BG Reads | News You Need to Know (April 14, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
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BG Podcast EP. 138: Q1 2021 Review with Veronica Briseño, Chief Economic Recovery Officer, City of Austin
On today’s episode we speak with return guest Veronica Briseño, Chief Economic Recovery Officer for the City of Austin.
Veronica and Bingham Group CEO A.J. discuss developments in Q1, including recent efforts by the city and Austin Council including the Economic Recovery and Resiliency Framework (bit.ly/3sbsJ6d), released last month.
You can listen to all episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. New content every Wednesday. Please like, link, comment and subscribe!
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
[THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE]
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (5,537)
LINK TO FILED SENATE BILLS (2,547)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
New coalition pushes back on Austin’s efforts to ‘reimagine public safety’ (KXAN)
On Tuesday, a new coalition came out against the police funding cuts Austin mapped out to “Reimagine Public Safety.”
“We want to launch this coalition so that we can highlight the consequences of failed policies at the city level,” said Save Austin Now co-founder Matt Mackowiak. “It should not be too much to ask that the city put public safety first.”
In a press conference, the new coalition criticized the city’s recent moves to halt cadet classes, cut vacant officer positions and reallocate millions of dollars in funding from the Austin Police Department.
“I support smart efforts to reform and retrain policing, but I do not support policies which make our city less safe,” said former Austin city council member Ora Houston.
The group put blame on the mayor and city council for changes that have left APD with 77 currently-vacant patrol positions.
“We have a city council and a mayor right now that are undermining public safety… proactively, intentionally, unconscionably undermining public safety,” Mackowiak said.
The Austin Police Association said 95 officers in specialized units have already been pulled off their assignments to help fill patrol shortages, and 38 more will do so in early June. That’s when whole units like the DWI unit are set to be disbanded.
“Without a unit dedicated out there looking for drunk drivers, more people are going to die,” said Dennis Farris of the Austin Retired Police Officers Association.
However, Chas Moore, who serves on the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force told KXAN in response, “that’s not something we recommended.”
Moore said when the police budget was reduced, APD chose where to make a lot of the cuts, and that includes the DWI unit.
Moore said the task force, tasked with coming up with suggestions for council is making other recommendations where members feel there’s room to safely redefine public safety.
“It can’t solely belong to the police,” Moore said. “It has to be this huge collective of many different things achieving the same goal.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Homeless camping debate plays out on Austin's beloved Lady Bird Lake hike-and-bike trail (Austin American-Statesman)
Among the locations hit hardest by Austin's homelessness crisis is the Ann and Roy Butler Hike and Bike Trail — the popular 10-mile loop along Lady Bird Lake that was supposed to be protected against the city's explosion of tent encampments.When the Austin City Council approved a controversial measure in June 2019 canceling an ordinance that had made it a criminal offense to camp in public, it came with the explicit understanding that city-owned trails and parkland would remain off-limits.
But it hasn't worked out that way.
Since early 2020, dozens of tents have popped up along or near the trail in violation of the camping ban.
But rather than issue citations or direct tent occupants to move, the city during the COVID-19 pandemic has opted to follow guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that urge letting people who are living in encampments stay where they are to minimize spread of the disease.
Their presence inflamed an already sizzling political divide in the city by tarnishing a trail that has long symbolized the city's bustling outdoors scene the same way Sixth Street has symbolized the city's nightlife. The trail attracts 4.4 million visits a year.
The influx of homeless campers has also happened around the same time the city reduced the amount of time spent cleaning Lady Bird Lake by 75% — a reduction that, combined with the increase in campers, led to trash piling up in the water and along shorelines.
In a 12-month period ending in March, Austin's 311 nonemergency service line received 463 service requests with complaints related to transients on city-owned trails. The requests — which included all trails, not just the one along Lady Bird Lake — involved camping, as well as other potentially unlawful actions, such as trespassing after hours… (LINK TO STORY)
What 3 contenders for Samsung’s $17B chip plant offer (Austin Business Journal)
Samsung’s potential $17 billion chipmaking plant will bring historic investment to whichever city is chosen by the technology giant.
