BG Reads | News You Need to Know (June 17, 2020)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
*NEW* BG PODCAST Episode 93: Processing with Dr. Colette Pierce Burnette, President/CEO at Huston-Tillotson University (SHOW LINK)
Today's podcast features returning guest Dr. Colette Pierce Burnette, Ed.D., President and CEO of Huston-Tillotson University (HT), a private historically black university located in Austin’s East Side.
She and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss the state of world in HT’s corner including the May, including the June 7th Black Lives Matter protest sparked by the murder of George Floyd, adapting to COVID-19, and ways organizations can support the university.
Note: Show also available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Sound Cloud, and Stitcher
[AUSTIN METRO]
Local artists paint ‘BLACK AUSTIN MATTERS’ on Congress Avenue downtown (Austin American-Statesman)
The bright yellow paint on the street leading to the Texas Capitol makes downtown Austin’s new statement hard to miss: BLACK AUSTIN MATTERS. Congress Avenue between Sixth and Ninth streets was shut down before the sun came up Tuesday so artists, volunteers and city crews could stencil massive letters and fill them in with paint. Each word of “Black Austin Matters” takes up roughly a block between Sixth and Ninth streets, and will be on display for at least six months.
The new mural is the latest demonstration in Austin to echo the words of a movement that has taken on greater urgency after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died on Memorial Day in Minnesota after a white officer kept a knee on his neck for almost nine minutes. Capitol View Arts, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the arts in East Austin, and social justice organizers at the Austin Justice Coalition worked with the city to make the mural happen. Austin Transportation Department staff closed roads and assisted with outlining letters, said David Gray, a spokesman for the Austin Economic Development Department. He said Capitol View Arts reached out to the city about the mural last week. Capitol View Arts paid for the art and told the city the mural would cost about $54,750, which includes payment to artists, food costs and supplies, Gray said. The city spent a combined total of $3,750 on paint and materials and $1,293.12 on traffic control, which is covered in the Transportation Department’s annual budget, Gray said… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin on brink of becoming nation's 10th largest city, according to demographer (CultureMap Austin)
It appears Austin soon will join Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas in an elite club — the 10 largest cities in the U.S.
As it stands now, Austin ranks as the 11th largest city in the country, right behind San Jose, California. But a new projection from the City of Austin indicates that sometime next year, Austin will leapfrog San Jose to claim the No. 10 spot. Unless it sees an unlikely surge in population, San Jose would fall to No. 11.
Houston ranks as the country’s fourth-largest city, with San Antonio at No. 7 and Dallas at No. 9. When Austin climbs into the top 10, Texas will boast four of the country’s 10 largest cities. California currently has three cities in the top 10 (Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose).
According to this month’s Imagine Austin newsletter, released June 16, Austin’s ascent to No. 10 is coming “sooner than we had previously anticipated.” That’s because San Jose has witnessed population loss for several years in a row, while Austin keeps growing.
“As Austin gets closer to breaching the 1 million total population mark (maybe in late 2020), San Jose is drifting backwards, and if the current trend holds, even with reduced growth velocity on Austin’s part, we’ll become the 10th most populous city in the country sometime during 2021,” says the newsletter, produced by the City of Austin… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin needs more than double its current number of virus contact tracers (KXAN)
Austin Public Health says its target is to hire 115 contact tracers, a need exacerbated by the state’s re-opening and a subsequent spike in COVID-19 cases.
APH says it has been bringing on about 10 people a week. The tracers will do the work of contacting people who may have been exposed to the virus.
Including the 10 tracers that were brought on this week, the city now has 48 contact tracers. UT’s Dell Medical School has 20 additional contact tracers who assist in the effort.
As Austin moves into Stage 4 because of an increase in hospitalizations, the city is tracking a number of clusters tied to restaurants, which can now operate at 75%, per state of Texas orders.
APH says between May 21 and June 4, it tracked four clusters to the food service industry, for a total of 12 cases… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS]
Steve Adler, Sylvester Turner among group of Texas mayors to ask Gov. Greg Abbott for authority to enforce facemask rules (Community Impact)
Gov. Greg Abbott asked Texans to wear face masks in public to protect their communities from further spread of COVID-19 in a press conference June 16. Abbott said state residents who could be asymptomatic carriers are "doing the right thing" by wearing a mask in public because they are reducing the chances of spreading the virus to someone else.
However, Abbott's recommendation to wear masks in public is not a mandate, and he has prevented any city or county governments from imposing any penalties or fines to enforce face mask requirements.
A group of mayors from nine large Texas cities, each with populations of more than 100,000, signed a letter to Abbott on June 16 hoping to change the governor's mind, asking Abbott for authority to create and enforce their own rules in their communities about whether face masks should be mandatory.
