BG Reads | News You Need to Know (February 25, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
NEW// BG Podcast EP. 131: Discussing the Black Austin Musicians' Collective with Mobley
Today’s episode features Austin-based musician and activist, Mobley, a co-founder of the Black Austin Musicians' Collective. The Collective was borne out of the dual impacts of COVID-19 and protests for Black equality and equity in 2020. Its mission is to strengthen the community, industry, and political power of its members. Mobley and Bingham Group CEO A.J. dig into the founding of the Collective, and what’s ahead in 2021, including the Black Austin Musicians Census.
You can listen to this episode and previous ones on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Please like, link, comment and subscribe!
HEARINGS/MEETINGS
The Austin City Council meets today @10AM for a Special Called Meeting related to last weeks weather crisis and relief/recovery efforts.
THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE
The House Committees on State Affairs and Energy Resources meet today @ 9AM
The Committees will hold a joint public hearing to consider the factors that led to statewide electrical blackouts during the recent unprecedented weather event; the response by industry, suppliers, and grid operators; and changes necessary to avoid future power interruptions.
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (2,538)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Court rejects bid to overturn ballot language (Austin Monitor)
Today’s City Council agenda contains resolutions and emergency ordinances waiving fees and regulations to help Austinites deal with the aftermath of prolonged freezing temperatures and the loss of power and water. The final item on the agenda is entirely different.
Item 7 would allow Council to rewrite ballot language on the May 1 ballot for the Save Austin Now Proposition B, which asks voters to consider reinstating anti-camping provisions and ordinances related to solicitation and sitting, lying or sleeping in public areas.
But Council will probably decline to revise the language, because on Wednesday night the 3rd Court of Appeals rejected a writ of mandamus that would have required the city to change the wording. Attorney Bill Aleshire, who represents three Austinites who signed the Save Austin Now petition seeking to reinstate the city’s previous ordinances, told the Austin Monitor via email that his clients would appeal to the Supreme Court.
Linda Durnin, Eric Krohn and Michael Lovins allege in their suit that the language adopted by City Council is “unfair, prejudicial and distorts the actual petition language in an attempt to intentionally bias voters” against the camping ban. More importantly, they say the city charter requires Council to use the language in the caption of the petition, which Council did not do.
In its response to the suit, the city says it is not required to use the caption language – that’s the crux of the argument. But the response goes on to dissect the petition to show it lacks the safeguards of the previous city ordinance. In their rebuttal, Durnin, Krohn and Lovins say the city is misinterpreting their petition. As campaigns rev up both for and against the camping ban, it is likely that the two sides will argue about the meaning of Proposition B on similar grounds… (LINK TO STORY)
Downtown Austin high-rises remained lit during power outages — what lessons were learned? (Austin Business Journal)
The juxtaposition of downtown Austin’s high-rises being lit up last week while many neighborhoods were without power or heat as the mercury dipped as low as 9 degrees certainly fanned some anger toward the business community.
Now business groups, such as the Downtown Austin Alliance and the Real Estate Council of Austin, are trying to learn from what happened and work toward an improved response should a similar emergency occur in the future. That means collaborating with City Hall on disaster preparedness and communication protocols.
According to Austin Energy, the downtown power grid is considered essential and cannot be shut down completely. Places such as City Hall, the Dell Seton Medical Center, warming centers and emergency responder facilities required power throughout the blackouts, so shutting down the Central Business District grid wasn’t an option.
That left action up to individual building managers and owners, many of whom could not drive downtown to get into those buildings. And then there were some properties, such as the new Austin Marriott Downtown, that became safe havens for those who lost power at their homes. While the 600-plus-room hotel is not set to open until March 4, a hotel representative said about 150 team members were able to stay there, some of whom were recently hired or transferred to Austin to prepare for the opening.
While some buildings might have been able to shut down decorative lighting and cut power consumption as the week progressed, Austin Business Journal was unable to calculate exactly how many buildings were able to reduce electricity use. But the complex situation speaks to the urgent need for more planning. Commercial real estate stakeholders are trying to do exactly that, all in hopes of being better prepared for the next weather crisis… (LINK TO STORY)
Some Austin EMS medics working winter storm say it was the 'worst shift of their life (CBS Austin)
From record-breaking call volumes to transporting patients in their final moments of life on icy roads, Austin EMS Association shared the many challenges they faced during last week’s historic winter storm.
