BG Reads | News You Need to Know (December 15, 2020)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
***NEW*** BG PODCAST - Episode 117 - The State of Georgia with Howard Franklin
On today’s episode Bingham Group CEO A.J. speaks with return guest Howard Franklin, Managing Principal of Atlanta-based lobby firm Ohio River South. The main discussion covers the state of play in Georgia ahead of the January 4th runoff for its two US Senate seats. Additionally, the two discuss the intra-party state GOP civil war, and the implications of Georgia’s new battleground status.
***NEW*** BG Blog: 2020 Austin City Council Runoff Candidates - District 6 and 10
Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m.
More information here (Travis County Clerk)
Pre-filed bills for the 87th Texas Legislature:
[AUSTIN METRO]
Austin's Alter, Flannigan face conservatives in council runoffs (Austin American-Statesman)
The two races for the Austin City Council that were not determined in November will be settled in Tuesday's runoff elections – and the results will be the latest testament to how the city's progressive movement on public safety and homelessness is playing with voters.
To this point, no council member has lost an election since the council approved cuts to the police department's budget this summer and repealed the city's public camping ban last summer. Leslie Pool and Greg Casar cruised to reelection in November, and Delia Garza will be the next Travis County attorney after winning the Democratic primary and running unopposed in the general election.
Tuesday's runoffs were required after a more conservative challenger in each November race prevented the liberal incumbent from receiving the majority of votes needed for victory… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin runoff election early turnout at 7% heading into election day Dec. 15 (Community Impact)
According to numbers from the Travis County clerk, 41,515 county voters have cast their ballots so far in the Dec. 15 local runoff elections, a total of 7.37% of the 563,296 who are eligible to cast a ballot.
Just over half of those early voters—22,209—appeared in person, while 19,306 voters cast their ballot by mail.
Voters in Austin are electing two Austin City Council members and two members of the Austin ISD board of trustees. Unsurprisingly, the busiest early polling locations in Travis County were those within the Austin City Council districts with contested elections.
The Austin Public Library's Old Quarry Branch, in District 10, was by far the busiest early polling location, with 6,756 in-person voters. No other location in Travis County had more than 3,000 votes. Incumbent Alison Alter is facing challenger Jennifer Virden for the District 10 seat.
The second-most visited early site in Travis County was Lions Municipal Golf Course, also in District 10, followed by Peace Lutheran Church in District 6—where incumbent Jimmy Flannigan is looking to hold onto his seat against opponent Mackenzie Kelly. Parts of District 6 are located within Williamson County… (LINK TO STORY)
Council approves street impact fee program (Austin Monitor)
Beginning in mid-2022, developers eager to contribute to Austin’s growth will need to pitch in to help pay for the transportation infrastructure costs necessitated by the new development. The street impact fee program that City Council unanimously adopted last week will require a one-time payment from developers in proportion to how much traffic their project is likely to generate.
“This is a big step forward to achieving our mobility goals established by the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan,” said Gina Fiandaca, assistant city manager for mobility. “Austin keeps growing and our transportation staff has worked hard to find the right balance to have development pay its fair share of infrastructure costs.”
The program will officially take effect Dec. 21, but fees will not be collected until June 2022 due to an 18-month grace period intended to help the development community prepare for the new costs. Following the grace period, the city will begin issuing fees for new developments based on a uniform fee system that will vary based on a site’s location inside or outside the urban core and its land use. The fee is set at 50 percent of the state’s allowed maximum for non-residential uses and 35 percent of the maximum for residential, or $1,250 per generated vehicle mile and $850 per vehicle mile, respectively.
The uniform fee system is a departure from previous iterations of the proposed impact fee program, which set fee amounts specific to the infrastructure needs in each of the 17 geographical service zones. The uniform fee is intended to prevent pushing developers away from parts of the city that have greater infrastructure needs due to historic disinvestment… (LINK TO STORY)
UT Austin's Dell Medical School Is The First Institution In Central Texas Receiving Shipment Of COVID-19 Vaccine (KUT)
UT's Dell Medical School is expected to receive a shipment of about 3,000 doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine Monday. It will be the first health care institution in Central Texas to get the vaccine.
