BG Reads | News You Need to Know (December 21, 2020)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
***NEW*** BG PODCAST - Episode 118 - 2020 Review & What's Next with George Elliman, CEO & Publisher, TRIBEZA
On today’s episode Bingham Group CEO A.J. speaks with George Elliman, CEO & Publisher, TRIBEZA. Founded in March 2001, TRIBEZA is Austin's leading locally-owned arts, culture and lifestyle magazine, covering the arts, fashion, architecture and design, music, community events and cuisine. A.J. and George discuss the pandemic’s impact on the magazine, look back on TRIBEZA’s history on the eve of its 20th anniversary, and what’s on the horizon.
Pre-filed bills for the 87th Texas Legislature:
[AUSTIN METRO]
Opinion: A 'strong mayor' is not the answer to Austin's challenges (Austin American-Statesman)
Over the past two decades, Austin has emerged as a global destination for job creation while maintaining its roots as a community known for live music, art and culture. This has been accomplished under a council-manager system of government, that while imperfect, has been successful. Recently, however, a group called Austinites for Progressive Reform has called for dramatic upheaval in our city’s governance structure by proposing a change from our current council-manager governance to a system that would place more executive power in a strong mayor.
Their proposal is offered up as a panacea to fix the challenges our city faces. However, in reality, it will simply consolidate power into the hands of the political elite while limiting the agency of Austinites to participate in local government.
Our council-manager form of government divests power and provides checks and balances that safeguard all people of Austin. If voters next year approve the charter amendment for a “strong mayor," Austin will have an elected mayor operating independent from the council with vast spending authority on personal initiatives, veto authority over council decisions and the power to dole out political favors and critical city jobsto supporters. The mayor would not even be required to attend council meetings, relegating council members to positions of old-school ward representatives — essentially silencing many voices across the city that we fought so hard for in the adoption of the 10-1 system… (LINK TO STORY)
Related content: BG Podcast EP. 110: Discussing City Governments with Professor Sherri Greenberg, LBJ School of Public Affairs
Note: Bingham Group is not endorsing one system or another, but we do expect public debate on strong mayor to be the major issue of early 2021 (Q1 - Q2). We have and will be advising clients of impacts and opportunities of a strong mayor shift.
Newly appointed transit board to oversee implementation of $7.1B Project Connect plan (Community Impact)
With the city’s transformation $7.1 billion Project Connect rail and bus plan approved by voters in November, Austin City Council and local transit authority Capital Metro appointed the five-person board responsible for overseeing its implementation.
The Austin Transit Partnership is made up by one member of the Austin City Council, one from the CapMetro board and then three community experts in finance, engineering, construction, sustainability and planning. The inaugural crew appointed by Austin City Council and CapMetro include Austin Mayor Steve Adler, Huston-Tillotson University President Colette Pierce Burnette, WSP USA Vice President Tony Elkins, CapMetro board member Eric Stratton, and Veronica Castro de Barrera, owner of VCdB Architecture and Art.
Adler called Project Connect the “single most important thing” the city could do in getting people out of cars and reaching its climate goals.
The independent board, which will act as the governing body of the Project Connect process, holds a significant amount of authority moving forward. The group will be responsible for approving the annual budget, approving design, construction and engineering projects, agreeing to interlocal agreements and overseeing the implementation, design and construction of the $7.1 billion transit plan’s projects. Austin City Council and the CapMetro board will oversee the Austin Transit Partnership’s work.
The authority granted to the Austin Transit Partnership members was a sticking point for several community members who spoke in objection to moving forward with the appointments at the Dec. 18 meeting. During the public comment portion, several Austinites complained that the process was rushed, opaque and lacked public input…The Austin Transit Partnership’s inaugural meeting is scheduled for next month… (LINK TO STORY)
Capital Metro extends nearly $40M of Project Connect contracts (Austin Business Journal)
The Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority board extended two sizable contracts at its Dec. 14 meeting for work on the city’s future public transit system.
Voters approved the $7.1 billion transit plan called Project Connect in November, and Capital Metro officials said at the board meeting that the project is now moving into “Task II,” which is largely centered around community engagement and preliminary engineering work.
Engineering firms AECOM Technical Services Inc. and HNTB Engineering Inc. — the companies that designed the transit system's future Orange and Blue lines — were extended contracts to complete the environmental and preliminary engineering phase of the projects. The contracts were nearly $21.3 million and $18.5 million, respectively.
The two companies were hired in the spring of 2019 to design the Orange and Blue lines, which are two light rail lines that will connect the outer portions of Austin to downtown.
The Orange Line is slated to run from North to South Austin through the University of Texas and downtown along major corridors such as South Congress Avenue. The Blue Line will run from North Austin out to Southeast Austin and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, according to the project map.
AECOM is a global engineering firm headquartered in Los Angeles, according to its website. HNTB is a Kansas City-based company with offices across Texas, including in Austin, Dallas and Houston. Officials with AECOM declined to comment, and representatives at HNTB could not be reached by deadline.
