BG Reads | News You Need to Know (December 26, 2019)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
NEW -> Episode 67: Exploring Public Sector A.I. with Valkyrie Intelligence (LINK TO SHOW)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Ellis looks at District 8’s place in transit, homelessness issues in reviewing 2019 (Austin Monitor)
Ask Paige Ellis about one of the first lessons she learned as a new City Council member and her answer is immediate: patience.
The old adage that the wheels of government turn slowly takes on a whole new meaning for someone stepping into public service for the first time. Budgets, workload and the priorities of 10 other Council members and hundreds of city staffers all play a role in determining what gets done, and when.
“You come in here thinking, I’ll just ask the city to do things and they’ll get done,” Ellis said of her first year on Council. “The truth is, you have to learn each department and their individual processes because they need to know how their time is allotted and that Council is on board with what’s being done, so you can’t just call someone up and expect to get something fixed as soon as possible, unless it’s already planned in and on a list, and then you have to schedule a crew to fix that problem. It just took a lot longer to get things happening than I originally would have thought.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Tovo reflects on a year of challenge and success (Austin Monitor)
As she looks back on 2019, Council Member Kathie Tovo can count some major victories, including passage of her expansive resolution directing enhancements to a lengthy stretch of downtown parkland leading up to Palm School, direction to begin creation of a Mexican American heritage corridor, and authorizing renovation and expansion of the convention center.
“That was a heavy effort and an exciting one,” Tovo said. She notes some of the moving pieces: designating the Rainey Street historic district; getting money through the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax for the Mexican American heritage corridor wayfinding project; and establishing the Waterloo Greenway initiative under the umbrella of the city, along with the Waterloo Greenway Conservancy.
Although Travis County, not the city, owns Palm School, Tovo is hopeful that the two municipal governments can work together to preserve the school and its surroundings… (LINK TO STORY)
Leslie Pool remembers high, low points of 2019 (Austin Monitor)
District 7 Council Member Leslie Pool is proud of the contributions she and her colleagues made toward helping the homeless in 2019, calling it “a pretty amazing year.” Still, she thinks some things could have been done better. For example, the city wasn’t really ready to deal with the consequences of Council’s vote repealing the prohibitions on camping and resting in public places and panhandling, she said.
After repealing those ordinances, Council members took their annual summer break before coming back to beef up the city budget to provide more services for the homeless. In October, they also added more restrictions on camping, but the changes were not as major as Pool and three of her colleagues would have liked.
Pool told the Austin Monitor in December, “I wish that we’d had the systems and services lined up and in place before we loosened up those ordinances. We would have saved a lot of grief in the community. If we had lined it all up in advance we could have had everybody pulling in the same direction, rather than a lot of conflict.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Amazon in line to build massive distribution center outside Austin (Austin Business Journal)
Amazon.com Inc. is planning another distribution center in Central Texas — this one a massive 3.8 million-square-foot facility in Pflugerville, a source with direct knowledge of the deal confirmed to Austin Business Journal.
The proposed project is a four-and-a-half-story logistics/distribution center on about 94 acres at 2000 E. Pecan St. less than a mile from State Highway 130 in Pflugerville and Travis County, according to plans submitted to the city of Pflugerville.
Dubbed Project Charm, the development has been in the works for awhile. Pflugerville annexed the property on Nov. 26. The Pflugerville Planning and Zoning Commission on Dec. 2 recommended rezoning the site as a planned unit development. Now the rezoning is set to go before Pflugerville City Council for consideration on Jan. 14… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
On University of Texas at Dallas’ growing campus, meal-delivering robots make splashy debut (Dallas Morning News)
Topped with a ball cap and sporting six wheels, one of the newest members of the University of Texas at Dallas introduced itself to students and staff at the campus’ annual fashion show.
“We put a hat on it and let it strut the runway,” said Pam Stanley, UTD’s interim director of food and retail service.
The cooler-shaped autonomous robot from Starship Technologies has become something of a campus celebrity. It has appeared in the homecoming parade and posed for hundreds of selfies with students at a late night breakfast. It has taken part in a holiday scavenger hunt. And it inspired the design of a T-shirt — featuring robots pulling Santa’s sleigh. When students spot the robot, some take out their phones to shoot video or spread the word on social media. Some liken it to Wall-E, the endearing Pixar movie character…. (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
GOP predicts bipartisan acquittal at Trump impeachment trial (The Hill)
Republicans are becoming increasingly confident they'll be able to hand President Trump a bipartisan acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial.
With 67 votes needed to convict the president and remove him from office, and the outcome of a Senate trial all but guaranteed, GOP senators are broadening their sights as they plot their strategy.
Senate Republicans think they’ll be able to pick up one or two Democrats on the final votes for each impeachment article. That would let them tout Trump’s acquittal as bipartisan — an angle they’ve already seized on when talking about the two House votes, in which a handful of Democrats crossed the aisle to join Republicans in opposing impeachment… (LINK TO STORY)
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