“I’ve heard from many medics this was the worst shift of their life, and this is after going through a global pandemic,” said Selena Xie, President of the Austin EMS Association.
Many Texans are still processing the trauma of the winter storm that caused infrastructure to fail across the state and lead to a domino effect of issues that will takes months, if not longer, to fully recover.
Whatever challenges we faced as a community, Xie and her paramedics faced them with the goal of saving as many lives during the crisis as possible.
”My partner and I kept on saying ‘there are no rules anymore.’ The normal rules just don’t apply. Stop signs don’t mean anything, roads don’t mean anything when you’re creating tracks in the road, the normal way you take care of patients doesn’t mean anything in this type of crisis. It felt very lawless, to be just doing what we could barley be able to do to take care of people. It felt lawless,” said Xie.
Austin-Travis County EMS measured they received 1,435 calls for service on February 15 and 1,323 calls for service the next day. Xie said the previous record for calls for service was on January 1, New Year’s Day, in 2017 with around 700.
One week after ATCEMS recorded their highest volume of calls for service – ever, for two consecutive days, Xie wrote down some of the challenges she faced last week and posted it for the community to see… (LINK TO STORY)
$674 million Oak Hill Parkway project set to begin in South Austin, but opponents are not giving up the fight (Community Impact)
Back in the early 1990s, John Dromgoole was worried a highway project could sink his business.
Dromgoole opened a small garden store in 1982 and ran it for about 10 years out of the stone building at the intersection of Hwy. 290 and Patton Ranch Road. When he got word the Texas Department of Transportation was thinking of widening the highway, he started looking for a way out.After spotting a for sale sign on Old Bee Caves Road on his drive home, Dromgoole moved the Natural Gardener to the location where it still operates today.
Nearly 30 years later, the major construction work that Dromgoole worried would make his garden business “dead in the water” back in 1993 is finally about to start.
TxDOT will break ground in June or July on the $674 million Oak Hill Parkway project, which is set to finish in 2026. The project traces its roots back to an environmental impact statement issued in 1988 and, according to TxDOT, addresses congestion for a road that reached its traffic capacity back in 1995… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
Watch live: Texas House and Senate to hold hearings at 9 a.m. Central on Thursday about last week's winter storm (Texas Tribune)
Key committees in both chambers of the Texas Legislature will meet Thursday to discuss what went wrong with the state's power infrastructure during last week's winter storm.
Bookmark this page to watch the hearings. We'll be adding video of each a few minutes before they begin at 9 a.m. Central.
In the House, the State Affairs Committee and the Business and Commerce Committee will hear invited testimony on "the factors that led to statewide electrical blackouts during the recent unprecedented weather event; the response by industry, suppliers; and grid operators and changes necessary to avoid future power interruptions."
In the Senate, meanwhile, the Finance Committee and the Business and Commerce Committee will meet to "examine extreme weather condition preparedness and circumstances that led to the power outages as directed by Electric Reliability Council of Texas."… (LINK TO STORY)
Texans needed food and comfort after a brutal storm. As usual, they found it at H-E-B (New York Times)
The past week had been a nightmare. A winter storm, one of the worst to hit Texas in a generation, robbed Lanita Generous of power, heat and water in her home. The food she had stored in her refrigerator and freezer had spoiled. She was down to her final five bottles of water. “I have never felt so powerless,” Ms. Generous, a copywriter, said. But on Sunday, as the sun shined and ice thawed in Austin, Ms. Generous did the same thing as many Texans in urgent need of food, water and a sense of normalcy: She went to H-E-B. “They’ve been great,” she said, adding with just a touch of hyperbole: “If it hadn’t been for the bread and peanut butter, I would have died in my apartment.” H-E-B is a grocery store chain. But it is also more than that. People buy T-shirts that say “H-E-B for President,” and they post videos to TikTok declaring their love, like the woman clutching a small bouquet of flowers handed to her by an employee: “I wish I had a boyfriend like H-E-B. Always there. Gives me flowers. Feeds me.”
