WMRA Daily 7/3/26

For WMRA news, I'm Bob Levicki. Cooling centers open around the region as we head into an Independence Day weekend of extreme heat. The Free Clinic of Culpepper launches a new peer recovery program, and we pay a visit to the front royal campus of the Smithsonian Institute where rescuing black-footed ferrets has become a success story. This is the WMRA Daily for Friday, July 3rd.

With July 4th, falling on Saturday, local governments and many businesses are observing the federal holiday today. Local government offices and courts will be closed, but the U.S. Postal Service will maintain normal business hours. Some grocery stores and banks may have modified hours, so it's a good idea to check ahead today if you are paying a visit. The city of Charlottesville is opening cooling centers and closing its farmers market early amid a heat wave. that's raising temperature statewide into the triple digits. Areas east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, including Charlottes Hill, and also Winchester, are under an extreme heat warning again today. Heat index values, the weather service calls that the feels-like temperature,

are expected to be over 110 in those areas. You can find a cooling center near you at the Virginia Department of Health website, VDH.VVorgia.gov. American Airlines is planning to resume twice-daily non-stop service between Charlottesville-Alabomarle Airport and Chicago O'Hare International Airport, starting November 2nd. The Daily Progress reports that American previously offered flights to O'Hare starting in 2011, suspending them in 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. United Airlines offers daily direct flights from CHO to O'Hare, which began in 2017. The Free Clinic of Culpepper launched a peer recovery program in May. The grant-supported program aims to help individuals with substance use disorders

and partnership with a regional community services organization. WMRA's Isha Peer report. Tammy LeGraf is the director of the free clinic of Culpepper. She says the Virginia Association of Free and Charitable Clinics. I helped get this grant because there were a couple of free clinics. downstate, Bradley Free Clinic, being the main one, who designed this Hope Initiative peer recovery program for their clinic. The Hope Initiative began in 2016 and Roanoke and allows individuals with substance use disorders

to receive support from certified peer recovery specialist. A peer recovery specialist is someone with lived experience and challenges related to substance use, mental health, and co-occurring issues. Another clinic in our area, Shandua Community Health Clinic in Woodstock, offers the Hope Initiative model as well. The graph says that their clinic works closely with Encompass Community Supports,

a Rappahannock Area Community Services Board, and that relationship predated the peer recovery program. Katie Lindsay is the Behavioral Health Operations Director and Encompass Community Supports. She says they have their own established peer recovery program in addition to their outpatient clinical settings. In the town of Culpeper, we have a peer drop-in center called the C Center, which is kind of our no-barrier facility

where anybody who needs any kind of support can go in. So that is kind of one of the first steps for people who are interested in our services is working with our peers. She says this helps break down barriers for those who need services. For WMRA News, I'm Aisha Pilge. Find links to more information at WMRA.org and our app. About 20% of Virginians have a criminal conviction or past arrest that can keep them from jobs or rental agreements.

Virginia legislators passed a law to allow the ceiling of that history years ago, but it's just going into effect this week. Radio IQ's Brad Cutner reports. We'll see a lot of people get relief and be able to move forward with their lives without answering that question about whether or not they have a criminal conviction in their history. That's Sheba Williams with no left turns, an advocacy group for the formerly incarcerated. She and others say Virginia's system for sealing criminal records was long out of date

and made it harder for returning citizens to truly return to normal life. That changed in 2021, kind of. Democrats, at their own admission, rushed through a series of reforms that aimed to make the process easier. It took another four years of amendments to get it right. And in 2025, a new law was passed that now creates an automatic sealing process for some crimes like marijuana possession and felony charges that ended without a conviction. And now thousands of Virginians are on track to have those records sealed.

