BG Reads | News You Need to Know (May 18, 2021)
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
[THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE]
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (6,225)
LINK TO FILED SENATE BILLS (2,786)
Austin airport sees first year-over-year increase in passengers since pandemic started (KXAN)
For the first time in a year, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport saw an increase in passengers compared to the same month the year before.
735,270 passengers traveled through the airport in March, up 4.9% from March 2020.
While official numbers haven’t been totaled for April or the first half of May, ABIA spokesperson Bryce Dubee said they’re promising.
“We have seen that trend continue upwards, just this last Sunday alone we had 22,000 passengers go through TSA security, which is getting close to almost what would be considered a normal day pre-pandemic,” Dubee said.
There is still a ways to go, though. Dubee said a busy pre-pandemic day typically has more than 30,000 passengers.
While official numbers haven’t been totaled for April or the first half of May, ABIA spokesperson Bryce Dubee said they’re promising.
“We have seen that trend continue upwards, just this last Sunday alone we had 22,000 passengers go through TSA security, which is getting close to almost what would be considered a normal day pre-pandemic,” Dubee said.
There is still a ways to go, though. Dubee said a busy pre-pandemic day typically has more than 30,000 passengers… (LINK TO STORY)
Facebook sees 'immense opportunity' in Austin, company's local leader says (Austin American-Statesman)
As Facebook Austin prepares for an eventual return to the office and end of the coronavirus pandemic, the leader of the company's Austin operations says she sees "immense opportunity" for Facebook to continue to grow in Central Texas.
Despite the pandemic, Katherine Shappley, head of Facebook Austin's office, said the company's Austin team is busier than ever, a trend that will only continue as looks to keep growing and investing here.
Facebook's presence in Central Texas has increased rapidly since it first opened an Austin office in 2010 with just seven employees, a number that climbed to over 125 employees by the end of its first year.
The rapid hiring has continued since. Just six months before the pandemic hit, Facebook had more than 1,200 employees here and was on a hiring spree when it opened a second Austin location, a brand new 256,000-square-foot downtown office space in a building called Third & Shoal, with the capacity for up to 1,500 employees. Austin has grown to be Facebook's fourth-largest hub, with more than 2,000 employees in more than 100 of its teams.
Shappley, head of Facebook's North American Global Business Group, has led the Austin operation since 2016, initially drawn by its work with small and medium-sized businesses. The Facebook Austin office has become something of a microcosm of the company overall, working on everything from technology geared to small businesses to emergency management tools.
"I'd say we are the only site, maybe one of a couple, outside of our headquarters (in Menlo Park, Calif.) that has that kind of organizational diversity, and it just makes us have a really unique dynamic," Shappley said.
It's a dynamic that she said has helped the Austin office navigate challenges ranging from the move to remote work during the pandemic to the company's continued growth in the city.
"It's just been an incredibly exciting time for us over the last 10 years. As I look towards the next 10 years, I'd say the future is incredibly bright for us and Austin," Shappley said. "We've been successful over the last 10 years thanks to hard-working people that call Austin home and, given our presence now, we're really proud to call Austin home for Facebook. We've been doing a lot of hard work, but I'd say we feel incredibly optimistic and hopeful about the future of what Facebook Austin is going to do and continue to do in Austin."… (LINK TO STORY)
City waives permit fees for food charities (Austin Monitor)
Effective immediately, City Council has voted to waive permit fees, fines and other charges for charitable feeding organizations like food banks and soup kitchens that distribute food to vulnerable populations and increase access to healthy foods in the community. The waiver also applies to operational requirements and grease traps for food establishments.
“This would ensure that CFOs won’t be burdened with fees, excessive paperwork or excessive regulations that might keep them from operating,” said Beth Corbett, a spokesperson for Central Texas Food Bank.
The state health department already exempts nonprofit food organizations that distribute food from requiring a permit. The permit fees that were just waived are an Austin Public Health department requirement.
The city defines a charitable feeding organization as a 501(c)(3) food establishment that provides food at no charge. These include food pantries, food banks, soup kitchens, community kitchens and nonprofit food delivery services.
Before the city consented to the fee waivers, most CFOs were regulated in the same manner as commercial food establishments that serve food cooked on the premises. This made it expensive for nonprofits to qualify for the permit; they had to meet the same costly physical requirements of a commercial kitchen, such as self-closing doors, smooth ceiling tiles and grease traps.
“These changes will create a process that has a dual benefit of ensuring public health and safety and also increase community access to the most basic of human needs,” said Lisa Barden, the executive director of Keep Austin Fed.
Stakeholders from the charitable food community and city departments spent several years trying to find sensible solutions that would ensure CFOs can operate safely, Corbett said.
