BG Reads | News You Need to Know (November 8, 2021)
Sam Houston Building, Texas Capital Complex
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
Special Called Meeting of the Austin City Council (Tuesday, November 9 at 9AM)
Joint Meeting with Travis County Commissioners Court
Update on Covid-19 related matters.
Regular Meeting of the Austin City Council (Thursday, November 18 at 10AM)
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
City presents long-awaited follow-up on Winter Storm Uri (Austin Monitor)
As Austin prepares for colder temperatures, a coalition of teams led by the city’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management has finalized its after-action report on February’s Winter Storm Uri.
Staying well past 10 p.m. last Thursday, City Council ended its meeting with a briefing on the report’s findings. The briefing, which included presentations from the city’s water and energy utilities, outlined an ambitious set of recommendations based on the shortcomings of the city’s response to the disaster.
“I’ve been involved in the field of emergency management for over 27 years … in over 15 presidential disaster declarations … (including) floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes,” Juan Ortiz, director of HSEM, began, “and I will have to say that the events we experienced in February of 2021 required me to muster all of this previous experience.”
Uri, which brought 164 hours of freezing temperatures and broke the record for consecutive days of grounded snow, left up to 40 percent of Austin residents without power, with some outages lasting as long as 72 hours. As pipes burst and roads froze, many residents were stuck in dangerously frigid homes without access to food or water.
Staffers noted that the overlapping pandemic, which was already straining city resources, severely challenged storm response efforts. Having invested in extensive Covid shelters and vaccine rollout programs, the city was caught scrambling to reorganize and meet more pressing demands.
“City departments currently do not have adequate staffing models for multiple-response operations,” said Allan Freedman of Hagerty Consulting, who assisted with the report. Noting the likelihood of future “overlapping disaster events,” the report recommends a major bolstering of the city’s disaster-response infrastructure… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin's hotel market rebounding from COVID-19 devastation (Austin American-Statesman)
After the coronavirus dealt Austin hotels a devastating blow in 2020, rooms are now back in demand and the industry is ready to look ahead, industry experts say.
"As we talk to people in the lobby, they're excited to get out try new things, whether it's food, music or events," said Fernando Estala, director of sales and marketing at Austin Marriott Downtown. "It's a reset for everyone, including hotels."
The 31-story Marriott Downtown, which is just west of the Austin Convention Center, was being built during the peak of the pandemic. It opened in March, as vaccines were rolling out and the notion of leisure travel was returning.
"Tourism was starting to come back, particularly people who were driving from places like Dallas and Houston," Estala said. "But the weekday traveler — the business traveler — was basically nonexistent."
Now, with the return of major events like the Austin City Limits Music Festival and Formula One racing, as well as a slight increase in business travel, Estala and other Austin hotel executives say they are feeling bullish about 2022.
"We're still not where we want to be, but we feel we're in a very, very good spot," Estala said. "Leisure is definitely back, and there's a lot demand for weekend trips. With business travel, we're starting to see more corporate guests coming in for two or three days, and we've had a number of large group meetings. It's a strong start."
Austin hotel occupancy for October was 75%, up from 41% a year ago, according to Visit Austin, the city's convention and visitors' bureau. By comparison, the occupancy rate in October 2019 was 81.4%…. (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Austin health leaders say COVID-19 transmission is still too high to move to Stage 2 (KUT)
Since the end of October, it’s looked like Austin-Travis County was ready to move down to Stage 2 of Austin Public Health’s COVID-19 risk guidance. The seven-day average of new COVID hospital admissions has sunk below 15, putting the area in the Stage 2 range. But health officials said Friday the area will remain in Stage 3 because virus transmission is still too high.
“We take several factors into consideration when we are making decisions about the stage changes,” Health Authority Dr. Desmar Walkes said during a news conference, “and one of those is that concept of how something is spreading in our community.”
