BG Reads | News You Need to Know (September 14, 2021)
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
Work Session of the Austin Council (9.28.2021 at 9AM)
Regular Meeting of the Austin City Council (9.30.2021 at 10AM)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Legal battle looms over Austin airport’s plans to demolish South Terminal (KUT)
The private company that runs the South Terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport – a separate three-gate facility where discount airlines Allegiant and Frontier operate – says it was not consulted over plans to demolish the terminal as part of a multiyear airport-expansion program.
Lonestar Holdings is moving ahead as if the terminal will remain and is even planning to spend nearly $1 million to accommodate Allegiant’s move to create a base of operations in Austin.
Both sides are bracing for a legal battle.
“No communication and then out of the blue,” is how Lonestar Airport Holdings CEO Jeff Pearse said he found out about plans to raze the structure that handled almost 1 million passengers annually before the pandemic slashed that to around 300,000.
“It was a bit insulting, honestly, particularly when I found out a few moments later that they had reached out to my two tenants, Allegiant and Frontier, prior,” Pearse said.
Austin airport officials declined to be interviewed about the conflict due to “anticipated litigation,” but issued a statement saying Lonestar “recently notified the city of Austin that it is not interested in participating in a structured negotiation process.”
“The Department of Aviation plans to transition the carriers that currently use the South Terminal to the Barbara Jordan Terminal in the coming years,” the statement said. “This is in support of a larger program that will allow AUS to create the infrastructure needed to support our growing community and our airline partners as they continue to invest in Austin.”
Airport officials have said Allegiant and Frontier airlines could continue to operate at the airport.
“AUS has given Allegiant assurances that we will work together on a transition plan and strategy to accommodate our future growth,” Allegiant spokesperson Sonya Padgett said in an email.
In July, an internal memo from Aviation Department CEO Jacqueline Yaft to the mayor and City Council said the decision to close the South Terminal was based on the advice of “independent consultants” and would take place within about two years.
KUT filed a public information request seeking a copy of the 40-year lease agreement (30 years plus two optional five-year extensions) between the city and Lonestar Holdings, along with communication records between them about discussions around the terminal’s future. The city contends it does not have to release the documents and has asked the Texas attorney general to support it.
A copy of the lease agreement viewed by KUT includes a provision for the airport to grant the “exclusive first right” to develop and operate any expansion of the facility. Lonestar could argue it should have been consulted under this provision.
The new concourse that airport officials hope will replace the South Terminal would be accessible by underground tunnel from the Barbara Jordan Terminal. The concourse would have at least 10 gates.
Members of the Airport Advisory Commission, who are appointed by City Council, have asked for clarification about the airport’s plans.
“There are thousands of (airport) employees and people who don’t know really what’s happening,” Commissioner Wendy Price Todd said at the group’s last meeting. “We’ve been asking for briefings all along.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
U.S. census data shows Hays County is fastest-growing county in nation (Community Impact)
Of the fastest-growing U.S. counties with a population of 100,000 or more, Hays County took the top spot nationally with 53% growth from 2010-20 according to U.S. census data.
The county grew by 83,960 residents in the decade to 241,067 in 2020.
The data reflects the trend in growth throughout the Austin-San Antonio corridor, with neighboring Comal County growing nearly 49% over the same period, up from 108,472 residents in 2010 to 161,501 in 2020. Austin and San Antonio are two of 14 cities nationally that grew by more than 100,000 residents over the decade.
Of the cities in Hays County along I-35, Buda grew from 7,295 residents in 2010 to 15,108; Kyle grew from 28,016 to 45,697; and San Marcos grew from 44,894 residents in 2010 to 67,553.Hays County bucks a national trend in which 52% of counties saw population decline over the last decade.
Estimated figures showed a decrease in the population identifying as non-Hispanic white alone, though that population remains a slight majority, down from 58.6% to 52.5%. The population identifying as Hispanic grew by about 5 points, from 35.3% in 2010 to 40.1%. Those identifying as Black or African American ticked up to 4.6% from 3.2%. The Asian population grew from 1.1% to 1.7%… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Shoal Creek/Third Street redesign aims to create greener, safer spaces downtown (Austin Monitor)
The Urban Transportation Commission’s hefty meeting agenda on Sept. 7 included a proposal to significantly redesign the heavily trafficked area of downtown surrounding the intersection of Third Street and Shoal Creek Trail.