Future design and construction contracts will be awarded by the Austin Transit Partnership, which is a local government corporation that's set to take over Project Connect next year. A board of directors hasn't been identified for ATP just yet, but Austin City Council and the Capital Metro board are slated to have a joint meeting on Dec. 18 where they'll consider approving the corporation's bylaws and initial board… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
COVID’s ‘untold story’: Texas Blacks and Latinos are dying in the prime of their lives (Dallas Morning News)
Claudio Sanchez is facing his first Christmas without his fiancée, Blanca Leon; his mother, Cecilia; and Blanca’s father, Jose. All three died of COVID-19. Now Claudio, 33, a machine operator at a paper company, cares for his and Blanca’s two sons, his sister and three young cousins who used to live with his mom and aunt. His aunt is hospitalized with COVID-19 and on a ventilator. The Sanchezes are two motherless generations, grieving together. Conventional wisdom says COVID-19 threatens only the very old. That’s not true in Texas’ Latino and Black communities, where working-age adults are dying at rates many times higher than those of whites.
“That discussion of ‘Oh, it’s all the really old people’ — that’s a white people’s story,” said Sarah Reber, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles and a fellow at the nonprofit Brookings Institution. In Texas, among those ages 25 to 64, the COVID death rate for Hispanics is more than four times as high as that of non-Hispanic whites, a Dallas Morning News analysis of state health data found. Blacks in that age group are dying at more than twice the rate of whites. Similar trends hold true for Dallas County. While losing a person of any age to COVID is tragic, the virus has been disproportionately cutting down Blacks and Latinos during their most productive years, when they’re working, raising children and saving money for homes, retirement and their children’s college educations.
“That has been the untold story of all the injustices that COVID has highlighted,” said Erin Carlson, director of graduate public health programs at the University of Texas at Arlington. “The pandemic is taking people of color during the prime of their lives.” The deaths have sweeping implications for Texas’ economy, for its higher education system and for a rapidly unfolding mental health crisis fueled by trauma and grief… (LINK TO STORY)
State Rep. Drew Springer trumps Shelley Luther in Texas Senate runoff (Texas Tribune)
State Rep. Drew Springer of Muenster prevailed Saturday over fellow Republican Shelley Luther in a special election runoff for a state Senate seat that was animated by Gov. Greg Abbott and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
With all polling locations reporting, Springer defeated Luther by 13 percentage points, according to unofficial results.
Luther is the Dallas salon owner who was jailed earlier this year over her refusal to close her business due to coronavirus restrictions. Throughout the race, she was an outspoken critic of Abbott, who endorsed Springer in the runoff and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own campaign funds to beat back Luther in the race to succeed outgoing state Sen. Pat Fallon, R-Prosper.
Abbott took to Twitter Saturday night to congratulate Springer on an "overwhelming" win. Springer also declared victory on social media, saying he "will continue advancing the conservative priorities of our district like reducing property taxes, securing the border, and standing up for our law enforcement and first responders who keep our communities safe."… (LINK TO STORY)
What was behind Greg Abbott’s bullet train flip-flop? (Texas Monthly)
Long before they heard about the Texas bullet train, Mary Meier and her husband were accustomed to companies coming after slices of their land. A fifty-foot-wide oil pipeline easement bisects their 25-acre property in Montgomery County, north of Houston, where they’ve lived for sixteen years. But when she learned that a 200-mile-per-hour Japanese-designed train might speed by every thirty minutes, just two hundred yards from her kitchen window, carrying travelers between Dallas and Houston, she was furious. There was the practical concern: how would she access the half of her property on the other side of the tracks? The train’s builders had advertised that some sections of the rail would be elevated to allow passage underneath, but Meier doubted whether such access would be provided on her property. Then there was the matter of principle. “Your property is where you have peace and serenity,” she said, adding that the main beneficiaries of the train wouldn’t have to deal with its adverse consequences. “It’s all fine and good if you’re living in an apartment in downtown Houston.” Ultimately, the proposed route moved off Meier’s land and the surveyors never came. But she still staunchly opposes high-speed rail on behalf of other landowners in the ten counties along the Interstate 45 corridor where the train would run.