That concept is called community-based transmission — a metric APH will be adding to its staging dashboard. The dashboard measures COVID-19 trends and shows how close the area is to moving into different risk stages. (See it here.) Community-based transmission is the number of cases per 100,000 people over a seven-day period. Right now, the Austin area is at 50, which Walkes said means “substantial transmission.”
“It’s for that reason we are going to stay in Stage 3,” she said. “We know that that number is slowly going down, and as it continues to go down, we’ll take another look at things.”
A move to Stage 2 would mean fewer recommended precautions for vaccinated people. They would no longer need to wear masks at indoor gatherings with people outside of their households. APH would still advise unvaccinated people to wear masks at such gatherings, as well as at outdoor gatherings and when dining and shopping… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Buda City Council denies request to rezone land, provide more housing (Community Impact)
The Buda City Council denied a request to change the zoning of 20.5 acres of land from light industrial to urban residential at its meeting Nov. 3. The Buda Planning and Zoning Commission voted 4-3 to recommend approval of this item at its meeting Oct. 26.
The land in question is located between South Loop 4 and Robert S. Light Boulevard. The current zoning ordinance is light industrial, meant for business parks, light industry work or office warehousing that will not generate noise or heavy traffic in the area, according to the city’s unified development code. The desired zoning ordinance of urban residential would have allowed for multifamily residential homes, or in the case of applicant Gehan Homes, LTD, for-sale townhomes.“The vision for this is a continuation of the Harvest Meadows residential property,” said Peter Verdicchio with SEC Planning, LLC, who presented the proposal.
The hope was to extend the existing Harvest Meadows parks, facilities and amenities for a cohesive neighborhood.However, the council had concerns over the limited amount of land left in Buda and how to best utilize it.
“I’m not anti-residential. I just am struggling with taking the bit of land away that we currently have that I think probably needs to be utilized as industrial,” Council Member Ray Bryant said.
Council member Matt Smith noted that in the presentation, it was stated the land has been studied for close to two years, alluding it cannot come as a surprise that it is still zoned as light industrial.
“It’s a really nice picture that’s put together here. ... I’m confident that even if it takes another 20 years that we’re gonna find a light industrial developer that’s going to come in, ... and it’s going to be overall much better for the community and a better fit for Buda,” Smith said.
Smith added among the issues discussed in regard to projects like these, besides traffic and pressure on the current infrastructure in place, is a diverse workforce and job creation. Council Member Terry Cummings said with the small amount of land left, the city needs to be able to provide support to bring in businesses so that they may employ the residents.
“We don’t want to be a bedroom community that is only taking people and housing them here, and then they ship off to go to work,” Council Member Evan Ture said. “It’s the wrong place, product and time.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
'Not going to leave any stone unturned': Turner, Hidalgo call for Astroworld investigation (Houston Chronicle)
Houston-area leaders on Saturday called for an investigation into how a crowded crush of concert-goers at the Astroworld Festival late Friday led to the deaths of eight people and more than a dozen injuries.
"Nobody should ever expect for a loved one to go to a concert and not return," Harris County Judge Lina Hildago said in a Facebook post. "I'm calling for an objective and independent investigation into what happened." "We're not going to leave any stone unturned," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Saturday during a TV interview with CNN. "We want to look at every single detail to determine what led up to it and what additional steps that need to take place to keep it from happening again, especially in this city."
Local and state leaders expressed shock and sorrow Saturday as Houston police began reviewing camera footage and talking with concert promoters and witnesses to investigate the deadly concert crush at NRG Park.
Eight people died and 17 people were taken to the hospital Friday evening after a crowd of about 50,000 concert-goers surged toward the stage during rapper Travis Scott's performance. Attendees reported that people fell and found it hard to breathe as the crowd overwhelmed security personnel. Houston Police said many of those hospitalized were in cardiac arrest. Concert-goers who died ranged in age from 16 to 23, said Turner, who called for a "detailed briefing" from concert organizer Live Nation, Harris County, NRG Park, Houston Police and Fire and the Office of Emergency Management, explaining how the event got out of control. Festival fans also stampeded the concert entrance earlier on Friday. Harris County's District Attorney's Office on Saturday said that it was assisting local police with their investigation.