The Cypress and Shoal Creek Public Space Strategy, a joint effort between the Downtown Austin Alliance, Shoal Creek Conservancy and the city of Austin, seeks to resolve the chaotic convergence of pedestrian, cyclist and vehicular traffic. The project consists of several new concepts for plazas, underpasses, bikeways and other connecting features designed to connect the popular downtown area to the surrounding urban trail network.
“The project is in an area of downtown where we have devoted a lot of public dollars to creating important community resources that are meant to serve a citywide audience … (such as) the new Central Library, the Seaholm Development District and Butler Hike and Bike Trail,” said Parks and Recreation Board Member Nina Rinaldi. The project was developed with the idea that these investments are essential resources that should be easily accessible to all ages, ability levels and modes of transport.
The new design would involve closing Power Plant Drive to vehicle traffic and creating a series of pedestrian-only plazas along Third Street that would eventually extend past Shoal Creek Trail to the rest of downtown. These plazas would serve to alleviate safety hazards caused by overlapping car, foot and bike traffic; better connect the disjointed Seaholm development; and “activate public space” for the surrounding community.
The plan also calls for renovating outdated structures like the railroad trestle at Third Street and Shoal Creek, which has been abandoned since the 1990s. This concept involves widening the pedestrian bridge over the creek and transforming the trestle into a pedestrian-only walkway that would relieve traffic congestion and allow for a more comfortable coexistence between walkers and cyclists.
Along with plazas and bridges, the project outlines new Shoal Creek trail connections at its intersections with Third Street and Rio Grande. These new access points are designed to make this section of the hike-and-bike trail easily navigable by visitors of all ages and ability levels, as well as provide opportunities for streambank restoration.
While most of its designs have been developed to accommodate growing needs over the past few years, the Cypress and Shoal Creek project also includes plans for a Bowie Street underpass, which has been repeatedly proposed and derailed since the creation of the Seaholm Master Plan in 2001.
The underpass, which would connect walkers and bikers from the Pfluger pedestrian bridge to West Third Street, has been plagued by its intersection with the Union Pacific Railroad and its $8.6 million price tag. The most recent negotiations with Union Pacific came to an abrupt halt this summer, when Austin’s Economic Development Department conceded that the railroad giant’s inflexible terms had rendered the project unfeasible.
Given this development, Rinaldi admitted the team may have to consider “alternative strategies” to complete their vision of connecting these disparate parts of downtown. Still, they are optimistic about the proposal’s other goals. With each of the seven projects’ price tags ranging from $3.5 million to $9 million, the estimated cost of the completed design adds up to the substantial sum of $43 million, an amount that’s within the total funds available in the Seaholm Tax Increment Finance District, which exists in part to finance improvements to the area’s public spaces.
While the proposal was warmly received by the commission, it will ultimately take an amendment to the Seaholm TIF plan via City Council vote to receive the necessary funding and move forward… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Here's every property that would lose land to TxDOT's I-35 expansion in Central Austin (KUT)
The state's plans to expand Interstate 35, the busiest roadway in Austin and one of the most congested in Texas, would require expropriating land from almost 200 properties, according to a KUT analysis of schematic maps produced by the Texas Department of Transportation. Some property owners would cede a few square feet. Other tracts would be virtually wiped off the map.
TxDOT had already revealed that its top two options for the I-35 Capital Express Project — the name given to an overhaul of the highway between U.S. 290 East and Ben White Boulevard — would displace at least 140 properties. The state agency did not provide a list of each property affected, only maps in the form of large PDF files that require extensive zooming and scrolling to read.
KUT examined maps from TxDOT's two leading options tract-by-tract. We created our own interactive map below showing each instance in which the right-of-way, a term to describe land where roads are built, would encroach into private property. For each property, we posted two screenshots to show how each of the leading "Build Alternatives" under consideration by TxDOT would incur on tracts of land… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Nearly 2 million people in Texas are overdue for a second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine (Texas Tribune)
When vaccines were first rolled out last year in Texas, Syed Raza received an unusual text message from a fellow doctor practicing in the Houston area.
The doctor had just received his first dose of the coronavirus vaccine and was scheduled to get his second shot later that month, but he was texting Raza to note he had been reading on the internet that he had “enough protection from the first dose” and didn’t need to get the second dose.
“I’m not sure what ‘stuff’ he was reading, but it was inaccurate. It doesn’t matter if people are fully trained physicians or have no training in science, it seems that we are all able to be fooled by these ruses,” said Raza, the vice president of medical operations at St. Luke’s Health in Houston, who is responsible for all aspects of isolating, treating and stabilizing patients with COVID-19 at two area hospitals.
