BG Reads | News You Need to Know (February 26, 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.
See also, Black Austin Musicians Collective forms to give a voice to local artists (KVUE)
You can listen to this episode and previous ones on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Please like, link, comment and subscribe!
CITY OF AUSTIN
Austin City Council
Work Session - Tuesday, March 2 @9AM
Austin Council Regular Meeting - Thursday, March 4 @10AM
Staff Moves:
John-Michael Cortez, Special Assistant to Mayor Adler, announced his departure from City Hall Wednesday. Mr. Cortez served in the mayor’s office from the start his first term in 2016, coming on as Chief of Staff. No immediate plans have been announced. LinkedIn Profile.
THE 87TH TEXAS LEGISLATURE
LINK TO FILED HOUSE BILLS (2,632)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Austin mayor urges governor not to lift Texas face mask mandate (KVUE)
Austin Mayor Steve Adler has urged Gov. Greg Abbott to keep the Texas face mask mandate in effect to help stop the spread of coronavirus as vaccination numbers remain low.
On Thursday, it was revealed Abbott is considering lifting the statewide orders, with an announcement forthcoming.
The requirement has been in place since July, when case numbers first surged in the state.
But as more Texans get vaccinated against COVID-19, the governor is looking at when to stop all executive orders related to COVID-19, including a policy that rolls back business capacity when COVID-19 patients exceed 15% of hospital capacity.
“We’re working right now on evaluating when we’re going be able to remove all statewide orders, and we will be making announcements about that pretty soon,” Abbott told media at a press conference in Corpus Christi.
In response to the comments, the Austin mayor issued a statement urging the governor to wait on lifting restrictions.
“Wearing a face mask while in public or within closed spaces remains one of the most effective, proactive measures anyone can take to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control,” said Adler. “While hospitalizations in the Austin area have continued to decline, the number of vaccinations is not where it needs to be. I am calling upon the governor not to create any ambiguity or uncertainty about the importance of wearing a mask by changing the rules at this time.”
"Despite the tireless work from our many staff and volunteers administering vaccines, our community is still months away from reaching herd immunity. While we diligently work to vaccinate everyone over the coming weeks and months, it continues to remain incredibly important to keep wearing your mask, watching your distance, and washing your hands. Austin Public Health remains committed to protecting the health of our community, but doing so requires community involvement and cooperation. Our residents have done a great job of keeping our cases comparatively low, and that was not by accident or luck, but by following public health recommendations and guidance."… (LINK TO STORY)
Council critiques Uri response – and looks ahead to future disasters (Austin Monitor)
On Thursday, City Council launched a wide-ranging review of the city’s response to the devastation wrought by winter storm Uri, beginning the long, complex work of preparing for the next storm – even as the current crisis persists for many.
“I appreciate the beginnings of how we approach this looking back (on the crisis), ” Mayor Steve Adler said. “But we still have a lot of people that are without water tonight, and without food.”
Council adopted a resolution directing City Manager Spencer Cronk to implement policies that will help those still suffering, review the city’s response to the crisis and develop a comprehensive plan to prepare for future winter storms. The vote was 9-0 with Mayor Pro Tem Natasha Harper-Madison and Council Member Leslie Pool off the dais.
Cronk will come back next week with potential actions for Council, though some actions could be taken sooner. Cronk was originally given a month to form recommendations for Council, but Adler pushed the date up.
The mayor and other Council members offered many considerations. Adler made several suggestions, including finding more long-term housing for people experiencing homelessness and finding short-term housing for those with extensive damage to their homes. He also suggested creating an online “one-stop shop” for all disaster recovery resources available to residents: local, state, federal and nonprofit.
Council Member Greg Casar moved to protect homeowners and renters whose homes have been damaged. It is important, he said, “to support those moderate and low-income homeowners through the repair process and … make sure that there’s tenant voice in that process.”
Disaster communication to elderly Austinites, particularly those in nursing homes and other facilities, needs to improve, Council Member Ann Kitchen said. Council Member Alison Alter agreed, saying there were “a lot of seniors that were in trouble, that we needed to deliver support to, and our systems for identifying and understanding how to notify people especially as power was down for some phone systems, etc., were very limited.”
