BG Reads | News You Need to Know (July 20, 2021)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
City says two sites could serve as temporary encampments for homeless Austinites (KUT)
Austin has found two city-owned sites that could serve as camps for people living outdoors. One of the potential campsites is on Manor Road in East Austin and the other is on Convict Hill Road in South Austin, according to a memo released Monday.
The memo, posted initially on a city website shortly before 5 p.m., was removed shortly after posting and then republished. A city spokesperson said it was not supposed to be published until Tuesday morning.
The city has been scrambling to find housing for Austinites experiencing homelessness since voters reinstated the city’s ban on public encampments in May. These temporary camps would be fenced and have staff on site 24 hours a day.
The memo said the sites were initially intended to host affordable housing. Both would need to be rezoned and would require city permitting changes, it said. The sites also could host prefabricated shelters.
The memo said city staffers would hold community meetings and provide surveys for the public to offer feedback if given the OK from Austin City Council. Council will get a briefing about the sites on July 27… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin likely to revert to Stage 4 COVID guidelines as cases and hospitalizations continue to rise, officials say (Austin American-Statesman)
Hospitalizations and cases of coronavirus are continuing to rise, and on Monday night reached levels that are likely to send Travis County back into the stricter Stage 4 of Austin Public Health's risk-based guidelines, according to Austin Public Health officials.
Austin and Travis County on Monday night reached the threshold to enter Stage 4, which is when the seven-day average for new daily hospital admissions is between 30 and 49. The average as of Monday was 30, according to the city's dashboard.
Austin Public Health's guidelines — ranging from the lowest threat of coronavirus spread at Stage 1 to the highest at Stage 5 — have been used for about a year to help residents understand the level of coronavirus risk to the community, while offering guidelines they should follow to avoid transmitting or contracting the disease.
In addition to the average number of new admissions, Austin-area health leaders also keep a close eye on the seven-day average for new daily confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. As of Monday night, the average was 159, compared to just 33 at the start of July.
Under Stage 4, Austin Public Health would recommend fully vaccinated people again wear masks while gathering in groups both indoors and outdoors and also while shopping, dining or traveling. Unvaccinated or partially vaccinated residents should no longer gather in groups at all and only shop, dine and travel as essential.
Business owners under Stage 4 can still decide whether or not to require customers to wear masks. Dr. Desmar Walkes, Austin-Travis County health authority, on Friday said she had no immediate plans to attempt to reinstate the previous mask mandate that required businesses to have a masks-on policy… (LINK TO STORY)
EMS leader recounts medics’ harrowing week during freeze (Austin Monitor)
First responders are still in recovery mode as they plan for the next severe weather event, such as the freeze that gripped Austin in mid-February, and any other unforeseen disaster that may occur.
“Our medics’ stories should be heard,” Austin EMS Association President Selena Xie told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Monday, providing members with a grimmer look at the challenges medics faced during Winter Storm Uri.
When temperatures dipped below freezing and power outages struck homes and businesses, call volumes increased dramatically, with the number of calls in one day triple the number received on the same day a year ago, increasing from 500 calls on Feb. 15, 2020, to 1,500 calls on the same day this year.
“At about 500 calls – that’s a pretty heavy call volume for us anyway, so for it to triple is basically unthinkable,” Xie said. “We had never seen anything like it. We had never had calls holding and we saw that quite a bit. The calls we were receiving were related to people being stranded, medical complications from losing power, and a lot of people were simply at their limit from being cold, even without having a medical emergency.”
After the storm, the association sent out a survey soliciting feedback from medics. The survey asked for personal stories, recommendations for planning for the future, and what the medics saw as the department’s strengths and weaknesses.
“It was very, very, challenging for our first responders to access patients as they tried to navigate icy roads, particularly roads with inclines. We had quite a few (ambulances) go into the ditches … because they had no idea where the road actually was,” Xie said.
One key takeaway was the medics’ realization of the staggering number of people who rely on electricity to survive, Xie continued. “We learned we had such a large medically vulnerable population in Austin that have oxygen, dialysis, methadone, and other power needs to keep them healthy and to stay outside of the hospital system.”
And hospitals aren’t immune to severe weather events either. Xie said some hospital emergency rooms started turning ambulances away, including one hospital that relies on water pressure to heat the building. “When the water pressure dropped, they actually closed (their doors) to us,” she said.
