BG Reads | News You Need to Know (October 26, 2021)
[MEETING/HEARINGS]
Special Called Meeting of the Austin City Council - Agenda (Today at 9AM)
Joint Meeting with Travis County Commissioners Court
Update on Covid-19 related matters.
Special Called Meeting of the Austin City Council - Agenda (10.28.2021)
Discuss policy priorities, goals, and the potential impacts on governance for the City of Austin.
Special Called Meeting of the Austin City Council - Agenda (10.29.2021)
Joint Meeting with Captial Metro Board of Directors and Austin Transit Partnership Board of Directors
Regular Meeting of the Austin City Council - Agenda (11.4.2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
EVENTS // Thursday, October 28 (6PM - 10PM0, A Night In Verde Presented by St. David’s Healthcare - benefiting the 4ATX Foundation (Austin FC’s non-profit arm).
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Council denounces ‘false choice’ of pitting parkland against affordability (Austin Monitor)
More than two months after City Council passed a new budget that took effect Oct. 1, city management now wants to freeze one of the adopted fee schedules as it relates to the amount developers pay toward parkland acquisition and development.
While some Council members appeared ready to deny the request at the outset, a long and bumpy deliberation ended with a decision to postpone the matter indefinitely. Thursday’s vote was 9-1-1, with Council Member Pio Renteria dissenting and Council Member Greg Casar off the dais.
Getting to that decision was not easy. Council members expressed their frustrations with staffers for placing an unsolicited policy matter on the agenda. With rare exception, policy matters are driven by Council and implemented under the direction of the city manager.
Moreover, Mayor Steve Adler and other Council members reproached city management for placing them in the position of pitting parkland and housing affordability against one another. And several Council members expressed irritation over the level of influence the development community holds at City Hall – a sentiment in the community that has held steady for several decades, whether accurate or not.
Either way, the request to freeze the new parkland dedication fees, which are in some cases double the amount developers paid in the 2020-21 budget, would allow time for staffers to conduct a housing affordability impact study of the new fees, examine how peer Texas cities charge developers for parkland fees and “provide opportunities for internal and external stakeholder engagement and feedback.”
Austin ranks 45th on the Trust for Public Land’s 2021 ParkScore index, a higher ranking than Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, Houston and Fort Worth. Austin fares poorly against peer cities outside of Texas, such as Seattle and Portland, which rank 9 and 10, respectively… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Capital Metro board approves charter for public safety advisory committee (Community Impact)
The Capital Metro board of directors unanimously approved the public safety advisory committee charter during an Oct. 25 meeting.
The advisory committee will consist of 10 members, with eight board-appointed members, one retired law enforcement professional and one representative from the Amalgamated Transit Union. They will provide input on a range of public safety issues.
“You cannot move forward with creating a committee without this crucial first step,” Capital Metro Chief Safety Officer Gardner Tabon said.
Capital Metro unveiled details for an expanded public safety department in August. The plan would establish a transit police force, as well as unarmed public safety officers and community intervention specialists, who would focus on social service issues.
Tabon said Capital Metro intends to only use the police officers when necessary. He added that the community intervention specialists began full operations in October... (LINK TO FULL STORY)
3-D printed houses are sprouting near Austin as demand for homes grows (Wall Street Journal)
A major home builder is teaming with a Texas startup to create a community of 100 3-D printed homes near Austin, gearing up for what would be by far the biggest development of this type of housing in the U.S.
Lennar Corp. and construction-technology firm Icon are poised to start building next year at a site in the Austin metro area, the companies said. While Icon and others have built 3-D printed housing before, this effort will test the technology’s ability to churn out homes and generate buyer demand on a much larger scale.
“We’re sort of graduating from singles and dozens of homes to hundreds of homes,” said Jason Ballard, Icon’s chief executive.
If 3-D printing succeeds at this more ambitious level, it could offer a response to America’s chronic shortage of homes for sale, especially in the affordable price range. Mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac estimated that the national deficit of single-family homes stood at 3.8 million units at the end of 2020.
Supply-chain backlogs during the pandemic have pinched home construction, while labor shortages have hampered production for years.
“Skilled tradesmen are a dying breed,” said Eric Feder, president of LenX, Lennar’s venture-capital and innovation unit. “So there have to be alternative building solutions to help with this labor deficit.”
The vast majority of newly built single-family homes in the U.S. are constructed on-site and framed in wood using traditional construction methods.
Icon’s 3-D printed houses use concrete framing instead. Its 15.5-foot-tall printers can build the exterior and interior wall system for a 2,000-square-foot, one-story house in a week, Mr. Ballard said. The printer squeezes out concrete in layers, like toothpaste out of a tube. The machines can print curved walls, allowing for more creative house designs, he added… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
Gov. Greg Abbott signs off on Texas’ new political maps, which protect GOP majorities while diluting voices of voters of color (Texas Tribune)
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday approved Texas’ new political maps for the state’s congressional, legislative and State Board of Education districts, according to Texas Legislature Online.
The maps were drawn to keep Texas Republicans in power for the next decade. They simultaneously diminish the power of voters of color — despite new census numbers pointing to Texans of color as the main force behind the state’s population growth.
The new districts will be used for the first time in next year's primary and general elections, barring any court interventions.