"This one step could prove to be the most effective way to prevent the transmission of this disease. Yet many people in many of our cities are still refusing to wear these face coverings even though these coverings are scientifically proven to help prevent the disease from spreading," wrote the mayors.
The letter was signed by mayors Steve Adler of Austin, Sylvester Turner of Houston, Harry LaRosileiere of Plano as well as their counterparts from Arlington, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie and San Antonio… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Rising coronavirus hospitalizations are just the tip of the iceberg, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins says (Dallas Morning News)
Dallas County officials reported 305 more cases of the coronavirus Monday, the county’s sixth straight day of at least 300 new positive tests. The county also reported that another resident has died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus: a Dallas man in his 60s who did not have underlying health problems.
There have been 14,537 confirmed cases of the virus in Dallas County — about 5.5 for every 1,000 residents — and 285 county residents have died from it. The county does not release a number of recoveries from the illness. County Judge Clay Jenkins said in a written statement that hospitalizations for coronavirus symptoms have risen recently and that people should consider those cases as an indicator of deeper problems. “Think of hospitalizations as that part of the iceberg that you can see that is above the water,” he said. “Below the water are all the people who are sick but that are not yet in the hospital. The iceberg below the water is obviously far greater than the iceberg above it and a small increase in hospitalizations indicates a larger increase in illness.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Houston’s largest workforce prepares to bring energy back to offices (Houston Chronicle)
Some energy companies are slowly re-opening their offices, welcoming employees back as stay-at-home restrictions are eased and new social distancing measures are put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Many have put up plastic shields around desks, established rules for the number of people that can ride together in elevators and devised new disease detection protocols, including taking the temperature of workers each day.
The first waves of workers will help to bring some life back to downtown and to the Energy Corridor, which have become ghost towns as offices emptied out in mid-March when most workers who could began working from home. The Houston area has about 237,000 energy workers. Oklahoma pipeline operator Williams divided its employees into two teams. One team works at home for a week while the other works at the office and then they switch the following week. Williams said it plans to keep that plan in place through the end of June. Some employees at Houston pipeline operator EVX Midstream Partners have already gone back to work as shutdown orders eased in Texas. The company plans to have everyone back by June 15, CEO Herb Chambers said. Other companies are sending employees back in waves. The Houston oil-field services company Halliburton adopted a phased approach for employees to return to work sites beginning Monday with no more than 30 percent of the workforce, spokeswoman Emily Mir said… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
Seattle’s newly police-free neighborhood, explained (Vox)
After eight days of continuing clashes with protesters, staff at the East Precinct police headquarters in Seattle suddenly vacated the building on Monday, June 8, shredding documents and leaving it empty. Among protesters, there was initial confusion over why police would outright leave, but organizers suspected a trap. “The SPD seem like what they wanted to do is abandon the East Precinct and then wait on the borders, just like a few blocks away, for somebody to try to set a fire to repeat what was going on in Minneapolis,” Carla, a protester who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy, told Vox. “Then they can rush in and say, ‘Now our use of military force against unarmed civilians is justified.’”
But that’s not what happened. Instead, protesters set about creating a peaceful — and safe — police-free neighborhood. And the officers largely haven’t bothered to come back. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ as it was referred to early on, started as a meme, said Carla. “I was there the morning after the East Precinct was abandoned, and CHAZ was sort of just a joke that people were sharing, like, ‘Oh, this is an autonomous zone,’” she told Vox, referring to an area that is free from the local government structure and control. But the idea soon took off among the protesters. City personnel showed up the day after the precinct was abandoned to remove the barricades that police had set up to control the protests, but protesters convinced the workers to let them set up roadblocks to keep city traffic out of the area. They ended up sequestering an approximately six-block area in the central Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill. “This is the urban core of the city,” Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, whose district encompasses the protest area, told Vox. “It’s dense and it has a long history, including of LGBTQ rights activism in the ’80s.” CHAZ has since evolved further into a center of peaceful protest, free political speech, co-ops, and community gardens. Protesters have invited the city’s houseless population, who had been subject to a mass “clearing” of tent communities throughout the city, to come stay in the neighborhood… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Trump turns to establishment players to offset his renegade instincts (POLITICO)
Nearly two years after boasting that his gut tells him “more sometimes than anybody else’s brain,” President Donald Trump is ditching his go-it-alone approach — hoping the instincts and experiences of seasoned Republican players can help reinvent his 2020 campaign before it’s too late. In the months since a pandemic and protests complicated his bid for a second term, Trump and his two top campaign hands — White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and campaign manager Brad Parscale — have turned establishment figures into sounding boards, senators into policy directors and free market stalwarts into the drivers of his next economic response to Covid-19… (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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