“This is science. Vaccines work, and they work much more effectively if people get both doses,” he added. “Using emotions, or opinions people get off of nonreputable sources, is not helping.”
But a large number of Texans apparently have decided to stick with one dose of the two-dose Moderna or Pfizer vaccines: 1.89 million have missed their second dose as of Sept. 6, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. More than 1 million of them are more than 90 days overdue for their second dose.
That means that of those who received a first dose, 11% haven’t gotten their second shot within the recommended time frame.
“Those numbers [confirm] a lot of what we have been seeing. We knew it,” said Dr. James McDeavitt, the executive vice president and dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine. “It's problematic. It always has been, but it’s even more problematic with the delta variant.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Why Democrats are losing Texas Latinos (Texas Monthly)
South Texas lately has become an object of political fascination for pundits, some of whom have not taken the time to understand even the most basic facts about the region. Until recently, officials from McAllen typically found themselves on the national radar only when they welcomed visiting national politicians. But Villalobos’s win—albeit in a race in which his party affiliation did not appear alongside his name on the ballot and fewer than 10,000 of the city’s 73,000 registered voters went to the polls—was noteworthy for one reason. It seemed to confirm what Democrats had spent the past seven months denying: they have a deep problem in South Texas—and therefore in statewide races as well.
Last year, McAllen experienced the biggest shift in party vote share, toward Donald Trump, of any large city in the country save for Laredo, 150 miles to the northwest. In both border towns, Trump improved on his 2016 results by more than 23 points. Many predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods in Texas’s major cities, such as San Antonio’s Prospect Hill, also experienced double-digit shifts toward the incumbent president, though they ultimately stayed Democratic. But no area fled further into the GOP camp than South Texas, where 18 percent of the state’s Hispanic population lives. In Starr County, just upriver from McAllen, Republicans increased their turnout by almost 300 percent between 2016 and 2020. While Hillary Clinton won there by sixty points, Joe Biden barely scraped out a five-point victory.
In Webb County, home of Laredo, Trump cut his 2016 margin of defeat by more than half. And in Zapata County, which didn’t even have a local Republican party, Trump became the first GOP presidential candidate to win since Warren G. Harding was on the ballot a century ago. This shift has shattered years of political assumption—and perhaps arrogance.
Democrats ranging from Barack Obama’s Latino outreach coordinator, Cuauhtémoc Figueroa, to former San Antonio mayor and presidential candidate Julián Castro had long maintained that Hispanic voters would be the party’s salvation in the Lone Star State. Their logic was syllogistic. In the early 2020s, according to the state demographer’s projections, Texas’s Hispanic population would achieve plurality status, constituting around 41 percent of the state’s total and surpassing non-Hispanic white Texans as its largest demographic group. And most Hispanic Texans—more than 60 percent in 2016—voted Democratic. Banking on an identity-based appeal, Democrats last year trotted out the sort of bilingual messaging in South Texas that has played well among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and Puerto Ricans in New York, focused on a celebration of diversity and immigration.
Republicans, by contrast, recognized that Hispanic South Texans share many of the same values as non-Hispanic white voters elsewhere in Texas and swept in with a pitch about defending gun rights, promoting the oil and gas industry, restricting abortion, and supporting law enforcement. Republicans proved more persuasive… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
White House welcomes fight with GOP governors over vaccine mandates (The Hill)
Republican governors have emerged as one of the most consistent foils to President Biden during his eight months in office, with a brewing fight over coronavirus vaccine mandates shaping up to be the next battleground.
Biden has seemingly embraced the clash with GOP state leaders, vowing to use executive powers to sidestep their opposition to mask and vaccine requirements in his efforts to get the pandemic under control.
After Biden last week unveiled a slew of new measures and rules to compel workers and federal employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19, several GOP governors vowed to fight the mandates in court or with orders of their own.
But the White House, which has not shied away from sparring with the likes of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over orders blocking mask mandates in schools, believes it has the public’s support on the issue of vaccine requirements.
“I think [Biden] has played this just right,” said Jesse Lee, a senior adviser for communications at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress. “I think he and the American people have actually been aligned that it was the right thing to do to encourage people in a positive manner to get vaccinated until you couldn’t reach many people that way. Then you have to take a harder line.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)