Three U.S. markets — Phoenix, Austin and upstate New York — were identified as potential landing spots for its latest production facility in January, when plans were first reported. Korea, where Samsung Electronics Co. is headquartered, is also being considered.
At stake: one of the largest foreign investments in U.S. history, with the potential of at least 1,800 jobs being created, according to documents filed by Samsung in January in the Austin area. Samsung is expected to make its decision by this summer — and the company could even buy land in Arizona at an auction scheduled for late April — with construction possibly starting later this year and the plant becoming operational by mid-2023.
Samsung reportedly wants to build smaller, three-nanometer chips at its next plant — a new product line for the company — which could be used in electronics, aviation and defense applications. Bloomberg reported in January that this investment could win the company more American clients and better compete with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., otherwise known as TSMC.
And while a new Samsung plant would not do anything to address the current global chip shortage, it aligns with a push by President Joe Biden’s administration to boost domestic semiconductor production.
Samsung employs 20,000 people in the United States, spread among 46 states. It already has a massive factory in Austin, where two fabrication facilities, or fabs, produce semiconductors and employ roughly 3,000 people (plus thousands of contractors). The company does not have any existing facilities in upstate New York but it does have two Samsung Electronics America operations in the New York City area. Samsung does not have any existing facilities in Arizona.
Here’s how the investment would break down: roughly $11.4 billion would go toward equipment and machinery, while construction of the 7-million-square-foot facility would cost about $5.6 billion, according to an incentives application in Texas.
Each of the three states have their own ways of courting major economic development deals, and each has their own pros and cons that could drive Samsung to their market. Samsung identified the following criteria as important: access to talent, existing semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem, speed to market and strong public-private partnerships.
“The single-most important thing inside site selection is understanding the workforce,” said Tom Stringer, New York-based managing director and site selection and incentives service leader for BDO USA LLP. “Everything else — buildings, real estate, taxes, incentives — everything else is a cost to obtain that talent. It’s a balancing act of cost and availability and how you get that workforce. That automatically doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that the most incentives wins. In fact, that is very rare.”
Samsung executives continue to be tight-lipped about the process.
"While we do not have specific plans to build a new fab at this time, we are constantly exploring various opportunities for business development so that we are ready when such opportunities arise. No decision has been made at this time," said Michele Glaze, director of communications at Samsung Austin Semiconductor… (LINK TO STORY)
City’s vaccination task gets harder (Austin Monitor)
Interim Austin-Travis County Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott has been advising City Council members and Travis County commissioners that there was more demand than the city had available vaccine for all the Travis County residents who want to be protected from Covid-19. But as of Monday night, Austin Public Health was offering 14,000 appointments, yet only 3,400 were booked on the site, Escott and APH Director Stephanie Hayden-Howard told Council and commissioners at their weekly Covid briefing Tuesday.
“We’ve reached a plateau …. We have to move into the active model, where we’re providing active outreach” to get people vaccinated, Escott said. At the same time, Travis County has seen a 30 percent increase in the moving average of cases since last week after being flat for a while, he said.
Also Tuesday, Escott extended Health Authority Rules through May 18. That means adults and children over 10 years old must continue to wear masks in appropriate settings.
“As more people become vaccinated in our area, we are able to move to more lenient requirements for those individuals,” Escott explained. “However, we have not yet reached herd immunity in our community. To get there, we need more people to acquire immunity, which is why we encourage people to get the vaccine when it is available to them.”
He noted that only about 54 percent of Travis County residents have been fully or partially vaccinated or have had the disease and are not currently vulnerable. That leaves 46 percent of Travis County, or 600,000 people, still vulnerable to the virus. Health department numbers do not reflect how many people may have been vaccinated outside of Austin Public Health and the relatively new Circuit of the Americas vaccination site set up by Ascension Seton hospital network, CommUnityCare Health Centers, and Travis, Bastrop, Hays and Caldwell counties.
To achieve herd immunity, 67-90 percent of the population must be vaccinated.
Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, who represents Southeast Austin in District 2, was one of several Council members urging Austin Public Health to change its tactics for getting shots into arms.
“We can clearly see that our online scheduling system is not working,” Fuentes said. “A lot of what we are doing is great, but it’s on the individual to come to us. So they have to hear about our Equity Line. They have to go to our online system and … I really would like us to move to a more neighborhood-model approach, where we go into neighborhoods, get off of the online system and reduce the barrier.
“I think the neighborhood approach is absolutely needed,” she continued, “and we owe it to ourselves to really lean into that strategy and we can claim best practices from it.”
In response to questions from Council members, Hayden-Howard said her department has seven contractors doing outreach to inform people about the availability of the vaccine. Some are even going door-to-door, she said… (LINK TO STORY)
Hispanic chief hired to reform suburban Austin police force left it in a culture clash (Austin American-Statesman)
When an Austin suburb wanted a police chief to shake up its male-entrenched culture, it recruited a law enforcement executive from retirement — a diverse hire with a résumé that brimmed with experience and accolades. A year after Jessica Robledo retired as an Austin police assistant chief in 2016, she was leading the Pflugerville Police Department, directed by city leaders to diversify the force and implement more modern policing standards. “I was ready to take on the opportunity,” said Robledo, who is Hispanic and lesbian and took the job in early 2017. “I didn’t see it as a challenge because I knew that my heart and intentions were always going to be in the right place.”
Four years later, Robledo is no longer at the helm, and her former department on the frontier of Austin’s growth has become a cultural policing battleground. In recent months, once-collegial officers have turned on one another, fracturing along lines of whether they embraced Robledo’s reforms or saw her as a caustic, overly aggressive leader. “Everybody was afraid, and there were a lot of lives that had been affected by her regime,” said Kevin Reiff, a former police officer who worked nine years for the Pflugerville police. “She came through like a tornado that not only affected people’s lives, reputations and futures but destroyed them without a second thought.” To outside observers, what happened in the department is emblematic of the struggle to reform policing and ensure officers more clearly identify with communities they serve, moving away from what has historically been a white male dominated career field… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
ERCOT asks Texans to conserve power, but says outages not expected as it nears emergency conditions (Texas Tribune)
The state’s main power grid operator asked Texans to conserve power Tuesday afternoon and into the evening as the electricity grid is barely keeping up with the demand for electricity.
But the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said it does not expect customer outages like those caused in February.
The tight conditions for the grid are being caused by a stalled cold front over Texas, combined with a high number of energy-producing plants being offline for maintenance… (LINK TO STORY)
Pushing spending package, Biden administration gives Texas a C on infrastructure report card (Austin American-Statesman)
Giving Texas a C on an infrastructure report card released Monday, the Biden administration says the state needs upgrades to its roads, bridges, drinking water and broadband internet systems as part of the White House's $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan. The administration released report cards on each of the 50 states as it hopes to rally support for its sprawling plan. Widely embraced by Democrats, the plan faces resistance from Texas GOP lawmakers, according to interviews by the American-Statesman. With no bill yet finalized, the administration's report card did not release specific road or bridge projects that Congress might address — even as members of Congress are pressing their own pet projects on the administration.
Instead, the report card noted that in Texas: More than 19,400 miles of highway and 818 bridges are "in poor condition." Since 2011, commute times have increased 11.4% in Texas and on average each driver pays $709 per year in costs due to driving on roads in need of repair. Those who take public transportation spend an extra 80.8% of their time commuting, and nonwhite households are 2.7 times more likely to commute via public transportation. Twelve percent of trains and other transit vehicles in the state are past useful life. Over the next 20 years, Texas’ drinking water infrastructure will require more than $45 billion in additional funding. More than 12% of Texans live in areas where, by one definition, there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds… (LINK TO STORY)
Dallas Council Candidate Jesse Moreno returns $11,000 in campaign contributions (D Magazine)
Dallas City Council candidate Jesse Moreno recently found himself in an interesting predicament. He is running to represent District 2, an oddly shaped swath of the city that sweeps from Love Field, the Medical District, south of downtown, and into the Cedars and Deep Ellum. From January 1 through March 22, he raised more than $36,000 in contributions, but a D Magazine analysis revealed that nearly a third of the money appeared to come from limited partnerships that were governed by a single person. Election law limits contributions in Dallas municipal races to just $1,000 per individual and certain businesses. When asked last week about the origins of the money, Moreno pointed out—correctly—that everything was aboveboard. This week, though, he has returned all $11,000, saying that he wants to avoid even the whiff of funny business. The episode illustrates an interesting gray area in election law that it appears few local campaigns have taken advantage of, particularly during this cycle.
