BG Reads | News You Need to Know (November 30, 2021)
A Longhorn on ranch
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
Austin City Council Special Called Meeting Agenda (Today @9AM)
Joint Meeting with Travis County Commissioners Court
Update on Covid-19 related matters.
Austin City Council Special Called Meeting Agenda (Today @10AM)
Discussion on housing regulations, supply, and issues related to affordability.
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Union says Austin medics are leaving ‘in droves,’ negotiations with city begin Tuesday (KXAN)
A group of first responders says dozens are dropping out of their department, and they’d like the city to help shore up the gap.
Starting Tuesday at 9 a.m., the Austin EMS Association is the first to start negotiating agreements with the city, followed by the Austin Fire and Police Departments after the new year. The agreements expire September 2022.
If you want to be a medic with Austin-Travis County EMS, the president of its union says you’ll start at $19 an hour.
“In Austin, if you want to do EMS, you can work in the Tesla factory, you can work at Amazon and be paid $25 an hour,” said Selena Xie, president of the Austin EMS Association.
According to the city’s budget documents, EMS workers have seen pay increases between 1-2% each year for about five years.
Xie said that’s not enough for their medics — at least 80% of whom live outside of Austin. Xie also said about 30% of their medics are considered very low income in the city.
“At once, the city says you have to live within two hours of the City of Austin, but on the other hand, medics can’t even afford to do that,” she said.
Xie believes low pay is also the reason behind fewer applicants and cadets. They have only 16 for their December class, far short of their goal of 30 cadets… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Landmark commission experiments with new postponement tool (Austin Monitor)
The Historic Landmark Commission is taking a fresh approach to resisting demolition, opting to indefinitely postpone several cases at its Nov. 15 meeting.
After consulting with the city’s legal department, staffers recommended using the new tool in cases where applicants oppose historic zoning but are willing to negotiate alternatives to demolition. Commissioners elected to use this approach for two historic homes, one at 1601 Cedar Ave. and the other at 1411 Ethridge Ave.
“Indefinite postponement is not a tool we have been using, but it’s one we have learned of and will be making more use of going forward,” Historic Preservation Officer Elizabeth Brummett said.
Applicant Garrett Hill, who appeared before the commission last month, has met significant resistance from the surrounding neighborhood and city staff over his efforts to tear down his circa-1915 home on Cedar Avenue. Noting its grandiose transitional style and ties to the working-class Blocker family, who maintained the house for much of the 20th century, the commission unanimously voted to initiate historic zoning.
Seeking to prevent historic landmark designation, Hill has retracted his application for demolition to pursue less controversial remodeling options. With no imminent action on the horizon, staff felt that indefinite postponement was an appropriate response.
“What this will do is simply allow the clock to time out after 180 days,” Brummett explained. “So if another demolition request or partial demolition request were to come forward, staff would see that and bring it back to the commission to reconsider initiating historic zoning.”
The new tool came in handy once more to resolve the case of 1411 Ethridge Ave. Rebecca Burrisk, one of the home’s owners, appeared before the commission to explain that the contract instigating the pending application for tearing down the 1939 home had fallen through.
“The property is in pretty bad condition, and I personally think it’s ready for demolition, but I don’t know what the contract we enter on the property will want to do,” Burrisk said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Plan for 20,000-seat amphitheater project near Bee Cave ignites opposition (Austin American-Statesman)
On what's now a wooded hilltop near Bee Cave, bordering property that is set aside for a nature preserve, picture this:
A 20,000-capacity amphitheater, touted by its developers as a venue that will reinforce the Austin area's reputation as the "Live Music Capital of the World."
Two high-rise towers with 465 apartments.
A Top Golf-style driving range with 96 bays.
Nightclubs, restaurants and office space.
But before developers of the proposed amphitheater project can turn this vision into reality, they face several hurdles — not the least of which is the need to raise perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. The price tag for the project is estimated at $600 million to $750 million.
In addition, environmentalists and some homeowners in the area oppose it, saying the plans could degrade wildlife habitat and the water quality of nearby Barton Creek, as well as create noise and transportation issues… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin's Uber and Lyft riders face higher prices, delays (AXIOS Austin)
Feeling like the prices of your Austin Uber rides have been extraordinarily high?
You're not imagining things: Rides this fall on Lyft and Uber cost about a third higher than they were pre-pandemic.
The big picture: It's not just Austin, but data shows prices are slightly elevated in Central Texas compared to other areas. Much of the country is experiencing this mismatched equation of supply and demand for ride-hailing services.
Uber and Lyft riders in Austin are still facing a bump in prices and longer wait times as the companies cope with driver shortages.
What they're saying: "As vaccines rolled out and people started moving again, we began to see the demand for rides outpace the number of available drivers," a spokesperson for Lyft told Axios in an email.
"We've added thousands of drivers to the platform and expect rider wait times and prices to improve moving forward. For drivers, it continues to be a great time to drive with drivers in top markets earning significantly more than they were pre-pandemic."