But it's not quite that easy. Rob Pogenglass is with Justice Forward. It requires that people go conviction free for seven years after a misdemeanor or for 10 years after a felony. So they have to have demonstrated a level of rehabilitation before they're going to be eligible to qualify for this. This is not, you know, getting sealed the minute somebody gets convicted. spokesperson for the Virginia Association of Commonwealth's attorneys, the folks who will have to process

the requests, said they were given funding for 70 new positions, but noted they started the year down over 200 and there are 120 CA offices across the Commonwealth. We're still understaffed and will continue to appropriately share that message, the spokesperson said. In Richmond, I'm Brad Cutner. Local governments and low-income Virginians are about to start receiving grants for flood resiliency and energy efficiency. Radio IQ's Michael Pope, sports. Flood protection barriers and stormwater system upgrades. Those are the kind of projects. Local governments are about to start financing through grants from the regional greenhouse gas initiative. A cap and trade system, Virginia's previous governor, abandoned. Now, Governor

Abigail Spanberger is rejoining the multi-state compact that does things like help low-income residents fix collapsing roofs and remove mold. Here's Lee Francis at the League of Conservation voters. Reggie helps prevent catastrophic flooding before it happens. This isn't a program that's disaster recovery. It's meant to prevent disasters. The type of widespread flooding we saw in Hurricane Helene, the kind of sunny day flooding that we see in Hampton Roads. Conner Kish at the Sierra Club says the budget has about half of the grant money it would have had if Glenn Youngkin hadn't spiked the environmental program. Virginia is entering on July 1st, the calendar years, obviously January through December. So we will be receiving half of the revenue that we would otherwise be expecting.

And then, you know, once the calendar year turns, we'll be expecting a full year of revenue. But because Virginia was improperly removed from this program, we've not been receiving the benefits of it for the last several years. Money for the program comes from fossil fuel power plants that will now, once again, be required to pay to offset pollution. I'm Michael Pope. A new fiscal year for the state, brings new laws and some new legal fights. Politics analyst Jeff Josh Shapiro joins Michael to recap the week

in politics and state government. All right, a lot of news to get to this week, starting with all of the new laws that go into effect this week. Jeff Josh Shapiro, give us a rundown here. What kind of new laws are going into effect this week? Oh, man, just a pile, you know, protections for renters. Insurers are barred from dying in a medical, dental or medication if doctors are pharmacists having to review the request for care. Tax breaks were junked for Confederate Confederate heritage groups. Those Robert E. Lee and sons of Confederate license plates, they're done for, too. But there's a lot of stuff that doesn't take effect until next year or the year after.

That's the minimum wage boost. Legal sale of weed, paid family leave first in the South. these will all kick in later. So the Abigail Spanberger administration is clashing with the Trump administration. The Department of Justice is bringing a lawsuit to stop the new

law. Abigail Spanberger signed to ban assault-style weapons in Virginia. Where's that headed? Yeah, and it's also been blocked in the state courts, but the Department of Justice, the Trump Department of Justice, filed a lawsuit this week to have the federal courts

throw it out as an unconstitutional assault on the Second Amendment. And speaking of courts, the federal courts, the United States District Court, Bob Payne in the Richmond branch of the Eastern District, has blocked the ice mask ban that was signed by the governor. Judge Payne says it interferes with agents enforcing federal law. And speaking of the courts, I'm wondering what the rest of, are of the Supreme Court's decision on birthright citizenship here in Virginia.

Well, if you're looking for a reminder of just how diverse Virginia is in terms of its population and politics, just consider that decision. 42% of the people who live in Virginia are black, Asian, and Hispanic. 13% are foreign-born. All of this is a reminder that Virginia is more fully multi-hued for, more fully multi-hued. cultural, and this is shaping our politics. We have Asians and Hispanics in the legislature, our lieutenant governor, a Muslim and Indian American. We have a former attorney general, a Republican, Cuban American. And speaking of the General Assembly, there's a former

speaker of the House, Todd Gilbert, who's getting a new gig. Yeah, an interesting story here. Todd Gilbert was Donald Trump's pick for U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Virginia and pretty much. lost that appointment in short order because Todd Gilbert wasn't prepared to play by the administration's rules in particular, according to the national press. He refused to prosecute or attempt to prosecute James Comey, the former FBI director, Todd Gilbert, now a state judge in Virginia, general district court judge elected by a Democratic-controlled General Assembly. Quite a testimony to a former Republican House speaker, albeit a single term, as

speaker. This, I think, is a measure of his personal standings, standing with members of both parties. Of course, it was Todd Gilbert, who you'll remember the Attorney General, Jay Jones, fantasized about fatally shooting because of his resistance to Todd Gilbert's resistance, that is, to gun control. All right. That's all the time that we've got for this week. My name is Michael Pope, and we have been joined by politics analyst and UVA scholar Jeff Josh Shapiro. Talk to you, next week. Have a star-spangled weekend. Finally, today, in the hills outside Front Royal, scientists and animal keepers are at work ensuring that endangered species from America and beyond survive. One of their ongoing success stories has been that of the Blackfooted ferret. WMRA's

