BG Reads | News You Need to Know (October 1, 2020)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
BG Podcast Episode 108: Industry Update with Skeeter Miller, President, Greater Austin Restaurant Association (SHOW LINK)
*NEW* Job Posting: Local Government Affairs Program Manager (Austin-Bergstrom International Airport)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Questions arise about how BBB administers grants (Austin Monitor)
At Tuesday’s City Council work session, Mayor Steve Adler asked Sylnovia Holt-Rabb, the acting director of the Economic Development Department, to explain what went into the selection of the Better Business Bureau to administer nearly $26 million in federal emergency funds the city received for Covid-19 relief grants for small businesses, nonprofits and creative workers. Council is scheduled to consider ratifying a contract amendment with the BBB at today’s meeting.
The contract has already been signed, but Adler and other Council members said they had received complaints from constituents, particularly members of the music community, about the selection of the BBB. As Holt-Rabb explained, the BBB had the staff and the capacity to do the work required and had the lowest administrative fees of the seven that applied to administer the Commercial Loans for Economic Assistance & Recovery (CLEAR) and Austin Nonprofit & Civic Health Organizations Relief (ANCHOR) program money.
Staffers initially selected a different nonprofit organization to administer relief grants for Austin creative workers. However, according to written materials provided to Council, that organization “experienced several obstacles that hindered its ability to rapidly launch the program. As a result of these unexpected circumstances and an urgent need to rapidly distribute the funds to creative sector workers, EDD staff modified the pre-existing contract with Austin BBB to implement this relief program.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Fewer coronavirus patients could lead to larger gatherings in Austin, officials say (Austin American-Statesman)
As coronavirus cases in the Austin-Travis County area have seen a decline in recent weeks, government and health officials appear to be on the verge of easing social distancing orders.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler, speaking at a virtual public briefing Monday night, said once Travis County’s seven-day moving average of new hospital admissions for the coronavirus drops to 10, health officials may allow for larger gatherings, especially outdoors.
The seven-day average as of Tuesday night was 12, with 9 new hospital admissions reported, according to the city’s online data dashboard.
Dr. Mark Escott, the Austin-Travis County interim health authority, echoed Adler’s statements to county commissioners during a public meeting Tuesday morning.
Over the past three weeks, Escott said the moving average for new hospital admissions for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has bounced between 12 and 18.
Escott did not say how soon he expects the seven-day average to drop to 10. He did say, though, that residents should still avoid crowds and wear masks to help continue the downward trend.
The total number of people in the hospital for COVID-19 in Travis County on Tuesday was 73, which was much lower than the seven-day moving average of 82, city data showed.
Travis County is currently in Stage 3 of Austin Public Health’s risk-based guidelines, which allow social gatherings of no more than 10 for people at higher risk for severe COVID-19 symptoms.
If Travis County does move into the safer status of Stage 2, the most significant change would be that gatherings could increase to a maximum of 25 people.
Adler and Escott were meeting later Tuesday to discuss possible changes, but neither offered specifics about their conversation.
According to Austin Public Health, any changes to Adler’s orders must align with Gov. Greg Abbott’s reopening plan for Texas… (LINK TO STORY)
Pre-outbreak, Austin’s commute times kept growing in 2019 (Austin American-Statesman)
It should be no surprise that the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that commute times in the Austin metro area got longer.
The Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey revealed that in the five county Austin-Round Rock metropolitan statistical area — Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties — the average time spent getting to work for the area’s nearly 1.2 million commuters increased 41.5 seconds in 2019 to an average of 27 minutes and 42 seconds. For the average commuter, that amounts to three more hours spent in the car each year.
While a pre-pandemic increase in commute times seems predictable, the Census Bureau’s latest survey has some informative nuggets that its analysts considered statistically significant.
For instance, the share of commuters who drove to work alone in Travis County — considered by many transportation experts as the leading cause of increased traffic — actually dropped from 75.3% to 72.4%. Conversely, the share of people who worked from home and those carpooling increased, something that should lead to fewer cars on the road, and therefore, a shorter commute for everyone.
Yet the average Travis County commuter’s trip time got longer. That was also felt across the five-county Austin-Round Rock metro area, according to the data.
Romic Aevaz, a policy analyst with Eno Center for Transportation, said the data likely show what population growth on the outskirts of Austin and in its suburbs is doing to commuting times. Additionally, Aevaz said, it is a symptom of the ever-increasing costs of living in the city’s core that are forcing more and more farther away from the city’s center. In August, the median selling price for homes within Austin’s city limits was $435,000, according to the Austin Board of Realtors.