Beginning Tuesday, UT Health Austin – the clinical practice of Dell Medical School – will start administering the vaccine to 2,925 front-line health care workers. The university says it is deciding who gets priority based on guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which puts health care professionals and other high-risk groups at the front of the line.
The Pfizer vaccine requires two doses, with the second given about three weeks later. UT Dell Med says these workers will be receiving that initial dose. Another shipment of the vaccine will be sent later in January.
"It's a very big day," Dr. Amy Young, chief clinical officer at UT Health Austin, said. "This has brought a lot of hope, I think, to the providers, but I think to the community as well."
She called the vaccine distribution a "first step to getting us back closer to a normal life," but also urged people to continue wearing masks, social distancing and practicing good hygiene until herd immunity is achieved… (LINK TO STORY)
White House Coronavirus Task Force urges Texas to tighten limits on gatherings (Houston Chronicle)
The White House Coronavirus Task Force is increasingly suggesting that states including Texas begin shutting down again, saying in reports sent to state leaders this month that they aren’t doing enough to slow the worst surge in COVID cases that the country has seen. “This surge is the most rapid increase in cases; the widest spread of intense transmission, with more than 2,000 counties in COVID red zones; and the longest duration of rapid increase, now entering its 8th week, that we have experienced,” say the reports, sent to Texas and other states on Dec. 6.
“Despite the severity of this surge and the threat to hospital systems, many state and local governments are not implementing the same mitigation policies that stemmed the tide of the summer surge; that must happen now.” Texas, the report says, “must increase mitigation to prevent ongoing community spread,” including “significant reduction in capacity or closure of public and private indoor spaces, including restaurants and bars.”
The task force’s reports over the last several weeks, meanwhile, have consistently pointed to the success of European countries — many of which have shuttered restaurants, bars and other businesses — in stemming the outbreak. “The majority of the United States is not mitigating similarly,” Dec. 6 state report says. It’s the latest example of the task force’s increasingly urgent tone in its messaging to states, including Texas. A spokeswoman for Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement Monday that the governor has spoken with Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and she “commended” steps the governor has taken so far, including enacting mandatory occupancy reductions — including closing bars — in regions where coronavirus patients take up 15 percent or more of hospital capacity for seven straight days. The governor’s office pointed to El Paso, where the state says those steps are working. At the El Paso outbreak’s peak on Nov. 11, there were 1,108 people hospitalized in area hospitals, a figure that has dropped to 551, according to the governor’s office. The number of positive tests in El Paso has also decreased significantly since the November surge… (LINK TO STORY)
Hackers used obscure Texas IT vendor to attack U.S. agencies (Bloomberg)
At the epicenter of the most sprawling cyber-attack in recent memory is a two-decade-old, Austin, Texas-based software maker called SolarWinds Corp. While barely known outside geeky tech circles, its customer list boasts of every branch of the U.S. military and four-fifths of the Fortune 500.
Many of those customers found themselves ensnared in the attack because suspected Russian hackers inserted a vulnerability into a popular SolarWinds’ software product, designed to give users a bird’s eye view of the varied web of applications that keep their operations humming.
In a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, SolarWinds said it believed its monitoring products could have been used to compromise the servers of as many as 18,000 of its customers. Those clients include government agencies around the globe and some of the world’s largest corporations.
The company “has been made aware of a cyber-attack that inserted a vulnerability within its Orion monitoring products which, if present and activated, could potentially allow an attacker to compromise the server on which the Orion products run,” according to the filing. “SolarWinds has been advised that this incident was likely the result of a highly sophisticated, targeted and manual supply chain attack by an outside nation state.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas GOP chair denies that he advocated for state to secede (San Antonio Express-News)
Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West said Monday he was not advocating secession from the United States in his response on Friday to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to refuse to take up a Texas-led lawsuit to overturn election results in four battleground states. After the Supreme Court rejected the Texas case, West released a statement to the public expressing his frustration with the decision. But he included one line that caught national attention. “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a union of states that will abide by the Constitution,” West said. But West said that was never a call for Texas to leave the Union like it did in 1861. In a message to Republicans on Monday, he said he’s still unsure why people think his statement meant he wanted Texas to secede.