The redistricting process, which happens every 10 years after new census data is released, is complicated and contentious. Legal battles have already begun, with one early lawsuit raising various claims that the new districts unfairly and illegally discriminate against voters of color. More legal challenges are expected to pop up in the near future… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas judge denies order to keep delta-8 THC products from being considered ‘illegal’ (Dallas Morning News)
A judge has denied a temporary restraining order against the Texas Department of State Health Services that was prompted by confusion in the cannabinoid industry. Court documents show that the judge denied the order from Hometown Hero, an Austin-based company that sells delta-8 and CBD products, because “the plaintiff has not met requirements of a temporary restraining order.” The health department responded to the emergency order by stating there was no emergency. Hometown Hero filed the suit on Thursday after the state health department issued a notice on its website on Oct. 15 that delta-8 products are illegal. Delta-8 is a less-potent alternative to the delta-9 product known as “marijuana.”
Ramping up in popularity months ago, it wasn’t until the website change that many Texans, including regular consumers and sellers of the products, learned that delta-8 was illegal in Texas. But official state documents show the Department of State Health Services has considered it a Schedule 1 controlled substance since early this year. An individual caught for possession could receive a felony charge, punishable by up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Lukas Gilkey, CEO of the Austin-based dispensary, said they believe DSHS “did not follow the proper procedures” to proclaim that delta-8 is illegal. Hometown Hero will argue its case for a temporary injunction against the ban on Nov. 5. Until further notice, the business will remove all delta-8 products from its shelves, Gilkey said in a video Monday morning. Some of the confusion on delta-8?s legal status stemmed from the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized the product federally, but the bill allows individual states to write more stringent laws and diverge from the federal controlled substance schedule. Many consumers and sellers did not know that DSHS Commissioner Hellerstedt rejected the Drug Enforcement Agency’s modification that legalized all hemp products — including delta-8 — in September 2020, followed by a public hearing weeks later… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas pre-orders 1.3 million doses of COVID vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds (San Antonio Express-News)
More than 1.3 million doses of the pediatric Pfizer COVID vaccine likely will head to Texas providers over the next few weeks, as federal health officials are expected to greenlight the shots for 5- to 11-year-olds within days. The state has started pre-ordering the shots, which will start to ship as soon as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration grants emergency use authorization for the vaccine. An advisory panel will meet Tuesday on the matter, with full consideration following shortly after. Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which makes additional recommendations on who should get the vaccine, are scheduled to meet Nov. 2 and 3.
“This new age group is a big factor just in helping us reduce the viral load across the state,” said Imelda Garcia, the head of the state’s Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel. The emergency use authorization would add about 2.9 million Texans to the vaccine eligibility pool and comes as children’s COVID cases and hospitalizations have surged during the delta wave. The pediatric vaccine, like its adult companion, requires two shots for full immunization, though it contains just a fraction of the dosage. Pfizer said last week that its shots are more than 90 percent effective in children ages 5 to 11. The 1.3 million doses likely headed to Texas are not differentiated by first and second doses. Depending on demand, providers can request additional doses in the weeks after the emergency use authorization is granted. Just more than 1 million of those doses will be allocated directly to the state’s providers, including hospitals and pediatricians’ offices. Roughly 260,000 more will head to pharmacies, which have independent relationships with the federal government… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
Facebook staff complained for years about their lobbyists’ power (Politico)
Facebook says it does not take the political winds of Washington into account when deciding what posts to take down or products to launch. But a trove of internal documents shows that Facebook’s own employees are concerned that the company does just that — and that its Washington, D.C.-based policy office is deeply involved in these calls at a level not previously reported. The lobbying and government relations shop, overseen by former Republican operative Joel Kaplan, regularly weighs in on speech-related issues, such as how to deal with prominent right-wing figures, misinformation, ads from former President Donald Trump and the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in June 2020, according to internal reports, posts from Facebook’s staff and interviews with former employees. The dynamic is so prevalent that employees argued internally that Facebook regularly ignored its own written policies to keep political figures happy, even overriding concerns about public safety.
“Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors when enforcing content policy,” a Facebook data scientist wrote in a December 2020 presentation titled “Political Influences on Content Policy.” It added: “The standard protocol for enforcement and policy involves consulting Public Policy on any significant changes, and their input regularly protects powerful constituencies.” The public policy team includes the company’s lobbyists. The new disclosures come after years of internal and external grumbling at Facebook about the role played by Kaplan, who has angered Democrats in Washington who say he has amassed outsized power at the company and used his position to cater to the GOP. They also follow recent revelations in The Wall Street Journal that Facebook has a private internal system, known as XCheck, that exempted high-profile users such as Trump from the company’s normal rules. The latest disclosures are likely to add to those complaints — even as Facebook continues to insist, as a spokesperson did Friday, that Kaplan’s team is “just one of many groups consulted” on content decisions. "It is a fatal flaw of Facebook as a company that their team in charge of lobbying governments clearly is empowered to intervene on product and content decisions in ways that make it impossible to do good work," said Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of advocacy group Accountable Tech and former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Two Jan. 6 planners cooperate with committee, name MAGA Congress members (Rolling Stone)
As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent. Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.
Along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas). And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further. Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.” The organizer claims the pair received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar. “I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer. The rally planner describes the pardon as being offered while “encouraging” the staging of protests against the election. While the organizer says they did not get involved in planning the rallies solely due to the pardon, they were upset that it ultimately did not materialize… (LINK TO FULL STORY)