"The HCDAO is deeply shocked and saddened over the 8 lives lost at the Astroworld tragedy," the District Attorney's Office tweeted. "Our thoughts are with the families of the deceased & injured as they face the days ahead." Gov. Greg Abbott on Saturday said he directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to make state resources available to support the investigation into the deadly concert… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas faces ‘generational’ energy problems that it doesn’t know how to fix (Dallas Morning News)
Winter is coming. It’s an unavoidable truth hovering over Austin as the Texas energy market’s governing bodies attempt to fix an aching electric grid in a race against Mother Nature. February’s winter storm and subsequent electricity crisis, which led to the deaths of more than 250 people and knocked out power for nearly 70% of Texans, served as a wake-up call for a state that prides itself on its independent, deregulated electricity market. After months of in-depth discussions with energy experts, market participants and concerned public figures, a fix still hasn’t been finalized. Texas Public Utility Commission chairman Peter Lake has presented a first draft — a “strawman,” of sorts — and he knows his suggested fixes will almost certainly change before the regulatory agency signs off on a market redesign blueprint by the end of the year. Charged with the task of balancing impending cold weather and the future of Texas energy, Lake said he knows one thing for sure.
Lake, a 39-year-old Tyler native who left Texas to pursue degrees at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, was thrust into the debate over the state grid when Gov. Greg Abbott appointed him to his current position in April. Before chairing the PUC, the entity responsible for regulating the state’s electric and gas utilities and directing the market redesign, he served as chairman of the Texas Water Development Board and worked a number of private sector jobs, including director of business development at Lake Ronel Oil Co. Now Lake and his colleagues are facing down a problem afflicting not only the Lone Star State but the rest of the world.
For weeks, energy experts have been warning of a global energy crisis spurred by a resurgence in demand following the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by winter temperatures. Natural gas, oil and coal prices are skyrocketing. Rolling blackouts have already begun in China as the country scrambles to find more reliable sources of power. Across the globe, rising electricity prices have backed European politicians into a corner. They have to decide whether the answer lies in the speed at which the continent transitions away from fossil fuels. PUC commissioners are in good company in their quest to remedy what Lake calls a “generational” shift in energy use. But they’re left without an example of how to navigate a market redesign in a state that consumes one-seventh of all energy in the U.S… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas AG Ken Paxton sues Biden administration over new COVID-19 vaccination rules for big businesses (Texas Tribune)
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration on Friday over new federal COVID-19 vaccine rules announced the day before, which order big businesses to mandate vaccination against the virus among their employees by Jan. 4 or require regular testing.
The new federal rules preempt state and local laws, including part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide ban on vaccine mandates.
“The Biden Administration’s new vaccine mandate on private businesses is a breathtaking abuse of federal power,” Paxton said in a written statement Friday… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
House passes $1 Trillion infrastructure bill, putting social policy bill on hold (New York Times)
The House passed a $1 trillion bill on Friday night to rebuild the country’s aging public works system, fund new climate resilience initiatives and expand access to high-speed internet service, giving final approval to a central plank of President Biden’s economic agenda after a daylong drama that pitted moderate Democrats against progressives.
But an even larger social safety net and climate change bill was back on hold, with a half-dozen moderate-to-conservative Democrats withholding their votes until a nonpartisan analysis could tally its price tag.
For Mr. Biden, passage of the infrastructure bill fulfilled a marquee legislative goal that he had promised to deliver since the early days of his presidency: the largest single investment of federal resources into infrastructure projects in more than a decade, including a substantial effort to fortify the nation’s response to the warming of the planet.
“Tonight, we took a monumental step forward as a nation,” Mr. Biden said in a statement after the vote, lauding both the infrastructure and the social policy bills. “Generations from now, people will look back and know this is when America won the economic competition for the 21st century.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)