The rise in demand led to a price spike, but so far, consumers are willing to pay more per trip, per an analysis by research firm YipitData.
Email receipt data analyzed in October found that ride-share prices are still elevated in the Austin metro area and remain slightly higher than the rest of the country.
Ride receipts show that Austin fares were 35% higher this October than they were in October 2019. Austin fares peaked in May 2021, when they were 40% higher than in May 2019.
The email receipts, which show the amount charged and the distance driven in miles, include taxes, tolls and other fees. The figures exclude tips and only include UberX and standard Lyft individual auto rides.
In Lyft's latest earnings call, the company reported a bump in new driver growth, up 60% year-over-year. Active drivers in the third quarter also increased by roughly 45% compared to last year.
Lyft also reported that drivers saw 20% more rides on average in the third quarter compared to the same time in 2019. The company does not release regional or state figures.
Uber did not return Axios' requests for comment… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Project Connect agreement sees third and final approval (Austin Monitor)
On Nov. 17, the Austin Transit Partnership board approved the Joint Powers Agreement, which was created to delineate the roles of each of the agencies involved in administering the multibillion-dollar transit project, Project Connect.
ATP was the last of the three governing bodies – besides Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city – to pass the agreement, with the Capital Metro board passing the agreement the week prior.
“I think it’s important to mention that we have reached a very important milestone as we continue with this program. I am proud of the partnership that we have built with the city of Austin and with Capital Metro,” ATP Chair Veronica Castro de Barrera said.
The plan outlines the specific roles and purviews of each agency in the implementation of Project Connect, procedures for dispute resolution and general project principles, as well as language committing to adding mechanisms for receiving and responding to community feedback… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Texas health experts 'not panicking' over COVID's omicron variant, expect cases to appear soon (KUT / Texas Public Radio)
Doctors and health officials in Texas say that the omicron variant of COVID-19 could be found in the state within the next couple of weeks — if it’s not already here. No cases had been reported in the U.S. as of Monday afternoon.
San Antonio Metropolitan Health District officials are monitoring the situation, and said they “fully expect to see some cases soon.”
“It will take two to four weeks to begin to know how serious a threat this is… The new omicron variant has been described as ‘extremely mild’ by the South African doctor who first raised the alarm over the new strain,” a statement from Metro Health said.
Dr. Peter Hotez with Baylor College of Medicine in Houston said the variant may already be in Texas, and that scientists will know soon whether current COVID-19 vaccines are effective against it. He told CNN it’s unlikely that it will be totally resistant.
“Our scientists at Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor are now looking exactly at that — our immune response to our vaccine, seeing if it cross-neutralizes omicron," he said.
Hotez added that the delta variant is still his biggest concern, and he does not fully support travel restrictions that went into effect Monday by President Joe Biden. The U.S. has banned travel to seven countries — not including Canada — which reported its first case of the new variant this weekend… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Among this year’s affordable housing proposals, the deal at the center of City Hall scandal stuck out (Houston Chronicle)
When Houston officials began soliciting proposals from developers for this year’s highly competitive affordable housing tax credits, they had a very different message than in recent cycles: Do not count on money from the city. For the prior two years, the city had used a pot of $450 million in Hurricane Harvey disaster recovery funds to pair with the tax credits to help developers build affordable housing. The 38 projects currently in the pipeline will help fund more than 4,700 affordable apartments throughout the city. By the start of this year, however, the city had just $12.6 million of those Harvey moneys left. Officials told developers to look elsewhere to bridge any financing gaps. All but one of the applicants responded by arranging financing that did not rely on new city money. Dozens of the proposals were withdrawn altogether, and about half of the 17 developers who submitted a full application trimmed the number of housing units from their initial plans.
The one developer who did not follow the city’s advice was MGroup, which pursued a senior housing deal called Huntington at Bay Area. That proposal would later spark an unprecedented public broadside against Mayor Sylvester Turner by the city housing director, who accused him of arranging a sham funding process and steering city money to the developer. Instead, MGroup forged ahead with a request for $15 million the city said it had no plans to offer, incurring significant costs and risk along the way. Mark and Laura Musemeche run MGroup. Barry Barnes, the mayor’s longtime former law partner, and his colleague Jermaine Thomas were co-developers on the plan. Among the 17 complete tax credit proposals, Huntington was the largest project, with plans for 148 units. It also had the highest number (60) and share of market-rate apartments (41 percent), and the highest overall development costs at $37 million. MGroup also topped the others with a developer fee of $4.2 million, and it had the highest expected cash flow — $3.1 million over 15 years, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of the applications. The averages for competing proposals: 94 overall units including 13 market-rate apartments, $21 million in development costs, $2.1 million in developers fees and $1.3 million in cash flow… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Why cryptocurrency miners pose the next big threat to the Texas’ electric grid (Dallas Morning News)
Texas, already home to the most vulnerable power grid in the U.S., is about to be hit by a surge in demand for electricity that’s twice the size of Austin’s. An army of cryptocurrency miners heading to the state for its cheap power and laissez-faire regulation is forecast to send demand soaring by as much as 5,000 megawatts over the next two years. The crypto migration to Texas has been building for months, but the sheer volume of power those miners will need — two times more than the capital city of almost 1 million people consumed in all of 2020 — is only now becoming clear. The boom comes as the electrical system is already under strain from an expanding population and robust economy. Even before the new demand comes online, the state’s grid has proven to be lethally unreliable. Catastrophic blackouts in February plunged millions into darkness for days, and, ultimately, led to at least 210 deaths.
