police seeking suspect

I’m not a crime reporter in the typical sense, in that it’s not a beat I work regularly or typically in an in-depth way. But the murder of 13-year-old Lucia Bremer in broad daylight in a quiet Far West End neighborhood in late March was so shocking that it demanded our coverage. The story became a bit more personal for me, too, after I realized that Lucia's father and my younger sister were classmates at the Northern Virginia high school we had all attended.

Henrico supervisors want seats on GRTC board

It’s been one of the more illogical situations locally for years: Henrico County, soon to become the largest single funder of the Greater Richmond Transit Company, has never had a seat on the organization’s board of directors (its governing body). But Chesterfield County, which for years offered little or no bus service at all, has had seats. In April, Henrico supervisors finally decided they’d had enough and (to each other and to other county officials) expressed a strong desire to change that by petitioning for seats on the board.

In the shadows of Richmond Raceway, vaccination irony becomes evident

Mass vaccinations in Henrico were entering their fifth month when I decided to take a look at who was – and wasn’t – being vaccinated. I asked Richmond and Henrico Health Districts officials for whatever details they could provide about vaccination levels by Census tract within the county. Such tracts are the smallest identifiable groups of land in a locality. When I received the data, I matched up the tracts for which I now had information with an actual map, used image-editing software to create a color-coded map showing the location of the least-vaccinated tracts, then pulled demographic data for each one.

What resulted was an irony that sadly wasn’t surprising: the least vaccinated community in Henrico County was the one literally within eyesight of the raceway – a place where 150,000 shots already had been administered.

That was the takeaway from this story, but importantly, it wasn’t a criticism of vaccination efforts – rather a mere observation of fact and circumstance, with perspective included to explain the challenges of vaccinating a mostly poor, mostly minority, mostly young, mostly single community. The article explained how RHHD officials had been trying to reach people who were inherently less likely to want to get vaccinated – or less able to physically get to a vaccination site, even one so close to their homes.

Plans for a civilian review board in Henrico appear dead

Nearly a year after first proposing the creation of a civilian review board for Henrico County, Varina District Supervisor Tyrone Nelson decided to withdraw the concept after he sensed that a majority of the Board of Supervisors wouldn’t support the specific type of CRB he wanted. The process was an exhaustive one and involved hours upon hours of meetings, input, deliberations and consideration.

Prank finds its way into Henrico School Board meeting

This is how journalism works, isn’t it? You can spend dozens of hours researching a story that might be read by a few hundred or a couple thousand people, but then the most-read article that's ever included your name ends up being one that is all of two paragraphs long.

Our education reporter, Anna Bryson, was covering the Henrico School Board’s Aug. 26 meeting – one that was full of serious discussion about a variety of topics like COVID-19, what a return to school would look like, the school resource officer program, and adoption of a pre-Labor Day start time in the coming years. Anna had written a couple articles while at the meeting and was working on those when the public comment portion of the meeting took place. The following day, we were chatting about what other newsworthy items might have come from the meeting, at which she was the only reporter who remained throughout. In passing, she mentioned that there was something odd about the public comment portion and that a number of names had been called but no one was there to speak.

“I think it might have been a prank,” she told me, but she hadn’t been able to pay full attention as she worked on her other articles.

So I made a note to go check the video that night. As I did, I soon found myself in tears with laughter, we ran this article and edited video clip, and the rest became internet history.

2 environmental organizations sue Henrico County over 'series of pollution violations' involving James River

Frustrated by what they termed “a series of pollution violations over many years” involving Henrico County’s sewer system, two environmental organizations filed a lawsuit against Henrico, seeking legal action to protect the health of the James River and a number of its tributaries. The suit filed by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and James River Association allegesd that repeated failures of the Henrico Water Reclamation Facility in Varina since its 1989 opening have resulted in millions of gallons of raw sewage – 66 million gallons in the past five years alone – escaping into the James and feeder streams and creeks, in violation of the federal Clean Water Act.

Buttigieg’s Henrico visit spotlights county’s model transportation project

U.S. Transportation Secretary and former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg visited Henrico earlier this month, and I had a chance to attend the public press conference he and other elected and appointed local and federal officials gave at the site of the Woodman Road extension project, but I also was invited to attend a roundtable session he held with Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger and business leaders from around the state.

Letter shows federal officials knew about presence of PFAS in Eastern Henrico in April

Henrico and state officials first learned in late October that significantly elevated levels of potentially dangerous chemicals known as PFAS were present in the White Oak Swamp and Chickahominy River basin near Richmond International Airport in Eastern Henrico – but we learned that some federal officials knew about the chemicals at least six months earlier.