BG Reads | News You Need to Know (December 28, 2021)
Downtown Austin
[BINGHAM GROUP]
The BG Podcast is back! EP. 148 features Jose "Chito" Vela III a candidate for Austin's Council District 4.
The immigration and defense attorney declared in early November, following Council Member Greg Casar announcing his candidacy for Congress (triggering an automatic resignation).
Bingham Group CEO A.J. and Associate Wendy Rodriguez discuss Chito's campaign and what he hopes to achieve if elected.
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Gómez: Longest-serving commissioner finding new ways of doing business (Austin Monitor)
With new members on the court this past year, Travis County Commissioner Margaret Gómez has been rethinking the court’s longtime processes. (Ann Howard, who represents Precinct 3, assumed office at the start of 2021, while County Judge Andy Brown assumed office in late 2020.)
Gómez, who was elected in 1994 and is the longest-serving commissioner on the court, was the first Mexican American woman to hold her position.
One of the great success stories from this past year is the collaborative effort it took to set up the Covid vaccination center at Circuit of the Americas. Travis County partnered with neighboring counties such as Caldwell, Bastrop and Hays, as well as health care providers Ascension Health and Central Health, to set up a very successful clinic.
“I feel fantastic about it,” Gómez said. “To bring all these groups together, they each have a role in it and they all kind of work together. They had to figure out what was the best way. … It was fantastic.”
This collaboration has continued to the pop-up clinics, Gómez said.
“The whole thing was to make sure that when the constable and this team goes out, that people will trust them when they tell them that this is a good vaccine for you,” she said.
“It’s taken a lot to convince people to make sure that the vaccine is good for them, that it’s not going to damage them, and it’s not going to affect their health in the future.”
Another big issue the court reexamined is the criminal justice system, Gómez said.
“Time goes by and we move along to other issues, and you have to kind of really put the brakes on sometimes,” Gómez said. ”Let’s look at what we’ve been doing for a while now.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Where some see problems, Travillion sees opportunities (Austin Monitor)
Travis County Precinct 1 Commissioner Jeff Travillion acknowledges that 2021 was a “challenging year.” But where others saw problems, Travillion saw opportunities.
In areas lacking basic amenities like hospitals, clinics and pharmacies, Travillion made use of public schools and community centers for Covid-19 testing and vaccine roll-out.
“My proudest moment was working with community organizations to organize in the Eastern Crescent,” Travillion said. “We worked with the Community Resilience Trust, the Black Leaders Collective, Austin Voices, churches, constables’ offices, fraternities and sororities to build a system within public spaces.”
“We went into communities and did things to build trust in government processes that had been destroyed over years,” Travillion continued. “We had to bridge that gap and say, this is something that is going to protect the community and nobody is going to make you feel like you shouldn’t have access.”
Relief efforts during Winter Storm Uri were carried out in partnership with the Central Texas Food Bank, Cook’s Nook, Black Women in Business, and Saffron Trust. Schools without grocery stores within a 2-mile radius were used as pantries, “because that is where communities congregate,” he said.
The groups worked with churches to identify those who were elderly, sick and shut-in, to cook and bring them food. “Until the private sector catches up with making access to food available, we can use our public resources and our nonprofit entities to make sure that we know where our underserved populations are, and we provide services to them as a public entity,” Travillion said... (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Gov. Greg Abbott intervened to put a positive spin on Texas' power grid (Texas Tribune)
The two most powerful people overseeing Texas’ electric grid sat next to each other in a quickly arranged Austin news conference in early December to try to assure Texans that the state’s electricity supply was prepared for winter.
“The lights are going to stay on this winter,” said Peter Lake, chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, echoing recent public remarks by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Two weeks earlier, Abbott had told Austin’s Fox 7 News that he “can guarantee the lights will stay on.” The press conference that followed from Lake and the chief of the state’s independent grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, came at the governor’s request, according to two state officials and one other person familiar with the planning, who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
‘We’re doing badly’: Parkland Hospital reports COVID-19 hospitalization spike, staff hit by virus (Dallas Morning News)
North Texas’ largest public hospital system will open two additional COVID-19 wards amid a sharp increase in hospitalizations as a surge in coronavirus cases, fueled by the omicron variant, begins to hit Dallas-Fort Worth, Parkland Health & Hospital System reported Monday. Total current hospitalizations from the virus have nearly doubled from around 60 last week to about 110 on Monday, said Dr. Joseph Chang, Parkland’s chief medical officer. “In a word, we’re doing badly,” he said. “It’s looking like we’re heading in a pretty concerning and difficult direction, at least over the foreseeable future.” And staffing shortages are adding pressure to an already strained hospital system. Twice the number of staff were out Monday because of the virus compared to last week, Chang said. More than 90% of the patients hospitalized for COVID-19 have been vaccinated, he said. Early studies indicate that while two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines are not effective against omicron, a booster dose provides more protection against the new variant.