Some Council members focused on Austin Water’s response to water outages. Council Member Paige Ellis said the utility needs to improve its public communications by giving “more timely warning notifications, more localized, real-time outage information, and estimates of when water service will be restored.”
“Some sort of understanding of how long people would be waiting (for water) would have been extremely helpful for this past week,” Ellis said. Casar that there should be a map of specific water outage locations.
Last week, Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros said Austin Water had no way of knowing where the “tens of thousands” of leaks that plagued the city’s pipes were until residents reported them. Smart water meters, which are currently being rolled out, will allow the city “to tell, essentially in real-time, which meters are operating and which ones are not operating in terms of flow,” Meszaros said Thursday.
Council Member Kathie Tovo said Council should conduct hearings to understand why power and water went out and assess the city’s response and preparedness. She also suggested forming a community task force to get feedback from the public.
For now, Adler said, Council will stay focused on the present. “When the dust clears … we’ll look back,” said Adler. “But the focus right now is on the continuing crisis.”… (LINK TO STORY)
'This just feels insufficient:' Austin City Council gets few answers on winter storm (Austin American-Statesman)
On Thursday, the Austin City Council gathered to address last week's winter weather meltdown, though council members got little opportunity to grill utility officials on what happened that led to much of the city losing power and water and what's being done to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Morning briefings from utility executives Sidney Jackson of Austin Energy and Greg Meszaros of Austin Water included a brief question-and-answer period, with each council member limited to a single inquiry or comment. The meeting's design was for the council to approve financial assistance to residents staring at scary bills from the storm, rather than to get a thorough explanation on last week's events.
"This just feels insufficient. ... There's so much that we've been downloading over the last several days. I have so many questions I don't even know where to start to be honest with you," Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison said.
Alison Alter, the council member representing Northwest Austin, had tough words for Austin Energy. She said 40% of her district lost power from Feb. 11-14, even before the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, commonly known as ERCOT, ordered Austin Energy to cut the lights on 220,000 homes throughout the city to prevent the state grid from collapsing. Utilities in other cities received similar requests.
The early outages in Alter's district were the result of iced tree branches and other vegetation interfering with power lines – a situation Alter suggested Austin Energy failed to quickly address.
"I think it's really important that this council sends a very clear message to the community that we are intent on investigating what happened and understanding what went wrong, what went right, and how we can move forward," Alter said. "I want to be really clear on Austin Energy that this is not just about ERCOT. We in some sense experienced two emergencies connected by the weather."Later in the meeting, Alter said she was interested in knowing why residents in her district were not alerted to the outages through the city's reverse 911 system.
Austin Energy General Manager Jackie Sargent did not attend Thursday's meeting because she was scheduled to testify before state lawmakers on the outages. Standing in for Sargent was Jackson, the utility's chief operating officer and deputy general manager, who started the job only two weeks ago after moving from Minnesota.
Jackson's briefing touched largely on information already disseminated to the public. Austin Energy has maintained all along that it had no choice but to follow ERCOT's orders to cut off all available circuits except for those that power such critical infrastructure as hospitals and fire stations.
Austin Water's Meszaros said the utility has repaired all public water main breaks and now has shifted to assisting between 200 and 400 apartment and condo complexes with broken pipes that continue to leave some renters without running water.
At the peak of the water crisis, tens of thousands of Austin residents were without water, Meszaros said. Those who had water were ordered by the city to boil it before drinking.
A deep dive by council members into the storm will have to wait until next week. The council's committees that oversee the electric and water utilities will convene for a joint meeting beginning 1 p.m. Wednesday. Council Member Ann Kitchen, who heads the water committee, encouraged her colleagues to post their questions ahead of time to the council's message board… (LINK TO STORY)
After blackouts, economic development experts still bullish on Austin but all eyes on state's response (Austin Business Journal)
Site selectors and economic development experts said the brutal weather conditions that Texans experienced earlier this month likely won't pose a threat, at least in the short term, to Austin's growing reputation as a magnet for business. But there could be a long-term impact if nothing is done on the state level to make the electrical grid more resilient.
The winter storms exposed new challenges — largely, the reliability of Texas' grid — while also reinforcing some of Austin's positive attributes, experts said.