Earlier this year, after six years of legal battles brought by property owners and local governments, the rail project finally looked to be chugging along. Texas Central, the company behind it, had purchased six hundred parcels, or 40 percent of the land needed to build the project. In May, a victory at the Corpus Christi Court of Appeals asserted the business’s status as a railroad company with the power to exercise eminent domain—meaning that it can require owners to sell portions of their land in return for a “reasonable” price—though that ruling may be appealed to the state Supreme Court. This fall, the project received approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration, and Governor Greg Abbott wrote a letter to the Japanese government, a key investor in the project, voicing his support. The potential benefits of the rail seemed manifold. It would offer travelers a ninety-minute alternative to the four-hour drive between Dallas and Houston and relieve highway congestion that’s projected to double by 2035. It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And it would create thousands of high-paying jobs at a time when Texas is suffering from both a pandemic-related recession and an oil-price bust. “
The Texas High-Speed Train will be the first truly high-speed train in Texas and the United States, connecting North Texas, Houston and the Brazos Valley in less than 90 minutes, using the safest, most accessible, most efficient and environmentally friendly mass transportation system in the world today,” Texas Central spokesperson Erin Ragsdale wrote in a statement… (LINK TO STORY)
South Texas restrictions were meant to protect people from COVID-19. Then the handcuffs and ticket books came out. (Texas Tribune)
The day that Dallas salon owner Shelley Luther was arrested for reopening her business in defiance of Texas emergency stay-home orders, Robin Torres sat in a county jail 500 miles away facing the consequences of his own failure to follow such rules.
Luther became a conservative darling this spring for her provocation, spending two days in custody on contempt of court charges. Largely in response to her case, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott eventually prohibited the authorities from jailing anyone for violating the stay-home orders established to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Torres, by contrast, spent five weeks in the Hidalgo County jail after a police officer caught him smoking and drinking a Busch Light beer outside a convenience store just after 11 p.m. on April 3. Arrested on a public intoxication charge and for violation of the stay-home orders, Torres couldn’t afford to pay the $150 he owed on his bond. He wasn’t released until early May, one day after Luther emerged from her brief stint in jail as a celebrity, a notoriety she turned into a run for a Texas Senate seat. Meanwhile, cases like Torres’ have largely gone ignored.
“I thought I would only spend the weekend in jail,” said Torres, now 31, in a recent interview. “I ended up spending more than a month in jail.”
Torres was one of at least 300 people arrested for violating COVID-19 orders, often in conjunction with other charges, in the first six weeks of the pandemic in the Rio Grande Valley, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. Here, in a part of the state already teeming with law enforcement because of its location along the border with Mexico, officials took some of the hardest lines on enforcement of COVID-19 rules in Texas. Altogether, authorities here issued nearly 2,000 citations to individuals for violating the orders, the investigation found.
These counties were early adopters of curfews as a way to contain the virus. They banned nonessential travel, resulting in hundreds of individuals being stopped by law enforcement and ticketed. In at least some cases, officers used the emergency order as a reason to stop someone but then booked them for another, sometimes more serious, charge. Or, they tacked on a charge or citation for violating the emergency order even if it had little to do with the crime they were investigating, a decision that often increased bail and made it harder for people to get out of custody… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
Congress seals agreement on COVID relief, government funding (PBS)
Top Capitol Hill negotiators sealed a deal Sunday on an almost $1 trillion COVID-19 economic relief package, finally delivering long-overdue help to businesses and individuals and providing money to deliver vaccines to a nation eager for them. The agreement, announced by congressional leaders, would establish a temporary $300 per week supplemental jobless benefit and a $600 direct stimulus payment to most Americans, along with a new round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses and money for schools, health care providers and renters facing eviction.
It came after months of battling and posturing, but the negotiating dynamic changed in Republicans' favor after the election and as the end of the congressional session neared. President-elect Joe Biden was eager for a deal to deliver long-awaited help to suffering people and a boost to the economy, even though it was less than half the size that Democrats wanted this fall. House leaders informed lawmakers that they would vote on the legislation on Monday, and the Senate was likely to vote on Monday, too. Lawmakers were eager to leave Washington and close out a tumultuous year. “There will be another major rescue package for the American people,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in announcing the agreement for a relief bill that would total almost $900 billion. “It is packed with targeted policies to help struggling Americans who have already waited too long.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Inside Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election (Politico)
It started with a phone call.
In mid-November, President Donald Trump rang Monica Palmer, the Republican chair of an obscure board in Michigan that had just declared Joe Biden winner of the state’s most populous county.
Within 24 hours, Palmer announced she wanted to “rescind” her vote. Her reasoning mirrored Trump’s public and private rants: The Nov. 3 election may have been rife with fraud.
“The Wayne County election had serious process flaws which deserve investigation,” she wrote in an affidavit. “I continue to ask for information to assure Wayne County voters that these elections were conducted fairly and accurately.”
The reversal came too late — the results were already confirmed. But Trump was just getting started.
Over the next month, the president would conduct a sweeping campaign to personally cajole Republican Party leaders across the country to reject the will of the voters and hand him the election. In his appeals, he used specious and false claims of widespread voter fraud, leaning on baseless allegations that corrupt Democrats had conspired at every level to steal a presidential election.
In total, the president talked to at least 31 Republicans, encompassing mostly local and state officials from four critical battleground states he lost — Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The contacts included at least 12 personal phone calls to 11 individuals, and at least four White House meetings with 20 Republican state lawmakers, party leaders and attorneys general, all people he hoped to win over to his side. Trump also spoke by phone about his efforts with numerous House Republicans and at least three current or incoming Senate Republicans… (LINK TO STORY)