Proponents like Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Greg Abbott, both Republicans, say crypto miners are ultimately good for the grid, since they say the miners can soak up excess clean power and, when needed, can voluntarily throttle back in seconds to help avert blackouts. But it raises the question of what these miners will do when the state’s electricity demand inevitably outstrips supply: Will they adhere to an honor system of curtailing their power use, especially when the Bitcoin price is itself so high, or will it mean even more pressure on an overwhelmed grid? “There’s nobody looking at the scale of potential investment in crypto and its energy demand over the next couple of years and trying to account for that in some sort of strategic plan,” said Adrian Shelley, director of the Texas office of the consumer advocacy and lobbying group Public Citizen, which has sharply criticized the vulnerabilities of the state’s unregulated power market. Texas is rolling out the red carpet for crypto miners as onetime leader China has banned the industry. Mining for crypto requires massive amounts of power, complicating Beijing’s efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and shore up energy supplies ahead of the winter… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Inside the 'big wave' of misinformation targeted at Latinos (Associated Press)
Before last year’s presidential election, Facebook ads targeting Latino voters described Joe Biden as a communist. During his inauguration, another conspiracy theory spread online and on Spanish-language radio warning that a brooch worn by Lady Gaga signaled Biden was working with shadowy, leftist figures abroad. And in the final stretch of Virginia’s election for governor, stories written in Spanish accused Biden of ordering the arrest of a man during a school board meeting. None of that was true. But such misinformation represents a growing threat to Democrats, who are anxious about their standing with Latino voters after surprise losses last year in places like South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Heading into a midterm election in which control of Congress is at stake, lawmakers, researchers and activists are preparing for another onslaught of falsehoods targeted at Spanish-speaking voters. And they say social media platforms that often host those mistruths aren’t prepared.
“For a lot of people, there’s a lot of concern that 2022 will be another big wave,” said Guy Mentel, executive director of Global Americans, a think tank that provides analysis of key issues throughout the Americas. This month’s elections may be a preview of what’s to come. After Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy won New Jersey’s close governor’s race, Spanish-language videos falsely claimed the vote was rigged, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud — a fact the Republican candidate acknowledged, calling the results “legal and fair.” In Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin campaigned successfully on promises to defend “parental rights” in classrooms, false headlines around a controversial school board meeting emerged. “Biden ordenó arrestar a padre de una joven violada por un trans,” read one of several misleading articles, translating to “Biden ordered the arrest of a father whose daughter was raped by a trans.” The mistruth was spun from an altercation during a chaotic school board meeting months earlier in Loudoun County that resulted in the arrest of a father whose daughter was sexually assaulted in a bathroom by another student. The father claimed the suspect was “gender fluid,” which sparked outcry over the school’s policy allowing transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
GOP courts anti-vaxxers with jobless aid (AXIOS)
Republican officials around the country are testing a creative mechanism to build loyalty with unvaccinated Americans while undermining Biden administration mandates: unemployment benefits. Driving the news: Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have changed their unemployment insurance rules to allow workers who are fired or quit over vaccine mandates to receive benefits. The big picture: Extending unemployment benefits to the unvaccinated is just the latest in a series of proposals aligning the GOP with people who won't get a COVID shot. Republicans see a prime opportunity to rally their base ahead of the midterms. No matter how successful their individual efforts, the campaign is a powerful messaging weapon.
Details: Nine GOP-controlled states have passed laws requiring exemptions for the Biden administration's vaccine mandate, or banning private companies from requiring vaccination altogether, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy. Several states have made it as easy as possible for workers to claim exemptions, allowing them to opt-out on philosophical grounds or requiring businesses to accept all requests for religious or medical exemptions without proof. Legal uncertainty created by a wide variety of new vaccine exemptions in Florida – including for past COVID-19 infections and "anticipated future pregnancy" – prompted Disney World to suspend its vaccine mandate on Tuesday. In Congress, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) is leading a formal challenge against the federal vaccine mandate using the Congressional Review Act, the official process for Congress to eliminate an executive branch rule. The resolution is "guaranteed a vote on the Senate floor," according to Braun's office, which could come as early as December. At least 20 bills have been introduced to chip away at Biden's mandates. The backdrop: On Sept. 8, President Biden announced a new rule requiring businesses with more than 100 employees to implement vaccine mandates, affecting roughly 80 million private sector workers, as well as millions of federal workers and contractors… (LINK TO FULL STORY)