Loupassi was planning to guide through the 2018 General Assembly a voter-endorsed tweak to the Richmond charter — that is, the basic, state-sanctioned outline of the city’s powers and responsibilities — that would compel Mayor Levar Stoney and the City Council to come up with a way to repair or replace ramshackle and poorly equipped schools.

Approved by a lopsided margin — nearly 9 in 10 voters supported it — the measure gives Stoney six months to fashion a school bailout plan that does not rely on higher taxes. The plan, which presumably would resort to cost-cutting and budgetary sleight of hand, would be put to a vote in the City Council within 90 days after it’s submitted by Stoney.

The schools gambit, the brainchild of Democratic gadfly Paul Goldman, is intended to squeeze the mayor and the City Council into action by harnessing the power of public opinion. It is an effort at motivation by humiliation, one that oversimplifies the fiscal demands that accompany the larger challenge of righting Richmond’s schools.

But Loupassi, a former City Council member deeply familiar with the wheels-within-wheels ways of Richmond politics, would tell you in that fried voice of his that the referendum is about pressure — and that pressure can produce diamonds.