The contributions, each in the amount of $1,000, were made by 11 limited partnerships all registered to the developer Scott Rohrman, whose purchase of many buildings in Deep Ellum almost a decade ago helped begin the neighborhood’s latest resurgence. Rohrman says each limited partnership has varying interests “in or near” the district and wanted to support Moreno. And that is, without question, legal. The state’s election code allows individuals and certain businesses (e.g., limited partnerships, limited liability corporations) to give to political candidates; the city’s election code limits each to a maximum $1,000. But what happens when one individual controls multiple partnerships? “Is this the sign of someone who’s putting his toe right on the ethical line, or, alternatively, is this the sign of a shrewd businessperson who knows how to get things done?” asked Dallas appellate attorney Chad Ruback, who has experience with election law. He was speaking generally about the situation after hearing a description of it.
“I think two different voters can interpret it two different ways.” Rohrman says even raising that question was enough for him. “We determined that everything is aboveboard, but I did not want anyone questioning my intent,” he said. “The donations have been sent back.”…(LINK TO STORY)
Texas pauses J&J vaccinations as feds plan to review six reports of blood clotting among 6.8 million doses nationwide (Texas Tribune)
State health officials asked Texas vaccine providers to pause their use of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine early Tuesday after U.S. health officials recommended that states temporarily stop distributing the vaccine “out of an abundance of caution.”
The pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine came after a "rare and severe type of blood clot" was reported in six women across the nation after getting the shot. None of the six happened in Texas, state health officials said. About 500,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have been administered in Texas, according to a statement by the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Nearly 7 million people across the U.S. have gotten the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to the Food and Drug Administration… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Biden Administration says it will withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 (NPR)
President Biden will withdraw all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that prompted America's involvement in its longest war, a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday.
Some 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, and as many as 1,000 more special operations forces are also reported to be in the country. There were more than 100,000 at the war's peak in 2011.
The withdrawal will miss a May 1 deadline that the Trump administration had established in a deal last year with the Taliban, which included provisions for peace talks between Afghanistan's government and the Taliban that have since faltered.
The official said Biden had arrived at that determination after a "rigorous" policy review and believes the threat to the U.S. emanating from Afghanistan is at a level that can be addressed without a persistent military footprint in the country. The president is expected make an official announcement on Wednesday… (LINK TO STORY)
Coinbase listing marks latest step in crypto's march to the mainstream (Reuters)
Coinbase Global Inc, the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, will list on the Nasdaq on Wednesday, marking a milestone in the journey of virtual currencies from niche technology to mainstream asset.
The listing is by far the biggest yet of a cryptocurrency company, with the San Francisco-based firm saying last month that private market transactions had valued the company at around $68 billion this year, versus $5.8 billion in September.
It represents the latest breakthrough for acceptance of cryptocurrencies, an asset class that only a few years ago had been shunned by mainstream finance, according to interviews with investors, analysts and executives.
“The listing is significant in that it marks the growth of the industry and its acceptance into mainstream business,” said William Cong, an associate professor of finance at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business.
Bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency, hit a record of over $63,000 on Tuesday. It has more than doubled this year as large investors, banks from Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley and household name companies such as Tesla Inc warm to the emerging asset.
Coinbase’s direct listing - which means it has not sold any shares ahead of its market debut - is likely to accelerate that process, those interviewed by Reuters said, by boosting awareness of digital assets among investors… (LINK TO STORY)