The storm and its devastation have tested a notion of independence that is deeply ingrained in Texas, a sense that Texans and their businesses can handle things on their own without the intrusion of outsiders or the shackles of regulation. It is an ideology evident in Texas’ decision to have a power grid of its own, one that was pushed by the storm to the edge of collapse and was a source of fury as millions were left without electricity during the worst of the frigid conditions. But for many Texans, H-E-B reflected the ways the state’s maverick spirit can flourish: reliable for routine visits but particularly in a time of disaster, and a belief that the family-owned chain — with a vast majority of its more than 340 locations inside state lines — has made a conscious choice to stay rooted to the idea of being a good neighbor.
“It’s like H-E-B is the moral center of Texas,” said Stephen Harrigan, a novelist and journalist who lives in Austin. “There seems to be in our state a lack of real leadership, a lack of real efficiency, on the political level. But on the business level, when it comes to a grocery store, all of those things are in place.” As frustration swelled among residents trapped in their homes without power or water, some started to remark, half-jokingly, that H-E-B should just take over. The chain has become known for its logistical prowess — in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and to hurricanes, with stockpiles of water and emergency supplies ready to be deployed. “So many Texans look to H-E-B almost as a de facto arm of government,” Greg Jefferson, the business editor of The San Antonio Express-News, wrote in his column… (LINK TO STORY)
Gov. Greg Abbott, in statewide address, promises answers on winter weather disaster (Texas Tribune)
Gov. Greg Abbott, speaking Wednesday evening in a rare statewide televised address, sought to reassure Texans that the state was moving aggressively to get to the bottom of the power grid failure that left millions of them in the cold and dark last week.
"Tragic does not even begin to describe" the suffering Texans endured, Abbott said from the State Emergency Operations Center in Austin. "Many of you are angry — and you have a right to be. I'm angry too. At a time when essential services were needed the most, the system broke. You deserve answers. You will get those answers."
Abbott did not make any new announcements about the state's response to the crisis. He continued to blame the state's electric grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, for offering false assurances that it was ready for the storm, and he reiterated he has designated ERCOT reform and the "winterization" of the power system as emergency items for the current legislative session.
"I assure you this: This legislative session will not end until we fix these problems," Abbott said… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas disaster puts Beto O’Rourke back in business (Politico)
While Ted Cruz was getting clobbered for fleeing Texas amid its historic winter storm, the Democrat he defeated in 2018, Beto O’Rourke, was already deep into disaster relief mode — soliciting donations for storm victims, delivering pallets of water from his pickup truck and once again broadcasting his movements on Facebook Live.
It was part of an effort orchestrated by O’Rourke and his organization, Powered by People, in response to the crisis. It was also, to Texas Democrats, a sign that O’Rourke the politician is back.
The former congressman and onetime Democratic sensation acknowledged last month that he’s considering running for governor in 2022, and he has discussed the possibility with Democratic Party officials and other associates. The drubbing that Texas Republicans are taking in the wake of the deadly storm may provide him with an opening — even in his heavily Republican state.
“After all of Texas freezes over because of poor leadership, I think it’s a different state of Texas than it was two weeks ago,” said Mikal Watts, a San Antonio-based lawyer and major Democratic money bundler.
If O’Rourke runs for governor, Watts said, “I think he could catch fire.”
O’Rourke’s political prospects — like those of every Texas Democrat — appeared to significantly dim following the November elections, with Republican victories in the state grounding Democrats’ once-sky-high expectations there and seeming to confirm the GOP’s continued dominance. Donald Trump carried the state by more than 5 percentage points, and Republican Sen. John Cornyn won reelection by nearly 10 points.
Yet O’Rourke is appealing to Democratic donors and party officials in Texas because of his popularity among the rank-and-file and expansive political network in the state, which he has only broadened since abandoning his presidential campaign in November 2019. One Democrat described him as “the Democratic Party in Texas."
