BG Reads | News You Need to Know (November 30, 2020)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
REVISITING: BG Podcast Episode Episode 101 - Criminal Justice Reform with José Garza, Democratic Nominee for Travis County DA
Pre-filed bills for the 87th Texas Legislature:
[AUSTIN METRO]
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport reports busiest travel day since pandemic started (Austin American-Statesman)
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport officials said Sunday, Nov. 29, was the busiest travel day they've seen since the pandemic started, with 12,127 outbound passengers. If you are one of those fliers, Austin Public Health (APH) is asking you to follow a list of guidelines.
There were many warnings not to travel from public health officials, but many did to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. On Wednesday, the airport had 10,843 passengers. Before Sunday, Nov. 8 was the busiest travel day of the year at Austin's airport when 11,006 flyers were screened… (LINK TO STORY)
City of Austin defends taxpayer-funded lobbying ahead of contentious legislative session (KXAN)
The City of Austin is a familiar sparring partner with the Texas legislature. Bracing for a contentious legislative session when state lawmakers return to the Texas Capitol in January, city leaders defended the use of taxpayer-funded lobbyists to achieve and defend agenda goals while Republican leaders fight to end the practice.
“Everybody should have the ability, as effectively as they can, to advocate for their positions and make sure the legislators know what’s true and what’s not true,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler told KXAN. “People on the other side just don’t want to hear from folks in Austin or other cities — and the surest way to do that is to make sure they’re not part of the conversation, and that’s not right.”
In 2020, the City of Austin has spent $435,000-$824,000, according to state ethics reports, on lobbying services with five firms. Three lobbyists on the City’s outside, taxpayer-funded team work for Focused Advocacy, an agency that specializes in lobbying for municipalities. Focused Advocacy has received $110,000-$225,000 from the City of Austin this year and lobbies for 16 other cities, ethics reports show. Brie Franco, director of the City’s Intergovernmental Relations Dept., said outside lobbyists are vetted for potential conflicts and follow the agenda set forth by the Austin City Council. “Out of the 7,300 bills filed each session, about 2,500 affect cities,” Franco said.
“It’s seeking that assistance for the legislative expertise, for the knowledge of how the system works, and then also the relationships with the members.”… (LINK TO STORY)
TxDOT’s new $300 million HQ starts to take shape (Austin American-Statesman)
Construction is underway on the Texas Department of Transportation’s new $300 million headquarters in southeast Austin. The facility, which is expected to be completed in February 2022, will be home to about 2,000 agency employees. Eventually, it will consolidate TxDOT’s presence in Austin. The agency’s workers are currently spread over three sites across the city.
Two of those sites are buildings that the agency rents off of East Riverside Drive and offices the agency owns at Camp Hubbard near 35th Street and MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1). The site of TxDOT’s new headquarters is a 49-acre tract along East Stassney Lane just south of the intersection with Burleson Road.
The transportation agency paid $8.9 million for the property in 2017. It is now appraised at $9.6 million, according to the Travis Central Appraisal District. TxDOT’s plans call for five structures on the site. The main office is a five-story office building with about 425,000 square feet. There will also be a parking structure capable of holding about 1,580 vehicles, as well as a 74,000-square-foot materials lab where TxDOT will test a variety of things, including road construction materials and paints and coatings used for marking lanes. A 145,000-square-foot building will be home to a print shop for road signs. It will replace a TxDOT warehouse facility near Rutland Drive and Metric Boulevard in North Austin… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin Trail of Lights opens with sold out night (KXAN)
Austin’s holiday tradition kicked off with a sold out night but it looked a little different this year.
Tonight, the 56th Annual Austin Trail of Lights held its premiere at Zilker Park starting at 5:45 p.m. This year the annual light display is a drive-through event due to COVID-19. The dates for the event were also extended by two weeks, running from Nov. 28 to Jan. 3… (LINK TO STORY)
After earlier deal died amid pandemic, Renaissance Austin Hotel sells for $70M (Austin Business Journal)
A prior attempt to sell the the Renaissance Austin Hotel collapsed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, the property has changed hands at a discount.