“Due to people living further and further away from the city, even though the amount of people commuting is going down, their commute times are going up,” Aevaz said… (LINK TO STORY)
AISD considers hundreds of layoffs (Austin Business Journal)
An estimated 232 teachers and staff could be laid off in the coming weeks at Austin Independent School District, Chief Business Officer Larry Throm told board members on Sept. 29.
He said reported student enrollment is down by more than 5,000, and that could cost almost $50 million in lost funding for the district.
“We don’t want to alarm anybody, but these are facts. We will wait to see in another two weeks or week. We are taking attendance daily to see if we can improve on these numbers,” he said.… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
No straight-ticket voting for Texas' 2020 election, federal appeals court says (Texas Tribune)
Texas voters will not be able to select every candidate of a major political party with one punch, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, upholding a 2017 state law that ends the popular practice of straight-ticket voting for this year’s general election.
The Texas Legislature acted years ago to end straight-ticket voting in time for the 2020 presidential contest, but a federal judge reinstated the practice earlier this month, citing complications to the voting process caused by the pandemic.
A three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision Wednesday, ruling that the law ending the one-punch option should go into effect even as voters and election administrators contend with the coronavirus pandemic, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s “emphasis that courts should not alter election rules on the eve of an election.”
“The Texas Legislature passed HB 25 in 2017, and state election officials have planned for this election accordingly. The state election machinery is already well in motion,” the judges wrote. Upholding the law and eliminating straight-ticket voting, they wrote, “will minimize confusion among both voters and trained election officials.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Medicaid expansion could bring Texas $5.4 billion in federal dollars, study says (Houston Chronicle)
Expanding Medicaid, the federal safety-net insurance program, in Texas could bring as much as $5.4 billion federal dollars into the state and enroll nearly 1 million people, according to a new study by Texas A&M researchers. The study estimates that roughly 1.2 million Texans would qualify if the state's legislators widened Medicaid eligibility to include low-income individuals who make 138 percent or less of the federal poverty line. To qualify for Medicaid in Texas currently, an individual has to be 18 or younger, over 65, pregnant or disabled. Their income must not exceed the federal poverty line.
County-level estimates from the researchers indicate that 223,700 Harris County residents would be eligible for Medicaid if it were expanded. About 954,000 state residents would enroll if they qualified under the expansion, according to the study from Texas A&M's Bush School of Government and Public Service and sponsored by the Episcopal Health Foundation, a Houston-based community health advocacy nonprofit. Texas is one of 12 states that have not adopted the expansion. If the state expanded Medicaid, the federal government would pay 90 percent of the cost and the state would pay 10 percent. Gov. Greg Abbott has long opposed Medicaid expansion, although the state continues to lead the nation in the number of uninsured residents. During the pandemic, medical leaders and health policy experts have renewed calls to expand Medicaid to help cover low-wage workers at high risk of COVID-19 exposure… (LINK TO STORY)
State looks to recoup millions it says it overpaid to jobless Texans (Austin American-Statesman)
If losing a job amid the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t stressful enough, tens of thousands of out-of-work Texans also have been notified that they received too much money in unemployment benefits and now are in debt to the state.
The Texas Workforce Commission says it has overpaid a total of $203 million to about 185,000 people from March 1 through Sept. 15 while attempting to quickly get state and federal benefits to those in need.
The figures are relatively small fractions of both the total amount that has been disbursed and the total number of people who have received benefits.
According to data supplied by the commission, it has paid out a whopping $30.1 billion in benefits, putting the overpayment amount at less than 1% of that total. The agency said it has processed an estimated 4.9 million claims, putting the notices of overpayments at 3.8% of those claims.
But such statistics are scant consolation to Texans who have been told they now owe money for benefits they thought were intended to help them weather a coronavirus-induced financial calamity and in many cases have already spent.
“The person is then on the hook for what they needed as a desperately needed lifeline,” said Kathryn Youker, an attorney who oversees the labor and employment group at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “It’s a terrible insult to injury when someone gets unemployment benefits and then the Texas Workforce Commission later determines that they were not in fact eligible.”… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
House delays vote on Covid relief package in bid for last-minute deal (Politico)
House Democrats are waiting one more day before voting on their coronavirus aid package, giving Speaker Nancy Pelosi a final 24 hours to reach a deal with the White House before taking up their own bill and going home.