Randy B. Hagey reports. In the days of your, blackfooted ferrets thrived on the Great Plains, living in prairie dog burrows from southern Canada to northern Mexico. Their sleek little relatives of weasels and minks with cream and brown fur and a dark mask and paws. By the 1980s, they were thought to be extinct, but then 18 of the mustelids were discovered on a ranch in Wyoming. That population started to decrease in numbers pretty rapidly, and so a small population of animals was brought into human care for the purposes of establishing a breeding program for reintroduction back into the wild.

Adrian Crozier is the carnivore curator at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute campus and Front Royal, a 3,200-acre property dedicated to researching and saving species at risk of extinction. Black-footed ferrets are one of 20 species currently in their care. So several different things occurred back in the early 1900s. Farmers were actively eradicating prairie dogs from the western landscape. And black-footed ferrets rely on prairie dogs for their housing, but also for their, it's their primary food source. So with the, loss of the prairie dogs, then we saw the loss of the blackfooted ferrets. They're also susceptible to plague, which they get from the prairie dogs and fleas.

The species is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services National Blackfooted Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado, in collaboration with the Smithsonian and other facilities. Through their efforts, there are now about 300 ferrets back in the wild. It's been really successful. We're learning more every year about the ferrets and their biology and how best to manage them. We have had a very good year this year. We had 13 litters born out of 16 females. And that's our goal every year is to produce as many ferret kits as possible from the females that we have. This year's litters ranged from one to eight kits each. Several females had six or more. Currently, the moms and kits live in indoor enclosures and

are monitored closely. The moms monitor the keepers right back, as you can hear in this video recorded by staff. Outside, solo adults are housed in kennels. They're used to hot summers and cold winters on the prairie. We put on shoe covers to prevent tracking in any pathogens from outside. We have some pretty deep substrates. So this is just a nice gravel, dirt mixed substrate. The ferrets like to dig in the substrate, run through tubes, and periscope up from hidey holes.

Several poked their heads out of nest boxes as we walked by. So they're most active at night. They will definitely come out like early in the morning and then in the afternoon. A lot of our males, especially at feeding time, they know it's feeding time. And we have some males that always are right there at the door, kind of waiting for their food. This property has a long history of animal husbandry. Ellie Thomas, a public affairs specialist, explained it was formerly a U.S. Army remount service station when the military employed huge numbers of horses and mules.

There were soldiers here, there were a lot of horses here, and it actually also was a prisoner of war camp during World War II for German and Italian soldiers. Fast forward a little bit, the property turns over to the USDA for a cattle research facility. And then in 1970, Theodore Reed, who was the director of the zoo at the time, was looking for a place to breed endangered species that maybe needed a little bit more space, a little bit more quiet than was available in Washington, D.C. One of their notable ferret residents is Antonia, a clone of a ferret named Willa. She was one of the last individuals captured in the wild in the late 80s. Willa died without reproducing, further exacerbating an extreme genetic bottleneck. But her genetic material was preserved, replicated into Antonia and now passed down to Antonia's offspring. She's had two successful litters, but sadly she lost all her kits this spring.

We, of course, try to maximize the gene diversity we have in our managed population as much. as possible. In August, population managers and genetic advisors will look at the entire population in human care and determine which animals genetically should stay back for the next year's breeding and which animals should go to the release population. The ferrets with the most unique genes are typically kept in the Smithsonian's breeding program. The ones approved for release out west go to the conservation center in Colorado, where they have to prove they can hunt live prey. We also do feed live rats to the kit groups when they're a bit older. We wait until they're around eight weeks old, and that helps them learn how to hunt.

And they learn that for mom. And then that just sets them up for success a little bit better when they do go through that re-release program. The nest of one mother, Mizuno, and her six kits, has a live stream camera feed on the Smithsonian's website, where you can watch the babies play, feed, dig, and generally learn how to be ferrets. skills they may need someday out on the Great Plains. For WMRA News, I'm Randy B. Hagey. We posted links to more information, including that ferret cam at WMRA.org and on our app. For WMRA News, I'm Bob Levicki.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy your Friday.