2020 was a banner year in Central Texas for jobs created from corporate relocations and expansions, and Austin continues to be a landing spot for companies of all sizes and industries. At least a dozen companies have relocated here since the start of January, and Samsung is considering the area for a $17 billion chipmaking plant — one of the largest economic development projects in U.S. history.
Laura Huffman, president and CEO of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, was unaware of any businesses looking to expand or relocate to Austin that had changed their minds based on last week's storms. And she didn't know of any local companies that had decided to jump ship, though she said business owners have expressed some concern.
“Companies are asking questions. There is no doubt that having a reliable, resilient energy supply is a core concern for businesses," Huffman said. “I think what's most important now, and what we're watching, are the steps that are underway at the state and local levels to define the points of failure and to design remedies.”
For certain industries, like high-tech manufacturing, the state's response to the grid failure could be a much more serious issue.
Ed Latson, executive director of Austin Regional Manufacturers Association, previously told Austin Business Journal that Austin might lose out to huge projects like Samsung's next chipmaking plant if the state doesn't invest in a more resilient grid. Fabrication facilities like Samsung's current Austin campus rely heavily on access to both energy and water. As of the morning of Feb. 25, Samsung's plant was still offline… (LINK TO STORY)
UT-Austin won't require SAT or ACT scores for 2022 applications due to COVID-19 (Texas Tribune)
The University of Texas at Austin is suspending the SAT and ACT test score requirement for fall 2022 applicants, citing continued limited access to testing opportunities for students due the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The continuation of the temporary suspension will ensure that testing limitations related to COVID-19 do not affect a student’s ability to apply, or be considered for admission, to UT Austin,” the university said in a statement.
The flagship university is the latest among schools across the country to extend the temporary hold on the traditional application requirement. Earlier this year, multiple Ivy League universities and others had extended their “test-optional” policies through 2022.
In Texas, Rice University in Houston made a similar announcement. The University of Houston System also said it would remain test-optional through fall 2022 and would consider making the change permanent. Baylor University also made the standardized tests optional through fall 2023 and said it will reevaluate the policy for future years. Texas A&M University has also extended its policy to 2022 and anticipates 2023 will be test optional as well.
Last year, multiple Texas universities temporarily scrapped the testing requirement for 2021 applicants as the College Board cancelled test exams and large exam sites were closed, including Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University.
Elsewhere, other universities had already started to get rid of the standardized test requirement for admission even before the pandemic forced them to announce a temporary pause. “Test-optional” advocates have argued for years that standardized tests do not demonstrate a student’s true ability and instead create barriers for students of color, those with low incomes and who may not have the resources to hire tutors or attend test prep classes.
Now that schools were forced to adopt these policies, experts said it’s likely they will become more permanent… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
Gov. Greg Abbott weighing end to mask order, other statewide coronavirus rules, says announcement coming “pretty soon” (Texas Tribune)
Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday that Texas is looking at when it will be able to lift all statewide orders related to the coronavirus pandemic and that an announcement is forthcoming. Abbott made the comments at a Corpus Christi news conference where he was asked when the statewide mask mandate would end as Texans continue to get vaccinated. That requirement has been in effect since July. Abbott called it a “great question.”
“We’re working right now on evaluating when we’re gonna be able to remove all statewide orders, and we will be making announcements about that pretty soon,” Abbott said, without giving a specific time frame.
In addition to the mask mandate, statewide orders in effect include a policy that rolls back business reopenings in a hospital region if its COVID-19 patients exceed 15% of hospital capacity for seven days. Abbott put that policy in place in last fall.
Only 5.1% of Texans had been fully vaccinated as of Tuesday, though Abbott has been optimistic that the pace will pick up as more vaccines are made available to Texas.
Experts say Texas is a long way from reaching herd immunity through the vaccines. Hitting the 70% to 80% level that many estimate is needed would mean vaccinating some 22 million people, or nearly 100% of adults in the state, according to census numbers. The vaccines are currently not approved for children under 16, who make up about 23% of the population.
Scientists do not yet know for sure whether or how well the vaccines prevent the spread of the virus, though some preliminary research has suggested that some vaccines might be able to do so to some extent.
