BG Reads | News You Need to Know (April 27, 2020)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
*NEW* COVID-19 RESOURCE PAGE
Bingham Group is compiling the most important Federal, State, and City COVID-19 related announcements, policy and regulatory changes each week. Click here to find the most up-to-date information.
News: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will be making an announcement regarding the continued re-opening of the Texas economy today. The governor’s office released a statement Sunday evening and said the announcement would come at 2:30 p.m.
SPECIAL EPISODE - ATX COVID-19 COMMUNITY UPDATES - COVID-19 & The Class of 2020
Guests include: Dr. Colette Pierce Burnette, President and CEO of Huston-Tillotson University, as well as the President/CEOs of Austin Community College and Concordia University Texas, and Dr. Leonard N. Moore with the The University of Texas at Austin. We will also hear from community members and students in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. LINK TO SHOW
WEEKEND READS
[AUSTIN METRO]
Coronavirus in Austin: SXSW sued over no-refund policy after cancellation (Austin American-Statesman)
The company that puts on Austin’s internationally acclaimed South by Southwest festival is being sued over its no-refund policy, after the annual event was canceled this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Travis County on behalf of two people who said they each spent more than $1,000 on entry fees to attend but were denied refunds. It seeks class-action status on behalf of potentially “hundreds of thousands” of others similarly rebuffed.
The plaintiffs, “on behalf of themselves and all other persons who purchased wristbands, tickets, passes, and badges to the 2020 South by Southwest festival, bring this action for breach of contract and unjust enrichment in order to recover (money) paid for a festival that never occurred,” the suit says.
SXSW LLC, the company behind the annual festival, said in a written statement Saturday that it lacks the financial resources to issue refunds.
“Due to the unique nature of SXSW’s business, where we are reliant on one annual event, we incurred extensive amounts of non-recoupable costs well in advance of March,” the statement said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Protesters at Capitol demand Texas businesses to reopen (Austin American-Statesman)
Protesters gathered at the Capitol in Austin Saturday afternoon to rally against local stay-at-home orders and to demand Texas businesses reopen.
Videos circulating online at the rally show protesters holding signs calling the coronavirus pandemic a hoax and shouting “arrest Bill Gates.”
Last weekend, about 300 protesters swarmed together, defying health experts’ warnings about social proximity at a “You Can’t Close America Rally” on the south steps of the Capitol. They shouted, “Let us work!”, “Put this on TV!” and “Fire Fauci!”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS]
The politics behind Abbott’s most consequential decision (Austin American-Statesman)
The eyes of the nation will be on Texas on Monday as Gov. Greg Abbott unveils what he has previewed as a smart and safe strategy for gradually reopening the economy in the second-largest state. “We do want to open up business, and we want to open it up smartly, we want to open it up in a way that will not spread the coronavirus because it is a fact that if we do open up and it spreads the coronavirus, it will cause us to have to close back down,” the governor said Friday. “And, in fact, the only thing worse than being a little bit tardy opening up, is opening up only to close back down.”
The governor made the remarks in an interview with conservative North Texas radio talk show host Mark Davis. It was one of a slew of recent interviews Abbott has done to sell what might be the politically most consequential announcement of his 5½ years as governor. Abbott’s reputation, and the health and welfare of Texans and the Texas economy, might hang in the balance. So far, Texas has been spared the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. Texas ranks 41st among the 50 states and the District of Columbia for deaths per million people from the infection. Hospital capacity vastly outstrips demand. The governor has mostly avoided the showdowns between state and local officials that have erupted in the some other states. Abbott is too careful a politician to risk squandering that success on a risky leap into the unknown, but he also keeps his ear tuned to rumblings on the right that could weaken his hold on his GOP base. A vibrant Texas economy is the sine qua non of Abbott’s political identity… (LINK TO STORY)
Frustrated GOP lawmakers want to curb emergency power of Texas cities, counties (Houston Chronicle)
Local governments have gone too far in issuing emergency orders during the coronavirus pandemic and can expect to have those powers whittled down when the Texas Legislature meets again, key state lawmakers say. State laws give local leaders broad power during emergencies, but state Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston, a leading Republican in the Texas Senate, said too many local officials have taken it too far. “We are going to have to look at all these emergency powers and see if they have to be scrubbed down,” Bettencourt said. In Chambers County outside of Houston, for example, 10 p.m. curfews have been imposed on adults. In other counties, it’s prohibited to have more than two people in a car. In Laredo, people were allowed to exercise, but bicycle riding was barred.