EMS also lost power and water to critical infrastructure. “We absolutely had medics who were going to the bathroom and using the kitty litter that firefighters have to put on top (of the waste). We know we’re supposed to have generators at a lot of our EMS/fire stations and those failed. And so, for us, what that meant is we couldn’t charge our radios, we couldn’t charge our monitor batteries (which) are probably the ones that provide the most important thing, which is to defibrillate patients, and that was very, very challenging to overcome.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin has a housing affordability problem. Would updating land use rules make a difference? (Austin American-Statesman)
Although city leaders are being pressed to address the issue, a number of forces driving the increased costs are beyond their control, they say. Austin's place as a major tech hub and reputation for quality of life continues to fuel rapid population growth, attracting newcomers with a lot of money to spend in the housing mark.
Short of placing a ban on Tex-Mex food or cementing over Lady Bird Lake, Austin is primed to continue to lure large corporations and the high earners they employ.
But there are things that can be done, the most controversial of which is reviving the contentious fight to update the city's land use rules to allow for the development of more housing units. An earlier effort ended up in a courtroom with the city coming out on the losing end against preservationists who pushed back against the intrusion of multifamily homes in their neighborhoods. The ruling, from March 2020, is on appeal.
The last comprehensive rewrite to land use rules was completed in 1984, when the city's needs were much different from what they are today. The population was under 400,000; it's now about 1 million. Google and Facebook had not yet arrived in town, or, for that matter, on the internet. Three current members of the Austin City Council had not been born, and a fourth was born that year.
The council is likely to revisit the rules in the months ahead, according to numerous council members. It would be a larger splash after they dipped their toes into the water earlier in the year in passing ordinances to increase density along major transit lines and to revise the fee structure in a program that allows downtown developers to exceed normal building height restrictions in exchange for contributing to affordable housing. The proposed budget from City Manager Spencer Cronk for the upcoming fiscal year includes $79 million earmarked to provide more affordable housing options… (LINK TO STORY)
Save Austin Now PAC submits more than 25,600 signatures in #MakeAustinSafe initiative (KVUE)
On Monday, the Save Austin Now PAC announced that it has officially submitted more than 25,600 "self-validated" signatures in its #MakeAustinSafe initiative.
The petition drive kicked off on May 26 and was completed about 55 days later.
The ordinance the group is aiming to get on the next ballot would:
Ensure adequate police staffing: "Requires a minimum of two police officers per 1,000 population, a nationally recognized standard for safe cities, combined with a minimum of 35% community response time (or uncommitted time)."
Double police training: "Requires an additional 40 hours of post-cadet class training hours per year, making Austin the national model for police training."
Enact police reform: "Includes provisions to boost minority hiring (through foreign language proficiency), ensure racially diverse community policing, and provides retention bonuses for officers without police complaints (Good Conduct Medal eligible officers)."
Co-founders Matt Mackowiak and Cleo Petricek on Monday released the following joint statement after submission:
“We are thrilled to ensure our ballot position for the Nov. 2, 2021, election. To everyone who has supported this effort by signing our petition, collecting signed petitions, volunteering, donating and sharing our content, we are deeply grateful. Austin has never been less safe than it is today and the police staffing crisis continues to worsen. In just 107 days, Austin will become the first major city to overturn defund the police through a citizen vote. Our city supports law enforcement, even if City Hall does not. Our message to Steve Adler and Greg Casar is this: November is coming.”
To learn more about the political action committee, click here… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Sixth Texas Democrat in DC tests positive for COVID, and boycott isn’t going quite as planned (Dallas Morning News)
With COVID-19 hitting more than 10% of the Texas Democrats who fled Austin to stymie a GOP elections bill, the runaways spent Monday strategizing ways to prod Congress for new voting rights protections without being able to lobby in person. A sixth member of the Texas House tested positive on Monday, according to state Rep. Rhetta Bowers of Dallas, adding that she and others have brought food to those quarantining in their rooms. “It definitely is not stopping our work,” she said. “We’re just having to be a whole lot more careful.” At the White House a few blocks from their hotel hideaway, press secretary Jen Psaki shrugged aside concerns that Vice President Kamala Harris could have caught the coronavirus from the Texans, or may now be putting President Joe Biden at risk. Harris spent an hour with them last Tuesday, three days before one lawmaker developed cold-like symptoms and then tested positive.