In July 2020, former Mayor Pro Tem Delia Garza and Council Member Kathie Tovo co-sponsored a resolution aimed at protecting food charity resources at a time when the demand for food access was growing due to pandemic-related layoffs. The resolution directed the city manager to convene a working group to develop recommendations. Austin Public Health worked with a number of city departments and the Austin-Travis County Food Policy Board to identify how city regulations, policies and fees could be amended to reduce the barriers to providing healthy food to vulnerable community members.
“The impact of this is going to have long-term positive effects for us because we can just go back to doing the food and security work that we are mission-oriented to provide,” said Aaron DeLaO, director of health initiatives at Foundation Communities… (LINK TO STORY)
UT-Austin's Latino enrollment reflects Hispanic progress, legacy of racism (NBC News)
In a low-key announcement last fall, the University of Texas at Austin declared that it had reached a significant milestone.
UT-Austin, which is in the state with the second-largest number of Latinos nationally, had finally enrolled enough full-time Latino undergraduates to be considered a Hispanic-Serving Institution, or HSI.
UT-Austin’s full-time or equivalent undergraduate population was 26.1 percent Hispanic last fall. The threshold for the federal designation is at least 25 percent, and if it meets other federal criteria, the university can compete for grant money.
"Having the flagship university achieve HSI status is momentous, provided that it’s about equity and not just enrollment," said John Morán González, director of UT-Austin’s Center for Mexican American Studies.
Reaching the milestone is being simultaneously cheered and shrugged off.
UT-Austin turns 128 years old this year, the year Hispanics in Texas are projected to outnumber whites to become Texas’ largest population group.
UT-Austin’s undergraduate population reached the HSI threshold despite the state’s long history of deliberately excluding Mexican Americans from higher education.
However, because the Hispanic share of enrollment is nowhere near the Hispanic proportion of the state’s population overall, the HSI status is a jarring reminder of the opportunity — educational and economic — that Mexican Americans and other Latinos in the state have been denied and how far they have to go to catch up.
"What took them so long?" asked Al Kauffman, a civil rights lawyer who litigated landmark challenges to Texas’ systemic discrimination against Hispanics through its public school and higher education funding.
"The population in public schools" in Texas "now is about 50 percent Latinx, so it’s time, and 25 percent is only halfway there," said Kauffman, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Unemployed Texans will stop getting additional $300-per-week benefit next month after Gov. Greg Abbott opts out of federal program (Texas Tribune)
Jobless Texans will soon lose access to all additional federal unemployment aid — including a $300-per-week supplemental benefit — that was extended as a result of the pandemic after Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday said Texas will opt out of the federal assistance.
Following pressure from business groups, Abbott is withdrawing from the program that allowed Texans to receive a weekly unemployment supplement from the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program. Abbott also cut off another lifeline called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which extended jobless aid to gig workers, self-employed people and others who aren’t traditionally covered by unemployment insurance, the Texas Workforce Commission said. Congress extended those programs through September, but Abbott said they will end for Texans on June 26.
Approximately 344,000 Texans were receiving assistance through the PUA program as of April 30, according to data compiled by economist Julia Coronado, economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin. That number is down from the approximately 563,000 Texans receiving aid through the PUA program to start the year, a sign that Texans have steadily exited the program and returned to work even with the program still in place, Coronado said.
Monday’s decision comes amid a trend of Republican governors announcing plans to cut benefits in order to encourage people to return to work.
According to a press release, Abbott’s office said the decision was made to focus on connecting unemployed Texans with jobs instead of paying them unemployment benefits… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas records zero COVID-19 deaths for first day in over a year (Houston Chronicle)
What was statistically Texas’ best day of the pandemic was followed by a sobering number one day later.
On Sunday, the state’s Department of State Health Services reported its first day without recording a COVID-19 death since March 21, 2020.
The good news was dampened less than 20 hours later, when DSHS reported 23 new COVID deaths Monday — the highest Monday count in nearly two months.
Public health experts said the day-to-day discrepancy is likely due to the method of reporting COVID deaths, which usually requires an autopsy and other steps that can cause gaps between the time of death and when it is actually reported to the state.
“We all want to be on the other side of the pandemic,” said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist. “And it’s OK to feel excitement about changes in mask mandates, or about decreasing case numbers and mortality.
“But it’s important to remember how we got here,” Long continued. “A lot of the benefits we’re seeing now are largely driven by vaccines and compliance” with safety measures such as masking and social distancing.
Still, it’s clear the state has turned a corner: Last week, the state had a record low seven-day positivity rate of 3.9 percent, and cases and hospitalizations were at their lowest marks since last summer… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
DHS Division failed to analyze intelligence ahead of Capitol violence (NPR)
For months, officials have been saying the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was the result of a classic intelligence failure. Now key officials are questioning whether that was the case.