Local governments are accustomed to playing defense against the Legislature. During each of the last two legislative sessions, state lawmakers have tried to curb local authority on myriad issues including tree ordinances, annexations and property tax collections. Democrats say they’re getting used to this drumbeat of Republicans trying to take authority away from cities and suburbs as they have become more Democratic. They say the cities and counties needed to move quickly because Republican Gov. Greg Abbott waited to issue a statewide stay-home order until 30 other states had done so. Democratic Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo has been a consistent target for frustrated Republicans. Bettencourt said Hidalgo overstepped her bounds when she tried to release people from jail in the name of fighting the coronavirus. In early April, Hidalgo called for releasing nonviolent jail inmates, worried that COVID-19 was making jails a “ticking time bomb” where the virus could spread fast. Her order excluded those with three or more drunken-driving convictions, those with a conviction for burglary of a home and those with a temporary restraining order against them. “There has been broad bipartisan outrage regarding County Judge Hidalgo’s overreaching order throughout Harris County,” said Bettencourt, who joined eight other lawmakers in a lawsuit to fight it… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas’ coronavirus hotspots are in rural counties, near big meat-processing plants (Dallas Morning News)
Texas’ COVID-19 “hotspots,” at least as much as the disease’s spread has been detected, are in rural counties. Ranked by prevalence of confirmed cases of the coronavirus, two of the top three Texas counties are home to huge meat processing plants: Moore County, near the top of the Panhandle; and Shelby County, along the Louisiana border. Other rural counties showing high infection rates – much higher than in Harris and Dallas counties – aren’t scattered across the state. They’re grouped around Moore, which is north of Amarillo and has JBS Beef’s big packing plant in Cactus; and Shelby, where a vast Tyson Foods chicken-processing facility is in Center, the county seat.
Public health experts have said that, while our understanding of COVID-19’s prevalence is hobbled by the lack of widespread testing, it’s not surprising to see outbreaks in meatpacking plants in Texas and elsewhere. “It’s just a dirty industry,” former state epidemiologist Dennis Perrotta said of the plants that slaughter animals and prepare their meat for retailers and restaurants. “I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more cases out of there.” Generally, rural counties with few confirmed cases of COVID-19 are expected to receive the greatest leeway for reopening some businesses at Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement Monday of revisions to his March 31 stay-at-home order. On Wednesday, however, Abbott said Moore County and nearby Potter and Randall counties, which include Amarillo, all have “too high of a growth rate right now” in COVID-19 cases to allow for reopenings. “The hope is that when our open business order goes into effect that those counties will have been corralled,” he told Lubbock radio talk show host Chad Hasty… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATION]
Antibody Tests Go To Market Largely Unregulated, Warns House Subcommittee Chair (NPR)
Coronavirus antibody tests have garnered attention from officials as a potential tool to evaluate people's immunity to the illness. But the majority of companies creating the tests have had little to no regulatory oversight, according to the chair of the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy.
Antibody tests, when accurate, can detect if someone has been exposed to the coronavirus in the past. More than 100 of these tests have been brought to market in the last several weeks, but the majority of them are not being tested by the Food and Drug Administration, said Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) in an interview on Sunday with NPR's Weekend Edition.
Krishnamoorthi said that federal officials have told his subcommittee that companies selling antibody tests can go one of two routes as they seek to bring their products to market… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
If there’s a middle path among Republicans seeking to reopen economy, Abbott is trying to chart it. (Politico)
There’s a big argument going on inside the Republican Party over how to respond to Covid-19. Some Republican governors, like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, have refused to issue statewide stay-at-home orders during the pandemic. And some, like Georgia’s Brian Kemp, are aggressively lifting them: Kemp allowed barber shops, nail salons, bowling alleys and other businesses to reopen today. At the other extreme are aggressive lockdown governors like Ohio’s Mike DeWine and Maryland’s Larry Hogan — Hogan today laid out a recovery plan, but said it’s too early to consider ending his statewide shutdown. If there’s a middle path, between “We’re open for business” and “We’re closed until further notice,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is trying to chart it. On Monday, Abbott is set to announce a plan for ending his statewide stay-at-home order. The governor, who has kept details of the announcement private, is unlikely to push for a fast reopening, according to business executives and policy experts who say that he is deferring to medical experts.
Instead, he is expected to issue a set of guidelines for sanitation standards and the use of protective equipment for restaurants and other businesses. Reopening is the one thing that isn’t bigger in Texas. The Texas plan could offer a blueprint for other Republican-led states: In red states, the pandemic response is splitting the party. Republican leaders want to keep unemployment from swallowing their reelection plans, but they’re nervous about moving too fast. Kemp’s reopening was condemned by the president and by public health experts who said Georgia could succumb to a second wave of infections. Abbott has the chance to create a model for how to balance the public health response to the virus with the concerns of business interests and a noisy right flank. No mess in Texas: Texas has 29 million residents who are spread across urban, suburban and rural areas. The state is, by one measure, the second most diverse state in the country. And so far it has been spared the worst of the virus. The state has recorded nearly 600 Covid-19 deaths, considerably fewer than the 1,000 in Florida, 1,500 in California and 16,000 in New York, though the state’s low levels of testing might obscure the virus spread… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
The Bingham Group, LLC is an Austin-based full service lobbying firm representing and advising clients on municipal, legislative, and regulatory matters throughout Texas.
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