During the general election last year, O'Rourke's organization said it registered some 200,000 people to vote. And Powered by People, which includes two longtime advisers from O'Rourke's political campaigns, was beginning a program to sign people up for coronavirus vaccines when the storm hit, prompting it to shift its focus to the relief effort. O’Rourke, through his group, has raised more than $1.4 million for the recovery, scrambled a legion of volunteers to knock on doors and, via phone banks, made more than 900,000 wellness checks on seniors… (LINK TO STORY)
President Joe Biden, first lady Jill Biden to travel to Houston on Friday (Houston Chronicle)
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are heading to Houston on Friday as Texas recovers from winter storms that left millions without power and water. The White House announced the trip on Tuesday. It is the president’s first trip to the state since he took office last month. “The president will meet with local leaders to discuss the winter storm, relief efforts, progress toward recovery and the incredible resilience shown by the people of Houston and Texas,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. She said Biden will also visit a COVID health center where vaccines are being distributed, but did not specify which.
The trip comes as the president has declared a major disaster for 108 of the state’s 254 counties, with Gov. Greg Abbott and members of the Texas delegation urging him to expand it to cover the entire state. “Although the initial effects of this unprecedented winter storm are beginning to dissipate, the entire state continues to reel from the aftermath that has left millions without power, potable water, and dwindling food supplies,” more than two dozen members of Congress from Texas wrote in a letter to Biden on Monday. Psaki did not say Tuesday whether the president planned to expand the declaration further.
“In Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, sheltering operations continue to decrease, power and transportation are back to normal and water restoration continues,” Psaki said. “However, 9.8 million people are affected by water system outages and remain under boil water notices.” She said 9 million liters of water have been delivered or are on the way to more than 200 locally managed water distribution sites… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas electric bills were $28 billion higher under deregulation (Wall Street Journal)
Texas’s deregulated electricity market, which was supposed to provide reliable power at a lower price, left millions in the dark last week. For two decades, its customers have paid more for electricity than state residents who are served by traditional utilities, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found. Nearly 20 years ago, Texas shifted from using full-service regulated utilities to generate power and deliver it to consumers. The state deregulated power generation, creating the system that failed last week. And it required nearly 60% of consumers to buy their electricity from one of many retail power companies, rather than a local utility.
Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities, according to the Journal’s analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration. The crisis last week was driven by the power producers. Now that power has largely been restored, attention has turned to retail electric companies, a few of which are hitting consumers with steep bills. Power prices surged to the market price cap of $9,000 a megawatt hour for several days during the crisis, a feature of the state’s system designed to incentivize power plants to supply more juice. Some consumers who chose variable rate power plans from retail power companies are seeing the big bills. None of this was supposed to happen under deregulation. Backers of competition in the electricity-supply business promised it would lower prices for consumers who could shop around for the best deals, just as they do for cellphone service.
The system would be an improvement over monopoly utilities, which have little incentive to innovate and provide better service to customers, supporters of deregulation said. “If all consumers don’t benefit from this, we will have wasted our time and failed our constituency,” then-state Sen. David Sibley, a key author of the bill to deregulate the market, said when the switch was first unveiled in 1999. “Competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing monthly rates,” then-Gov. George W. Bush said later that year… (LINK TO STORY)
Dallas gives city attorneys go-ahead to sue Netflix, Hulu, other streaming services over franchise fees (Dallas Morning News)
Dallas city council approved a resolution Wednesday allowing the city attorney’s office to pursue a lawsuit against streaming service companies for their failure to pay franchise fees. The city wants to recover financial damages from Netflix, Hulu, Disney and “other video service providers” for their alleged failure to pay the city a franchise tax amounting to 5% of gross revenues under Texas’ Public Utility Regulatory Act. AT&T, which owns HBO Max, already pays franchise fees to Dallas, according to a spokesperson for the city. The city said Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ have all failed to apply for a state-issued certificate of franchise authority which would require the companies to pay the fee.
Dallas will seek an unspecified amount of relief for damages dating back to 2007, and also wants to obtain an order that would require the companies to pay the fee moving forward, according to city documents. With the measure approved by city council, Dallas is expected to now turn to the Texas Attorney General’s office for legal counsel moving forward, according to The Dallas Business Journal. Dallas believes streaming companies should be on the hook for the fees because they deliver their services to customers through wireline facilities located “at least partially in the public right of way,” according to city documents. The Dallas city attorney’s office was not immediately available for comment. The city plans to retain three law firms to represent the city which it said are already working on similar cases in other municipalities including McKool Smith, P.C., Ashcroft Sutton Reyes LLC, and Korein Tillery LLC… (LINK TO STORY)