The Axton Group, a San Francisco-based investment management firm, announced Nov. 24 it has purchased the 492-room Renaissance in North Austin for $70 million, or about $142,000 per key. It bought the hotel, which will continue to be managed by Marriott International Inc., from Orlando-based Xenia Hotels & Resorts Inc.
The $70 million price tag was about 30% less than the earlier deal. This spring, Xenia was set to sell the Renaissance Austin to an unnamed buyer for roughly $100.5 million — $205,000 per key. But that deal fell apart, allowing Xenia to pocket a $2 million deposit.
Xenia said the $70 million paid by Axton worked out to nearly seven times the hotel's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2019.
The Axton Group framed its purchase of the Renaissance Austin, at 9721 Arboretum Blvd., as an opportunistic investment in a city where real estate remains red hot despite the pandemic. The hotel is the sixth-largest in the Austin metro and part of The Arboretum, an upscale retail center with some large office buildings. It is close to major developments such as The Domain and a $1 billion Apple campus that's under construction.
Yet the hotel, completed in 1986, is also in serious need of renovations to catch up with other high-end properties, especially as more hotel development sprouts on the north side of the metro. The Kalahari Resort opened Nov. 12 in Round Rock, becoming Central Texas' third-largest hotel with 975 rooms. Hotels are planned at the 7700 Parmer business park, next to the forthcoming Apple project, and at Leander Springs, a mixed-use development that will have the area's first manmade Crystal Lagoon… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
State officials ready to distribute Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine ‘in the coming days,’ Abbott says (Houston Chronicle)
State officials were prepared to distribute doses of drugmaker Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine “in the coming days,” Gov. Greg Abbott said Saturday. Abbott tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal article that reported United Airlines had started operating charter flights to position doses of the vaccine for rapid distribution if approved by federal and global regulators and wrote, “Texas is ready to distribute these vaccines in the coming days.”
The comment was the latest Abbott has made about the state being ready to distribute a vaccine when approved.
“Texas is already prepared structurally for the quick distribution of those vaccines once they are approved,” he said during a news conference Thursday. The Chronicle reported last week four Houston-area hospitals were scrambling to prepare for shipments of the first vaccine, likely in mid-December… (LINK TO STORY)
‘Never stops moving’ — Dade Phelan’s rep as a hard-working, straight-shooting coalition builder made him a shoo-in as Texas’ next House speaker (San Antonio Express-News)
Tommy Williams was preparing to run for the Texas Senate in 2001 after two terms in the House when a young Dade Phelan strode into his office. Phelan handed Williams a list of almost two dozen people in his hometown of Beaumont who he thought Williams needed to win over to cinch the election. Phelan told him he could help him do it. Williams, a Republican from The Woodlands, hired him on the spot. “Beaumont was the largest city in my Senate district,” Williams recalled. “But I wasn’t from Beaumont. I didn’t ever live there. So I told him real quickly, ‘You know what? You’re my Jefferson County campaign manager.’” It paid off: Williams won, and Phelan became the legislative aide the senator depended on for the next five years. Now, almost two decades later, the 45-year-old Phelan is the presumptive House Speaker, and he has hired the former state senator to lead his transition team. A similarly bold, self-starting move, exhibiting the same networking skills, propelled Phelan to the speakership earlier this month.
Within days of the Nov. 3 election, he’d lined up support from 83 members, a majority of the 150-seat House, for his bid to become speaker. Soon after, the number grew to 106, including 57 Republicans and 49 Democrats. It’s now up to 140, according to a Phelan spokesman. The full House will take an official vote when the session begins in January. Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike said they supported Phelan because of his ability to bring people together and find common ground. That’ll be doubly important this session, they said, as the Legislature prepares to tackle weighty and contentious issues: coronavirus relief, a budget shortfall and the once-a-decade task of redrawing the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts. Phelan declined to be interviewed for this story.