A report written by the former head of intelligence at the New York Police Department, Mitch Silber, and titled Domestic Violent Extremism and the Intelligence Challenge, makes clear that officials at the FBI, DHS, and other agencies had collected plenty of intelligence leading up to the insurrection at the Capitol. What they failed to do was analyze it.
"Intelligence collection did not fail," Silber writes in an analysis for the Atlantic Council obtained by NPR before its publication next week. "In fact, it was robust. Rather, the failure was in the analysis of the intelligence and the failure of senior government officials to issue warnings based on that intelligence."
That could explain why a little-known division of DHS called the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, or I&A, is now receiving so much attention. In addition to the upcoming report, the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is devoting a hearing on May 18 to I&A and it will focus on what the intelligence division was doing in the run-up to the Capitol attack.
"[I&A's] job is to create these threat assessments so that its consumers have a better sense of how to deploy resources, how to think about what a threat may be," said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at DHS. "It basically was intended to be a consumer of intelligence." Their next job is to analyze that intelligence and pass that along to local law enforcement.
A key part of I&A's job is to provide a written analysis of possible threats to public events before they happen. These threat assessments aren't just done for gatherings that have potential for violence — like the Unite the Right march that happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Instead, these assessments are produced as a matter of course, even for events like the Kentucky Derby or the New Orleans Jazz Fest.
But as NPR has previously reported, the threat assessment that would have put everyone on notice ahead of the Capitol insurrection never came; even though the FBI, DHS, and the New York Police Department, among others, all had the information they needed to see that the pro-Trump rally ahead of the election certification would likely erupt in violence.
"When we think about an intelligence agency, they have three functions. Collect the intelligence, analyze the intelligence...connect the dots. Then you warn the appropriate authorities so they can take some actions to mitigate what you think is coming," Silber told NPR in an interview. "And if you look at number two and number three, analysis and warning, it is a clear failure from DHS." Former DHS officials and intelligence analysts interviewed by NPR make plain that anyone looking for what went wrong ahead of Jan. 6, should start with I&A.
t turns out that, despite its critical role in identifying threats here at home, I&A is fraught with issues.
First, officials told NPR that I&A is full of people from other departments and working there is not seen as a plum assignment.
"If you're a 23-year-old and you want to get into the intelligence business, the fun stuff — you are not picking DHS. And that has been a struggle for the department from the beginning," said Kayyem. "Within the intelligence agencies, I&A was not an equal partner. It might not even have been viewed as a cousin. It was a distant friend that you tolerated who showed up to the party."
Analysts said leadership has also had a role in the failures at I&A. As a general matter, the administration in power sets the priorities for the agency. Radicalized youth potentially intent on attacking the homeland, for example, was a big priority during the Obama administration as ISIS began to recruit in the U.S. and in the wake of the Paris attacks in 2015… (LINK TO STORY)
Trump signals he's ready to get back in the game (The Hill)
An emboldened former President Trump is preparing to become more active as he looks to boost GOP allies while mulling a new run for the White House.
Trump is expected to hit the road soon resuming his signature rallies, which will put him more in the public eye and create questions for television networks about coverage.
He’s also set to hold his first fundraiser for his new super PAC at a time when his control over the GOP was augmented after House Republicans voted to dump Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from their leadership team over her repeated criticism of the former president’s false claims about his loss in the 2020 election.
“I think he feels good. I think he feels vindicated,” said one Trump ally, who said the developments make it more likely that Trump will be “aggressively on the playing field” stumping for GOP candidates in the coming months ahead of 2022.
Even GOP critics of Trump acknowledge that what happened to Cheney underscores the former president’s clout.
“That is a reflection of where the membership is and ultimately where the voters are. The Republican conference is a pretty accurate reflection of where the Republican base is,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye, who has criticized Trump in the past.
Heye described the GOP as “Trump’s party, with some divisions.”
Trump has spent most of his time since leaving the White House at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where Republican leaders regularly travel to meet with him, though he recently relocated to his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
With the exception of a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and interviews with conservative media, Trump has remained largely out of public view and without his social media accounts to speak directly with his supporters.
Trump regularly blasts out email statements from his blog, something that is happening with increasing frequency.
The former president is eyeing rallies in June and July, an adviser confirmed, though no official announcements have been made. The New York Post first reported that two events were expected to take place in June and one in July.
Trump will also speak at the North Carolina GOP’s convention on June 5, a state with a competitive Senate race on the ballot next year… (LINK TO STORY)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
BG Podcast EP. 139: Q1 20201 Review: COVID-19's Impact on the Built Environment with Michael Hsu
On today’s episode we speak with return guest, Austin-based Michael Hsu, Principal and Founder of Michael Hsu Office of Architecture.
He and Bingham Group CEO A.J. catch up from their June 2020 show, updating on impacts to the design/built environment sector through Q1 2021.
You can listen to all episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. New content every Wednesday. Please like, link, comment and subscribe!