“There haven’t been additional precautions taken,” Psaki said after noting that Harris has since tested negative, and insisting that her visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Sunday was routine and previously scheduled. But with six of the 55 fugitives testing positive since Friday, the Texans’ hopes of meeting with Biden this week dimmed substantially. The outbreak upended their plans to return to the U.S. Capitol for more lobbying. Democrats nationwide are clamoring for federal voting rights legislation to tamp down restrictions emerging from Austin and other GOP-controlled state capitals in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat. To pass the time and keep up interest in their cause, the Texans held a hybrid seminar on Monday with guest speakers and most of the lawmakers attending via Zoom. A screen showed 20 or so scattered around a ballroom at the Washington Plaza hotel – no more than three per table, each stocked with a bottle of hand sanitizer. “Everybody is talking about you, talking about what you are doing. I hope you can stay out of Texas as long as you can, until the governor and the other Republicans in Texas come to their senses,” Dolores Huerta, 91, an icon of the labor movement who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chavez, said by video, the sound of a cat’s meows punctuating her comments. “You Texas Democrats are the soldiers that are fighting for everybody.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas restaurant workers are in short supply—and that gives them new leverage (Texas Monthly)
“Sadly, due to government handouts, no one wants to work anymore. Therefore, we are short staffed,” reads a table placard at Corralito Steak House in El Paso. At the Oasis, a restaurant on Lake Travis in Austin, a sign greeting diners reads: “We are short staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. No one wants to work anymore.” A similar sign was spotted at a Chicken Express drive-through in Fort Worth. As the COVID-19 pandemic eases and diners eagerly return to restaurants that had laid off many employees, those businesses are finding themselves short on workers. This is a national phenomenon, but given the rapid growth of Texas’s population and economy, the crunch is especially evident here.
Owners are blaming the shortage on a variety of factors, often embracing the much-challenged theory that workers prefer to stay on unemployment insurance rather than return to work. But workers we interviewed say it isn’t the unemployment checks that are keeping them from returning to work as servers and cooks—it’s the demanding, low-paid, and often benefit-free nature of the jobs. As economic growth accelerates in Texas, those workers face more attractive opportunities in other industries than they did before the pandemic. And by their account, most restaurant owners prefer to blame government handouts or employee laziness rather than behave like rational capitalists and compete for talent.
An April 2021 survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association showed 91 percent of Texas eatery operators “currently have job openings that are difficult to fill,” while 84 percent of operators nationwide have lower staffing levels now than before the pandemic. In May, a group of 38 Texas business organizations, including the Texas Restaurant Association and nearly two dozen chambers of commerce, wrote a letter asking Governor Greg Abbott to end the $300 monthly unemployment supplement that workers received as part of federal COVID-19 relief. The extra funds, they wrote, posed “a major barrier to fill [sic] their job openings.”
Abbott agreed and granted their wish. Citing “voluminous jobs,” with restaurant roles given as an example, the statement accompanying his decision boasted of the booming Texas economy and copious high-paying job opportunities. As of June 26, unemployed Texans no longer received the supplemental benefits. (The undocumented workers who make up 8.4 percent of the state’s workforce were never eligible to receive them to begin with.) What remains to be seen is whether this move, accompanied by the resumption of residential evictions at the end of July, is enough to push workers to fill low-paid jobs in restaurants, or whether they will find better prospects in other industries. There is much that eateries could do to bring back experienced workers and lure new staff. First, in the words of President Joe Biden, businesses could, of course, “pay them more.” Workers have additional ideas in the wake of a pandemic during which, as pastry chef Austin Walton says, many employers “essentially left us out to dry.”… (LINK TO STORY)
How Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin changed the small West Texas town of Van Horn (Houston Chronicle)
For most, Van Horn is a stop along Interstate 10 — an ideal spot to rest and refuel in the outer reaches of West Texas. It’s easy for interstate travelers to miss the odd silver feathers hanging inside restaurants. Or to overlook the red-and-blue rocket mailbox on Broadway Street. “They say, ‘Well, what’s going on?’” said Lisa Cottrell, who has spent most of her life in Van Horn. “And so when you start to tell them, they look at you almost like you’re crazy.” She doesn’t blame them. The locals didn’t know what to think when Jeff Bezos first announced he would use their community to launch people into space with his company, Blue Origin. That was 16 years ago, a date many Van Horn residents struggle to recall. It almost feels like Blue Origin has always been a neighbor — a quiet, private neighbor until recently, when the world’s richest man announced he was going into space.