The speaker is the presiding officer of the Texas House, and his duties include conducting meetings of the House, appointing committees and enforcing House rules. The speaker, along with the governor and lieutenant governor, are often referred to as the Big Three: Texas’ most powerful officials, who set the state’s legislative agenda. Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso who was on Phelan’s original list of supporters, said Phelan enjoys support from a broad cross-section: legislators of both parties as well as members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and the Texas Legislative Black Caucus…(LINK TO STORY)
Texas Attorney General’s legal woes potentially hinder Google case (Wall Street Journal)
Eight high-ranking employees of the Texas attorney general’s office reached out to law-enforcement authorities in September with a bold accusation, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this month. They claimed that their boss, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, had illegally used his office to interfere with an FBI investigation into a campaign donor. In the weeks after the employees notified the attorney general’s office of their claims, all eight were fired or resigned, and some faced retaliation from Mr. Paxton, according to the lawsuit, which was brought by four of the fired employees and alleges violation of whistleblower protections.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun questioning people about Mr. Paxton, said people familiar with the matter, but the full scope of its investigation isn’t known. Mr. Paxton has said he did nothing wrong. An FBI spokesman didn’t return a message seeking information on the scope of the agency’s investigation. The allegations have sent shock waves through the top ranks of the Texas Republican Party and raised questions about the future of cases the attorney general’s office is handling, including an investigation Texas is leading with a coalition of state attorneys general of Alphabet Inc.’s Google’s advertising business, in cooperation with the U.S. Justice Department. The lawyer who had been in charge of the case, Darren McCarty, was one of the employees who came forward and resigned in late October. Google’s advertising technology business, which controls tools used to buy and sell ads across the web, has been called a monopoly. Google declined to comment but has previously said its products help expand choices for consumers and businesses… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
Ousted Trump cybersecurity official calls Rudy Giuliani's election claims "dangerous" (AXIOS)
Former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Chris Krebs criticized Rudy Giuliani Sunday for making baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election at a Nov. 20 news conference.
Driving the news: When asked in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" what he thought of the news conference, Krebs responded: "It was upsetting because what I saw was [an] apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people."
"It's not me, it's not just CISA. It's the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months," added Krebs, who was fired by President Trump after the cybersecurity department called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history."… (LINK TO STORY)
Democrats seek new identity in post-Trump era (The Hill)
Democrats say they’re in need of serious course corrections to stay competitive in future elections, warning the party may no longer be able to rely on anger at President Trump to drive voters to the polls.
Top liberals interviewed by The Hill expressed concern that the party would drift back to old established ways after using Trump as a boogeyman to raise money and juice turnout for the past two cycles.
Democrats are alarmed after this month’s election revealed soft spots among non-college-educated and Latino voters and skeptical that they’ll consistently be able to rely on turnout from affluent white suburbanites who rejected Trump.
With Trump out of office, some Democrats say the party should fill the void of economic populism he’ll be leaving behind by aiming their policies and rhetoric at lifting working class Americans who have felt ignored by Washington.
And they feel a renewed urgency to build out a centralized campaign infrastructure. They’re calling on President-elect Joe Biden to work on rebuilding the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and for party operatives to train their focus on winning state legislative races that Republicans have dominated.
“The 2020 election was a referendum on Donald Trump, plain and simple,” said Robert Reich, a former Labor secretary under President Clinton and economic adviser to President Obama. “Democrats really have not had to worry about their message or having substantive policy proposals over the last four years. But going forward, Democrats can’t just rely on being against Trump. The question is, who do Democrats stand for and what do they stand for now in the post-Trump era?”… (LINK TO STORY)
Biden announces all-female White House communications team (Politico)
President-elect Joe Biden turned to two Obama administration veterans on Sunday to head up his White House’s communications strategy and serve as its public face.
Kate Bedingfield, who served as Biden’s communications director while he was vice president and on his presidential campaign, will be the White House communications director. And Jen Psaki, who served as White House communications director for the last two years of President Barack Obama’s administration, will be Biden’s White House press secretary.
Biden rounded out his White House communications staff with five other women — the first senior White House communications team comprised entirely of women, Biden's transition noted in its announcement.
Pili Tobar, who worked on Biden’s campaign and previously worked as deputy director of the immigration reform advocacy group America’s Voice, will be the White House deputy communications director. Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as chief of staff to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris during the campaign, will be the principal deputy press secretary. She previously worked for the advocacy group MoveOn.org… (LINK TO STORY)