The Centers for Disease Control recommends that people who have received two doses of the vaccine continue to avoid crowds, stay at least 6 feet away from people who live outside their households, and wear masks to cover their nose and mouth.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, has repeatedly said that he does not know when Americans will be able to return to normal, but that they may still need to continue wearing face masks into 2022.
Abbott has faced scrutiny from some of his fellow Republicans for how he has wielded his executive authority to issue statewide pandemic rules, and multiple GOP proposals have been introduced at the Legislature to curb his power. He has expressed openness to reforming executive authority while also promising that “we will not have any more shutdowns in Texas.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Catastrophic Texas power outages prompt finger pointing and blame shifting at legislative hearings (Texas Tribune)
Texas lawmakers investigating this month’s devastating power outages during a massive winter storm grilled power-grid officials Thursday and questioned whether state regulators did enough. Most of what they got during simultaneous public hearings in the Texas Senate and House was finger pointing.
“This is the largest train wreck in the history of deregulated electricity,” said state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe.
Officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas avoided taking full responsibility for the outages that left millions without power in subfreezing temperatures and disrupted water service for large swaths of the state. ERCOT officials, energy executives, utility company bosses and a meteorologist were among those questioned about the outages before committees in both chambers of the Texas Legislature.
After 11 p.m. Thursday, following more than 14 hours of testimony, state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, asked ERCOT CEO Bill Magness how much he earns, and where that money comes from. Magness answered that he made $803,000, which came from Texans paying their electric bills… (LINK TO STORY)
In Houston, Abbott will lobby for more disaster aid and Biden will refrain from lecturing Texas on its grid failure (Dallas Morning News)
Gov. Greg Abbott will use President Joe Biden’s visit to Houston on Friday to lobby for more federal aid as Texans recover from last week’s epic grid disaster, which left millions without electricity, heat or drinkable water. Biden will bring empathy and reassurance of help from Washington, but no lectures about the dangers of under-regulation or the wisdom of putting the state’s power grid under the watchful eye of the federal government. “He’s going to be spending the day traveling with Governor Abbott and surveying the damage,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
“The president doesn’t view the crisis and the millions of people who have been impacted by it as a Democratic or Republican issue... There’s plenty of time to have a policy discussion about better weatherization, better preparations, and I’m sure that’s one that will be had. But right now we’re focused on getting relief to the people in the state.”
Abbott, in Corpus Christi to roll out a plan to expand vaccination efforts targeting Texas seniors, said that he and Texas emergency management chief, Nim Kidd, will brief Biden on the challenges across the state from last week’s “winter disaster.”
“We will express our gratitude for the major disaster declaration already declared, but also explain the need to expand that to additional counties,” he said. Last Thursday, with millions of Texans still shivering in frigid, dark homes, Abbott asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Biden to issue a major disaster declaration for all 254 counties. Late Friday, Biden signed off on a declaration for 77 counties, adding 31 more on Monday. The declaration authorizes FEMA to provide grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low cost loans to cover uninsured property losses, and other programs to help individuals and business owners. Texas is not alone in getting only partial relief so far for last week’s winter storms. On Wednesday, Biden approved a major disaster declaration for 16 counties in Oklahoma, out of 77, despite the governor’s request for a statewide declaration... (LINK TO STORY)
Houston Democrat chastised for mentioning climate change at Texas power grid hearing (Houston Chronicle)
State Sen. John Whitmire barely got the word “climate change” out of his mouth before the Republican chairman of the committee looking into last week’s electricity grid failures interrupted him. State Sen. Kelly Hancock, a North Texas Republican, told Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, he wanted the committee to focus on what happened last week and not get into a discussion about things like climate change. “This is a discussion where we can chase a lot of rabbits. We can go in a lot of different directions,” Hancock said.
Hancock said he wanted to focus on what was predicted and whether we should have known what was coming “rather than get off into a climate change discussion at this point.” Whitmire set Hancock off after he asked a meteorologist that had been called to testify if the state should expect more frigid weeks like it last week because of the impact of climate change. The exchange came during the first hearings in the Texas Senate on the deadly storms from last week that left millions of Texans without power and running water. Lawmakers say they are determined to get to the bottom of why the state wasn’t better prepared… (LINK TO STORY)