New data from Britain’s Health Security Agency suggests that booster protection against symptomatic infection caused by omicron wanes within 10 weeks, The New York Times reported. Up until now, Parkland had closed most of its COVID-19 units recently as cases dwindled, leaving open a dedicated 36-bed unit. The system also treated COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit and the progressive care unit, which offers care at a level between regular and intensive care. Despite the rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, public health experts project that the omicron variant has yet to reach its peak. The highly-contagious strain, first identified by scientists in South Africa about a month ago, now accounts for a majority of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Preliminary, non-peer-reviewed data out of South Africa show omicron appears to cause less severe disease, but is more easily transmitted than the delta variant. However, the potential decrease in severity doesn’t necessarily mean the omicron variant will lead to fewer hospitalizations than previous variants. “If the overall number of infections is higher than delta, even if there’s a lower proportion that get admitted to the hospital, that absolute number of admissions is still currently large and perhaps even greater than delta just because there’s so much infection,” Chang said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Will Elon Musk Austin-ify Brownsville? (Texas Monthly)
The mural on the side of the old Capitol Theater building on the corner of Levee and Eleventh streets in downtown Brownsville isn’t exactly the sort of art that tends to court controversy. It’s pink, with big geometric shapes in various pastel-adjacent hues, and the letters “BTX” painted roughly the size of an F-150. On a spectrum of controversial outdoor art that ranges from “basic Instagram wall” to “Banksy in Gaza,” it’s decidedly closer to the former. The artist who created it, L.A.-based muralist Teddy Kelly, boasts an impressive list of corporate clients who pay handsomely for the sort of art that makes a great backdrop for a photo—Coachella, Facebook, Red Bull, Shake Shack. There’s nothing not to like about Kelly’s mural in Brownsville—before it was painted, the side of the building that housed the theater from 1928 to 1966 just looked like faded concrete—but it’s more design than art, not the sort of thing that tends to bring out strong emotions. Yet in Brownsville, the largest city in the Rio Grande Valley, it’s stirred them up anyway.
The six-thousand-square-foot piece of outdoor art has been one of the hotter topics of conversation in Brownsville since it was completed in September and residents—concerned that an out-of-town artist was hired to kick off a public art project intended to “inspire civic pride”—learned that Kelly was paid $20,000 for his work. The local arts and culture website Trucha RGV described the mural as “an example of the local inequity in the arts.” Fidel Martinez, a Valley native who writes the “Latinx Files” column for the Los Angeles Times, noted in the paper that “the only sign that you’re in Brownsville is the block letters ‘BTX.’” Even those letters attracted derision—locals are quick to point out that they’ve never heard anyone refer to the city that way. That’s more of an Austin thing. “They did it like ‘ATX,’” Emma Guevara, a local progressive activist, told me. “They’ve been trying to rebrand since the new mayor was elected.” On social media, the opinions were even more pointed, with locals sharing memes mocking the piece and describing it as a “gentrified eyesore” that needs to be replaced “with art that’s actually inspired by Brownsville.” The Brownsville drag artist and activist who performs under the name Kween Beatrix posted a Twitter poll asking, “Does the new Brownsville mural inspire civic pride in you? I need to know.” Ninety-four percent of the 257 respondents (admittedly, not the most representative sampling of Brownsville folks) said no… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
5 GOP-led states extend unemployment aid to workers who lose jobs over vaccine mandates (Washington Post)
At least five Republican-led states have extended unemployment benefits to people who’ve lost jobs over vaccine mandates — and a smattering of others may soon follow. Workers who quit or are fired for cause — including for defying company policy — are generally ineligible for jobless benefits. But Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have carved out exceptions for those who won’t submit to the multi-shot coronavirus vaccine regimens that many companies now require. Similar ideas have been floated in Wyoming, Wisconsin and Missouri. Critics contend that these states are incentivizing people to skip shots that public health experts say offer the best line of defense against the coronavirus. Business leaders and industry groups have argued against the rule changes because, they say, companies would shoulder much of the costs. And the efforts are playing out as the Biden administration is pressing immunization rules for private companies and as coronavirus cases are surging again because of the fast-spreading omicron variant.
Observers say it’s a mark of the politicization of the coronavirus — with fights flaring over business closures, mask mandates and more — and how it has scrambled state politics and altered long-held positions. It wasn’t long ago, they note, that two dozen Republican-led states moved to restrict unemployment aid to compel residents to return to the workforce and ease labor shortages. “These governors, who are using the unemployment insurance system in a moment of political theater to make a statement about the vaccine mandate, are the same folks who turned off unemployment benefits early for millions of workers over the summer,” said Rebecca Dixon, the executive director of the left-leaning National Employment Law Project. Arkansas, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida cut federal unemployment aid in June. But backers insist that Americans should be able to decide for themselves whether to get vaccinated. Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson (R) has broadly criticized vaccine mandates as ineffective and unfair, at one point tweeting: “Kansans have made it clear that they choose freedom over Faucism” — a play on the name of the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, whose masking and vaccination guidance during the pandemic has made him a target for the right… (LINK TO FULL STORY)