Bezos, his brother, an 82-year-old female aerospace pioneer and the 18-year-old son of a Netherlands investment firm CEO will take an 11-minute ride into space on July 20. They will be the first people to experience Blue Origin’s suborbital rocket system. It’s a big thing for a small town. R
Rooms in the hotels and motels are booked. Journalists are descending. The quiet community is the center of global attention. The company’s logo, a feather, is painted on the rocket as a symbol. To Blue Origin, the feather represents freedom, perfect flight design and gentle landings. But around Van Horn, the feather hints at the various ways a billionaire and his space company have impacted the community. “Our team started handing these out to town establishments that Blue Origin heavily relies on,” a company spokesperson said. Blue Origin has brought money into Van Horn, with its workers eating at local restaurants and buying houses. Some of its employees are becoming involved in the school and local museum. But new demographics aren't always good. This town, like a thousand other rural communities, has seen agriculture diminish and infrastructure deteriorate. Its local improvements often depend on grants. And with Blue Origin’s higher-paid workforce, the town no longer qualifies for citywide grants reserved for low- to moderate-income communities. Residents talk about about the tight housing market and problem-plagued water system… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Montana boomtown jumps to No. 1 on WSJ/Realtor.com housing market Index (Wall Street Journal)
Billings, Mont., is the new No. 1 on The Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com Emerging Housing Markets Index, boosted by its affordability and appeal to remote workers.
The index reflects how the housing boom has ignited homebuying activity in smaller to midsize cities around the U.S. The top 20 cities in the ranking have an average population size of just over 300,000.
In the latest index rankings published on Tuesday, smaller cities dominate. The No. 2 metro area is Coeur d’Alene, the lakeside Idaho city that held the top position when the index premiered in April. Fort Wayne, Ind., Rapid City, S.D., and Raleigh, N.C., round out the top 5.
The index identifies the top metro areas for home buyers seeking an appreciating housing market and appealing lifestyle amenities. This quarter’s version added the new criteria of real-estate taxes, which caused some areas in the Northeast, Midwest and Texas with higher property taxes to fall in the rankings… (LINK TO STORY)
‘It’s ceding a lot of terrain to us’: Biden goes populist with little pushback (Politico)
When President Joe Biden unveiled a series of sweeping executive orders to combat monopoly power, the response from Republicans was notable — because there was barely one at all. Not long ago, a Democratic administration taking unilateral action to rein in corporations on everything from non-compete agreements to prescription drug affordability would have engendered fury from elected conservatives. Yet over the last week, few Republicans were warning that Biden’s actions would severely kneecap business or slow the economic recovery. And inside the White House, the relative silence was not just noticed but seen as vindication. “If you're against competition, then what are you for?” said Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council. “Big business charging people whatever they want. You’re for businesses being able to offer workers low wages because there's no other competitor in town to offer something better. I mean, it's very hard to be against competition.”
The right’s muted response to Biden’s orders underscores the remarkable ideological shift that’s occurring in Washington, D.C. A Republican Party once closely allied with corporate America finds itself increasingly less so in the Donald Trump era. Indeed, in the aftermath of Biden’s orders, even officials in Trump’s orbit were saying the politics were smart. “Both [Biden and Trump] have elements in their constituencies that want this, and, by the way, they’re on solid ground with the rest of America,” said a Trump adviser. “America has a love-hate relationship with these companies.” But, so far, much of the GOP’s newfound economic populism has been delivered in words rather than action. And that’s given Democrats space to pursue an agenda that, even just five years ago, likely would have sparked massive blowback. “People will understand who's on their side and who's not,” said Cedric Richmond, a senior White House adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement. “There will be Democrats who are on the side of working families, and not Republicans. For them, I think it's a terrible mistake.” The executive order Biden issued earlier this month included 72 initiatives in all. Among the most consequential were his moves calling for greater scrutiny of tech acquisitions, bolstering competition for generic drug makers and importers from Canada, allowing hearing aids to be sold over the counter, standardizing plans for health care shoppers trying to compare insurance options, and protecting certain meat-packing workers from what are seen as artificially low wages… (LINK TO STORY)