“I am still trying to find where I said anything about ‘secession,’” West said. In an interview with FOX News, West was even more direct in declaring he did not want Texas to secede. West said he was really trying to say that he wanted other states to honor the Constitution, something he said many are not doing. He pointed specifically to the states that joined on to the Texas lawsuit that the Supreme Court rejected. He said those states did the right thing by joining Texas. The Texas suit sought to invalidate election results in four states that President-elect Joe Biden won because election procedures were changed before Election Day without first being voted on by those state legislatures. Although other states like Texas also made changes to early voting dates and procedures, Texas was not a subject of the suit, which was filed by state Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“Truth be told, the real perpetrators of secession are the states, and others, named in the suit by Texas, who enacted illegal and unconstitutional actions resulting in the violation of election laws,” West said in the letter to Republicans… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
'Democracy prevailed,' Biden says after U.S. Electoral College confirms his win (Reuters)
President-elect Joe Biden delivered a forceful rebuke on Monday to President Donald Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of his victory, hours after winning the state-by-state Electoral College vote that officially determines the U.S. presidency.
“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed,” Biden said in a prime-time speech from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. “Now it’s time to turn the page, as we’ve done throughout our history – to unite, to heal.”
Monday’s vote, typically a formality, assumed outsized significance in light of Trump’s extraordinary effort to subvert the process due to what he has falsely alleged was widespread voter fraud in the Nov. 3 election.
California, the most-populous U.S. state, put Biden over the 270 votes needed to win the Electoral College when its 55 electors unanimously cast ballots for him and his running mate, Kamala Harris. Biden and Harris - the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to become vice president-elect - will be sworn in on Jan. 20.
In a roughly 13-minute speech, Biden, the Democratic former vice president, called for unity while voicing confidence that the country’s democratic institutions had held in the face of Trump’s attempts to reverse the election outcome… (LINK TO STORY)
US COVID-19 deaths top 300,000 just as vaccinations begin (Associated Press)
The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus topped 300,000 Monday just as the country began dispensing COVID-19 shots in a monumental campaign to conquer the outbreak. The number of dead rivals the population of St. Louis or Pittsburgh. It is equivalent to repeating a tragedy on the scale of Hurricane Katrina every day for 5 1/2 months. It is more than five times the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. It is equal to a 9/11 attack every day for more than 100 days. "The numbers are staggering -- the most impactful respiratory pandemic that we have experienced in over 102 years, since the iconic 1918 Spanish flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said days before the milestone.
The U.S. crossed the threshold on the same day health care workers rolled up their sleeves for Pfizer's COVID-19 shot, marking the start of the biggest vaccination campaign in American history. If a second vaccine is authorized soon, as expected, 20 million people could be immunized by month’s end. Meanwhile, a sea change in Washington is fast approaching after an election that was, in large part, a referendum on the Trump administration’s handling of the virus. President-elect Joe Biden has made clear that his first priority will be a comprehensive and disciplined effort to defeat the outbreak.
The death toll was reported by Johns Hopkins University from data supplied by health authorities across the U.S. The real number of lives lost is believed to be much higher, in part because of deaths that were not accurately recorded as coronavirus-related during the early stages of the crisis. Globally the virus is blamed for more than 1.6 million deaths. Experts say it could take well into spring for the shots and other measures to bring cases and deaths under control in the U.S. With cold weather driving people inside, where the virus spreads more easily, and many Americans disdainful of masks and other precautions, some public health authorities project 100,000 more could die before the end of January… (LINK TO STORY)