The House is now expected to vote Thursday on Democrats’ $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package, reversing course from earlier in the day, when lawmakers were told they would vote Wednesday night.
But Pelosi and top Democrats delayed the vote to buy more for the last-gasp negotiations with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — which are widely seen as Congress' final chance to approve more pandemic aid before the election. Several centrist Democrats had urged party leaders to hold off, arguing it would be fruitless to take a party-line vote if a deal may be clinched.
“We’ll have to see. If we have an agreement, we’re going to pass that agreement, then we’re done until after the election," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Wednesday, noting that timing for the rest of the week remained in flux. "It’s hard to say when we’re going to leave."
Pelosi and Mnuchin met in the Capitol for 90 minutes on Wednesday afternoon, their first in-person sit down since bipartisan talks fell apart in early August. The meeting follows days of calls between the two with both parties under immense pressure to reach a bipartisan agreement that extends a financial lifeline to tens of millions of increasingly desperate Americans before the election… (LINK TO STORY)
Neanderthal genes linked to severe COVID-19; Mosquitoes cannot transmit the coronavirus (Reuters)
The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.
Neanderthal genes linked with severe COVID-19
A group of genes passed down from extinct human cousins is linked with a higher risk for severe COVID-19, researchers say. When they compared the genetic profiles of about 3,200 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and nearly 900,000 people from the general population, they found that a cluster of genes on chromosome 3 inherited from Neanderthals who lived more than 50,000 years ago is linked with 60% higher odds of needing hospitalization. People with COVID-19 who inherited this gene cluster are also more likely to need artificial breathing assistance, coauthor Hugo Zeberg of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said in a news release. The prevalence of these genes varies widely, according to a report published on Wednesday in Nature. In South Asia, roughly 30% of people have them, compared to roughly one in six Europeans. They are almost non-existent in Africa and East Asia. While the study cannot explain why these particular genes confer a higher risk, the authors conclude, "with respect to the current pandemic, it is clear that gene flow from Neanderthals has tragic consequences." (go.nature.com/36lHwnC)
Mosquitoes cannot transmit COVID-19
A mosquito that bites a person with COVID-19 cannot pass the coronavirus infection to its next victim, according to a study by researchers from U.S. Department of Agriculture and Kansas State University. Mosquitoes are notorious disease carriers, transmitting West Nile virus, Zika, and many other viruses from person to person and among animals. In laboratory experiments, researchers allowed several species of disease-carrying mosquitoes, plus some other biting insects, to feed on blood spiked with the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The virus was unable to survive and replicate itself in any of the insects, they reported in a paper posted on Wednesday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review. "Biting insects do not pose a risk for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans or animals," the researchers said. (bit.ly/3jgeLMw)…. (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Seattle adopts minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers (Geek Wire)
Seattle became the second big city in the nation to establish a minimum wage standard for Uber and Lyft drivers on Tuesday.
The Seattle City Council unanimously voted to adopt new regulations designed to ensure Uber and Lyft drivers earn the city’s $16.39 per hour minimum wage.
The new law requires transportation network companies to pay drivers at least $0.56 per minute when there is a passenger in the vehicle as well as a per-mile rate to cover expenses. The city says that standard will ensure drivers earn at least Seattle’s minimum wage, assuming they spend about 50% of their time waiting for rides or driving to pick up passengers. The minimum compensation standard takes effect on Jan. 1.
The legislation is modeled after a minimum wage standard New York City passed in 2018, though Council Chair Teresa Mosqueda dismissed the connection during the hearing. Seattle hired two researchers who advised New York City officials on their legislation to recommend a minimum wage standard when crafting the ordinance approved Tuesday. Uber and Lyft backed a separate study by Cornell researchers that produced significantly different findings. The competing studies highlight the complexities of establishing a minimum wage for gig workers.
Uber and Lyft have long said New York should serve as a cautionary tale for Seattle. Increased prices and reduced ride activity in New York followed the passage of the legislation. The apps now restrict the number of New York drivers who can work at a time, leading some drivers to sleep in their cars so that they don’t miss a chance to log-on, Vice reports.
“We would ask the city not to pass this legislation and go back to the drawing board and not copycat failed systems from other cities,” said Michael Wolfe, director of the Uber-backed group Drive Forward, during public comment ahead of Tuesday’s hearing… (LINK TO STORY)